Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association

Volume 79, 2005

Social Justice

A Counterfactual Analysis in Defense of Aquinas's Inference of Omnipotence from Creation Ex Nihilo

There is a traditional view, maintained by Aquinas and others, which holds that there is a mutual entailment between the power to Create Ex Nihilo (hereafter CEN-power) and the property of omnipotence. In his Metaphysical Disputations, however, Suarez attacks the traditional view by pointing out a serious flaw in Aquinas’s argument. Suarez claims that there is no reason in principle why God cannot miraculously bestow CEN-power to creatures––albeit in a limited form––even on the assumption that God cannot make creatures omnipotent. In this paper the authors argue that the debate can be resolved in favor of Aquinas; that CEN-power does indeed strictly imply omnipotence. After clarifying a sufficient condition for the property of omnipotence, the authors argue that attention to a modest possible worlds semantics and some interesting properties of counterfactuals are together sufficient to show that beings with CEN-power are in every case beings that are omnipotent.