Absolute creationism is a sort of theistic Platonism, which preserves intact the host of abstract objects but renders them dependent upon God. From its inception, absolute creationism has been dogged by a vicious circularity that has come to be known as the bootstrapping objection. Many philosophers, including the author, have taken the bootstrapping objection to be decisive against absolute creationism. But a review of the most sophisticated statement of the objection suggests a way out for the absolute creationist. By denying a constituent ontology the absolute creationist can avoid the vicious circularity, since explanatorily prior to his creation of properties God can be just as he is without exemplifying properties. Still, in light of the metaphysical idleness of such abstract entities, theists would be well advised to deny instead the Platonist’s presumed criterion of ontological commitment and so to avoid realism altogether.

Once the reality of properties is admitted, there are two fundamentally different realist theories of properties. Platonist or transcendent realism holds that properties are abstract objects in the classical sense, of being nonmental, nonspatial, and causally inefficacious. By contrast, Aristotelian or moderate realism takes properties to be literally instantiated in things (physical particulars or whatever other particular things may exist). An apple’s color and shape are as real and physical as the apple itself. The most direct reason for taking an Aristotelian realist view of properties is that we perceive them. We perceive an individual apple, but only as a certain shape, color, and weight, because it is those properties that confer on it the power to affect our senses. It is in virtue of being blue that a body reflects certain light and looks blue. Since “causality is the mark of being,” the properties that confer causal power are real. And that means a reality, not in a Platonic and acausal world of “abstract objects,” but in the ordinary concrete world in which we live. On an Aristotelian view, it is the business of science to determine which properties there are and to classify and understand the properties we perceive (and those which we infer to explain what we perceive), and to find the laws connecting them.