ABSTRACT
It is by no means prima facie absurd to suppose that this might be so. The well-known dispute about whether God can do everything may serve as an analogy. Jesus says, “With God all things are possible.”2 Could Descartes have used this logion as a proof text?—to provide biblical, and indeed Dominical, warrant for his thesis that God can create two mountains that touch at their bases and, nevertheless, surround no valley?3 Descartes might have thought so (as far as I know, he never mentions the Bible in connection with his views on the creation of the eternal truths), but Aquinas would deny it. I don’t know whether Thomas ever discusses Matt. 19:26,4 but here’s what I (who have a view of God’s power that is much closer to his than to Descartes’s) would say about that verse: The range of ‘all things’ is tacitly restricted to “things” that could possibly be of practical interest to human beings, and of interest particularly in the matter of their salvation; mountains that are removed and cast into the sea perhaps fall within this category, but mountains that are adjacent but have no valley between them certainly do not. (I mean this to be a point about that particular verse; I don’t mean to suggest that the scope of God’s power is limited to matters that pertain to practical human interests. I mean that those things are the things that were Jesus’ topic when he spoke those words, and that nothing that does not pertain to that topic can be a counterexample to the thesis that those words expressed in the context in which they were spoken.)
This example, the example provided by the biblical statement ‘With God all things are possible’, shows that it is at least not beyond dispute that in the creedal statement ‘God is the creator of all things’, ‘all things’ must be understood as an unrestricted quantifi er. But if there are things that are, so to speak, not covered by the phrase ‘creator of all things’, what things might they be?
