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Is there a problem of creatio ex nihilo? A reply to Pao-Shen Ho

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Abstract

Pao-Shen Ho attempts to argue that the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) violates modal logic and is necessarily false. More precisely, Ho argues that, if God creates the universe out of nothing, then the non-existence of the universe is both possible and impossible, which is logically incoherent. I point out, however, that Ho commits the (all too common) modal scope fallacy by confusing the scope of necessity in the argument and, therefore, Ho's argument is unsound.

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Notes

  1. Strangely, Ho (2019: 7) acknowledges that “the necessity at issue here is de dicto and concerns the entailment relation between the antecedent [if (possibly or actually) God wills to create X] and the consequent [(possibly or actually) X exists]”. However, if the necessity is de dicto, as Ho claims, then Ho should be affirming (B2) and not (B1)! At this point in Ho’s article (see 2019: 7–9), Ho’s argument becomes confusing and seemingly inconsistent. It appears that Ho confuses the de dicto/de re distinction with the accidentally necessary/essentially necessary distinction. Thus, Ho affirms the following, which is inconsistent with (A2): “it is impossible that X necessarily exists if God wills to create it. For X necessarily exists, just if God necessarily wills to create it. But since God is free to choose to not create anything or to create something other than X, He does not necessarily will to create X. Therefore, even if God actually wills to create it, it still does not follow that X necessarily exists” (Ho, 2019: 9). However, as we have seen, Ho also affirms that “if God actually wills to create X, then it necessarily follows that X exists actually” (Ho 2019: 7).

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Correspondence to Jacobus Erasmus.

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Erasmus, J. Is there a problem of creatio ex nihilo? A reply to Pao-Shen Ho. Int J Philos Relig 88, 215–218 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-019-09741-y

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