Modeling divine deliberation.

Abstract

Under the assumption that God deliberates when he decides which world he will create, I set out to build a model for God’s deliberation. The first chapter will lay the ground and outline each chapter. From Chapter Two through Six, I will explore various models. These models differ from each other mainly because they represent the relations between God’s creative acts and the actualization of the worlds in different manners. Based on these chapters, I will conclude that the only models that are simple, consistent, and adequate at once are ones that rely on the causal connection between God’s creative acts and the worlds. Yet these causal models may well be implausible, if we hold onto the conventional notion that creatures have causal power. Our only option left, then, seems to be retreating into modal realism and abolishing the need for God’s deliberation. Before the concluding chapter, however, I will spend one chapter arguing that there is no best possible world and the world chosen by God does not have to be better than all other worlds.