Aseity: God's Self-Existence and the Platonist Challenge

Aseity is the property by which a being exists of and from itself, and in Christian theology it names God's complete independence of everything that is not God. The word is built from the Latin a se, "from himself". Negatively, the doctrine affirms that God is uncaused and depends on no other being for the source of His existence. Positively, it affirms that He is entirely self-sufficient, with the sufficient reason for His own existence within Himself. And the doctrine has a live opponent: if numbers and properties exist necessarily and uncreated, then something other than God also depends on nothing.

Key takeaways

• Aseity means God exists from Himself, uncaused and self-sufficient, and it is the one divine attribute creatures share in no degree whatever.
• The doctrine is load-bearing. Divine simplicity, the uniqueness of God and the Creator-creature distinction are all argued from it.
• Platonism is its sharpest challenge. If abstract objects exist necessarily and uncreated, they neither depend on God nor were made by Him.
• Every standing answer pays a price. Absolute creationism faces the bootstrapping objection, William Lane Craig's anti-realism must deny that there are numbers, and the Thomist route requires strict simplicity.
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism argues the price is not forced, because the property apparatus that Morris and Menzel's absolute creationism and van Inwagen's Platonism both apply to God belongs to the frame of composite creatures.

What is aseity?

Aseity is the state of existing from oneself, and it is predicated of God alone. Everything else that exists was caused, is sustained, and could have failed to be; God was not, is not, and could not.

The term carries two aspects, and the encyclopedia's summary records that the negative one emerged first in the history of thought. Negatively, aseity denies that God has a source: no cause produced Him, no condition made Him possible, no prior reality explains Him. Positively, it asserts that He is self-sufficient, holding within His own nature the sufficient reason for His being. The negative half is the easier half to say and the harder half to believe, because a mind trained on causes finds a causeless thing genuinely difficult to think.

Three near neighbours are worth separating at the outset. Self-existence is the ordinary English synonym and carries the same content. Necessity is close but not identical: a being might exist in every possible world and still be explained by something else, which is exactly the dispute this article is about. And self-causation is not the doctrine at all. Nothing can cause itself, since it would have to exist in order to act and not exist in order to be produced. The claim is not that God made Himself; it is that the question of what made Him does not arise.

The framework behind this article is set out in one place; start here.

Where does Scripture teach the aseity of God?

Scripture teaches aseity where it refuses to finish a sentence about God with anything outside Him. The clearest instances are a name, a sermon, a doxology, and one difficult clause about the Son.

Moses asks for something to tell the Israelites, and the answer is not a title but a statement of being: "I AM WHO I AM" (Exodus 3:14). Whatever else the name carries, it does not point outward.

Paul presses the same point at the Areopagus, against an audience that housed and fed its gods:

"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else." (Acts 17:24-25, NIV)

God is not the recipient of anything, because He is the giver of everything. Paul closes his argument in Romans with the same structure, this time as praise:

"Who has ever given to God, that God should repay them? For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen." (Romans 11:35-36, NIV)

Then there is the clause that starts more debates than it settles: "For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself" (John 5:26, NIV). The Son has life in Himself, and He has it as a grant. Readers have divided over it for centuries; the questions below return to it.

Shorter arguments on adjacent questions are collected in the essays.

Why does aseity do more work than any other divine attribute?

Aseity carries the most weight because it is the only attribute creatures do not share in any degree at all. Human beings are powerful in a small way, knowing in a small way, good in a small way. Nobody is independent in a small way.

Three consequences follow, and each one is argued.

The first is divine simplicity. Aquinas holds that every composite is posterior to its component parts and dependent on them, while God is the first being (Summa Theologiae I, q. 3, a. 7). A composite owes its existence to its parts and to whatever holds them together, which is a form of dependence; so the being that depends on nothing has no parts of any kind. Aseity does not merely sit beside simplicity in a list. It entails it.

The second is uniqueness. To exist of oneself is to be bounded by nothing outside oneself, and two such beings would bound each other. Neither would then be a se. There can be at most one self-existent being, and this argument, not a headcount, is why the doctrine will matter so much in what follows.

The third is the line between Creator and creature. Contingency and aseity are contradictory qualities: to be contingent is to be caused and dependent, and to be a se is to be neither. No being can hold both in the same respect. That is why the difference between God and man is one of kind rather than of degree, and it is a conclusion with consequences far beyond this article.

Volume One carries that argument from its foundations; get your free copy.

How does Platonism threaten divine aseity?

Platonism threatens aseity by populating reality with things God did not make and does not sustain. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy states the collision cleanly in its entry on Platonism and theism: Platonists hold that at least some abstract objects are uncreated and exist necessarily and eternally, while traditional theism holds that God is the uncreated Creator of all reality beyond Himself and depends on nothing whatsoever.

The route in is not mystical. Our best scientific theories quantify over numbers, sets and functions at every turn, and on the standard account we are committed to whatever our best theories say there is. Numbers, then, exist. They did not begin, they cannot fail to exist, and nothing made them. Behind this lies the older quarrel about universals, which has its own treatment; the theological version is sharper because these objects are not merely real but necessary.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy sets out the perfect-being reasoning that turns this from an inconvenience for mathematicians into a problem for God. A being with maximal aseity is greater than one without it, and if necessarily existing abstract objects do not depend on God, then God lacks maximal aseity. The dependence may even run the wrong way. If God is omnipotent by exemplifying the property being omnipotent, then His being what He is involves a relation to something He did not produce.

The strongest Platonist reply is to accept all of it and deny that it costs anything. Peter van Inwagen argues that the existence of free abstract objects depends on nothing and that causation is simply irrelevant to their being, and he denies that dependence on God is a great-making property at all. He pays the trade-off knowingly: on this view, the traditional doctrine that everything other than God depends on God is abandoned rather than diminished.

Volume Five, still in draft, works through the mathematics chapter by chapter; follow its progress.

Can God create numbers? Theistic activism and absolute creationism

Thomas Morris and Christopher Menzel answered in 1986 that God can and does, and their proposal remains the most ambitious theistic reply on offer. The Platonic framework of reality, they argue, arises out of God's creatively efficacious intellective activity: properties, relations and propositions are the contents of a divine intellectual act.

The move that raises this above a slogan is their account of what a divine concept is. When a human being grasps a property, the property is one thing and the grasping is another, and the property would have been there had nobody grasped it. Divine concepts are not like that. God's concepts are the properties. There is no realm He inspects and no inventory He consults, because His thinking of them is their existing.

Necessity is preserved, since God's intellectual activity is itself necessary; realism is preserved, since the objects are genuinely there; and aseity is preserved, since abstracta turn out to exist ab alio after all, from another, as every creature does.

The vocabulary in this literature is untidy and worth fixing before going further. "Absolute creation" is Morris and Menzel's own coinage. In current usage, absolute creationism is the narrower claim that abstract objects are created by God, while theistic activism is the more ambitious project that also grounds modality itself in God. Craig has argued in print that the two labels should be used uniformly, and the distinction is drawn differently by different writers, so a reader meeting either term should check what the author means by it.

Two neighbouring positions deserve their sentence. Nicholas Wolterstorff restricts the scope of creation so that some abstract objects fall outside it, keeping the doctrine of creation intact by narrowing it. James Ross judged the two systems incompatible and left Platonism behind for an Aristotelian account of universals instead.

Volume Four takes up the immutability of the God who creates; see the volume.

What is the bootstrapping objection?

The bootstrapping objection says that God cannot create His own properties, because He must already have them in order to do any creating at all. It is the sharpest argument against absolute creationism, and it deserves to be stated without softening.

Take the property being omnipotent. On the activist account it exists because God thinks it. But for God to think anything, He must already be a knowing, willing, powerful being; that is, He must already exemplify the very properties His activity is meant to produce. So being omnipotent must exist before God creates it. The account asks God to stand on a chair while building it.

What makes the objection hard is that the obvious escape is closed. One might reply that this creation is eternal, so no moment precedes another. That is true and it does not help, because the priority in play is explanatory rather than chronological. Brian Leftow pressed the point in 1990, Matthew Davidson in 1999, Michael Bergmann and Jeffrey Brower in 2006, and Paul Gould in 2014.

Morris and Menzel have a reply, and it is a real one. Logical dependence is not causal dependence. God's causing abstracta logically depends on His having certain properties, but nothing causes those properties in a circle, so no vicious loop forms. Menzel returned to the objection in the American Philosophical Quarterly in 2016 and argued that it has problems of its own.

Bergmann and Brower took a different exit. In "A Theistic Argument Against Platonism (and in Support of Truthmakers and Divine Simplicity)" they proposed that God be understood as the truthmaker for the intrinsic essential predications about Him, and not as something that exemplifies a property or is identical to one. Notice what that concession amounts to: the property apparatus is being withdrawn from God rather than repaired. It is the hinge of everything below.

Volume One is permanently free on Kindle; take a copy.

What does William Lane Craig argue instead?

Craig answers by refusing the challenge's first premise. God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism (Oxford, 2016) gives the Platonist challenge to aseity a whole book, and then argues that we were never committed to abstract objects in the first place.

The target is the criterion of ontological commitment inherited from Quine, on which the quantifiers of a true sentence commit the speaker to the objects they range over. Graham Oppy's review of the book reports Craig as holding those commitments to be not merely false but obviously so. If saying that there are three prime numbers below six does not commit anyone to numbers, the indispensability argument never reaches its conclusion, and the threat to aseity dissolves before it needs answering.

Craig examines the theistic realisms before rejecting them. Absolute creationism he finds caught by the bootstrapping problem. Divine conceptualism, which relocates abstract objects into the divine mind, he takes seriously and declines, partly because it installs an enormous plurality of thoughts inside a God the tradition calls simple. Oppy's review reports his verdict that theists would be well advised to look elsewhere, and should take a good look at anti-realist alternatives to Platonism.

What he offers instead is a combinatorial anti-realism: neutral quantification that carries no ontological freight, singular terms that refer to nothing, a deflationary account of truth and reference, and fictionalist or pretence-theoretic readings of numbers, properties and propositions. The conclusion he wants is that there really are no uncreated abstract objects.

The bill is honest and not small. Aseity is secured by emptying the room. The mathematician's experience that theorems resist him and refuse his preferences is then left without objects to explain it, and the fit between mathematics and the physical world becomes a fact about a useful fiction.

A rival statement of the same problem sits on the framework page.

How do Thomists answer? God as ipsum esse subsistens

The classical Thomist answer does not begin with numbers at all. It begins with what God is, and it holds that God is ipsum esse subsistens, subsistent being itself: not a being that has existence, but existence subsisting.

Aquinas argues for it directly. Whatever a thing has besides its essence must be caused either by its own constituent principles or by some exterior agent, and neither is available for the first efficient cause. So God's existence is not something added to His essence. He is His own existence. Everything else receives being, and what receives being has it by participation.

That result answers the Platonist without any theory of abstracta. If a supposed realm of necessary objects exists, either it is subsistent being itself, in which case it is God, or it has being by participation, in which case it depends. There is no third option, so where to file the numbers never becomes the pressing question. Everything that is not God is a participant, and participants are not a se. The Thomist tradition has held this line since the thirteenth century with remarkable consistency.

The cost is real and much of contemporary analytic theology has declined to pay it. This answer runs on the strong doctrine of divine simplicity, on which God has no metaphysical parts, is not distinct from His attributes, and is not composed of essence and existence. It inherits a further problem at once: anyone who then wants eternal divine ideas, a plurality of exemplars in the mind of God, must explain how a real plurality lives inside a being with no parts.

Simplicity is defended at length in the fourth volume.

How does Frame-Indexed Classical Theism answer the challenge to aseity?

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) is a research program in analytic theology that resolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single formal error, and it is the position of the Many Beings Framework. One reality is known in two incommensurable ways. God knows it in a frame that is atemporal, simple and a se; we know it in a frame that is sequential, composite and contingent. Predicates whose content involves time, modality, agency or value are said of God and of us analogically and never univocally, and treating such a term as though it meant the same thing on both sides of that line is the error the framework calls the Many Beings Fallacy.

The answer here runs in four steps, set against four named rivals: van Inwagen's theistic Platonism, the absolute creationism of Morris and Menzel, Craig's anti-realism, and the Thomist doctrine of subsistent being.

The first move questions the inventory. The dispute assumes that anything real must be either a thing God made or a thing standing beside Him, and that properties are had by God in the way they are had by us. That apparatus of bearers and properties is the finite frame's true and necessary way of parsing composite, participating creatures; it is not a neutral census of reality. Bergmann and Brower reached the same boundary from the other direction when they declined to make God either a property or an exemplifier of one.

The second move closes the Platonist's door with aseity itself, and needs no theory of what numbers are. Two beings existing of themselves would bound each other, and a bounded self-existent being is a contradiction. A self-standing realm of abstracta would be a second aseity, and aseity admits no plurality. This does not depend on winning the argument about ontological commitment, where Craig has staked his case.

Where, then, does mathematical order live? Not in a third realm, and not in an eternal inventory filed inside the divine mind. Mathematical structure is the order of creation as God sustains it, grounded in His own nature and not in a catalogue of divine thoughts. It preexists in God virtually, as white light contains the colours, rather than as a drawer contains its contents. God's essence is not formally mathematical.

And the bootstrapping objection never starts. If God's being omnipotent is not a matter of exemplifying an item, there is no item waiting to be produced and no queue for Him to join. The activist had to create the properties because he had already granted that God has His attributes the way a creature has its qualities. Refuse that premise and the circle has nothing to run on.

Aseity is not a spectator here. It is the litmus test: contingency and aseity are contradictory qualities, so the natures of God and man differ in kind and not in degree, and the rest of the argument rests on that verdict. If the order grounded in God's nature turns out to require an uncreated abstract object after all, the answer fails and van Inwagen was right.

Volume One argues the position straight through; read it free.

How the positions compare

Each position protects something worth protecting. The comparison is a table of prices.

Frequently asked questions

What is the definition of aseity in simple terms?

Aseity means that God exists from Himself. Nothing made Him, nothing keeps Him going, and nothing outside Him explains why He is there. The word is Latin in origin, from a se, "from himself".

Is aseity the same as divine simplicity?

No, they are distinct doctrines, though closely tied. Aseity is about dependence and simplicity is about composition. Aquinas argued that the first entails the second, since a composite depends on its parts; some contemporary philosophers deny the entailment and hold that a complex being could still exist of itself.

Does the Son have aseity?

The classical answer is that the one divine essence is a se, and that the Son possesses that essence eternally by generation rather than by creation. John 5:26 raises the question: the Son has life in Himself, and He has it as a grant from the Father. The creeds hold both halves together, begotten and not made, and we do not go beyond them here.

If God needs nothing, why did He create anything?

Precisely because He needs nothing. A God who created in order to acquire something would be completed by His world, and a being completed by something else is neither simple nor independent. Aseity makes creation a gift with no exchange in it, which is Paul's point when he says that God is not served by human hands as if He needed anything.

Does modern mathematics disprove divine aseity?

No, though it sharpens the question. Platonists such as van Inwagen hold that numbers exist uncreated and depend on nothing, and Craig replies that our theories never committed us to numbers at all. The framework's own reading, argued in Volume Five, is that what the mathematics establishes is a result about the limits of a finite frame, and not a result about God.

Where to go from here

Aseity is tested by what it refuses to share. The other perfections have faint creaturely echoes and this one has none, which is why the argument about numbers turns out to be an argument about the difference between God and everything else. Whether a second thing can stand of itself is the whole question, and the answer decides more than it looks.

Volume One, free on Kindle, begins where this article ends.

Related reading

• Is God a Person? Classical Theism vs Theistic Personalism
• Kenoticism and Kenosis
• Hylomorphism