Does God Have a Nature?

The problem is a tension between two intuitions central to classical theism. On one hand, God is sovereign and self-sufficient (a se): all things depend on him, and he depends on nothing. On the other hand, if God has a nature—a set of essential properties such as omniscience, omnipotence, and goodness—then those properties seem to exist necessarily and independently of God's will. God cannot make himself not be omniscient, for instance. This appears to limit his sovereignty, because there are truths about him that he does not control . Plantinga explores whether this tension can be resolved without abandoning either divine sovereignty or the existence of abstract objects and necessary truths.

Plantinga argues that divine simplicity, the view that God is identical with his nature and that his attributes are not distinct from one another, fails to solve the problem and introduces worse difficulties. If God is identical with his property of omniscience, for example, then God is a property—an abstract object—which seems to deny his personhood and agency . Moreover, simplicity does not actually rescue God's sovereignty: even if God is identical with his nature, the truths about that nature remain necessary and independent of his will. Plantinga concludes that simplicity is both philosophically problematic and irrelevant to the sovereignty-aseity problem it was meant to address . This critique has been influential in subsequent debates, with defenders of simplicity such as Brower and Bergmann later developing truthmaker-based responses .

Universal possibilism is the view that there are no necessary truths at all: everything, including logical and mathematical truths, is within God's control. Plantinga argues that Descartes held a version of this position, though he describes Descartes's view as an inconsistent mixture of 'limited possibilism' (some truths are necessary though God could have made them otherwise) and 'universal possibilism' (no truths are necessary) . Universal possibilism is the only traditional solution that genuinely preserves God's absolute control over all truths, because it places even the laws of logic within his will. But Plantinga rejects it as absurd: if nothing is necessary, then the claim that God exists is not necessary either, and the distinction between God and creation collapses. He concludes that universal possibilism is coherent but unacceptable.

Plantinga's solution is to accept that God has a nature distinct from himself and to deny that this compromises his sovereignty in any problematic sense. He endorses a form of Platonic realism about properties: properties, propositions, and numbers exist necessarily, and God does not create them. But he argues that this does not make God dependent on them in a way that undermines his aseity. The key move is to distinguish between control and dependence: God's nature is the set of properties he essentially has, and while he cannot choose to lack them, this is not a limitation on his power but a condition of his being God rather than some other being . Plantinga also suggests that abstract objects may depend asymmetrically on God's intellective activity, following a line he associates with Augustine .

Does God Have a Nature? is a relatively early work, published in 1980, before the Warrant trilogy (1993–2000). Its significance for Plantinga's later project lies in its method and its metaphysics. Methodologically, it displays the analytic rigor and willingness to reject longstanding theological consensus that would characterize his later critiques of foundationalism and naturalism. Metaphysically, its endorsement of Platonism about properties and its rejection of divine simplicity set the stage for the account of proper function in Warrant and Proper Function, which relies on a robust realism about properties and design plans. The lecture also anticipates Plantinga's later insistence that theistic belief can be intellectually respectable without conforming to secular philosophical norms .

The most common misunderstanding is that Plantinga argues God does not have a nature, or that he reduces God to a set of abstract properties. Neither is correct. Plantinga explicitly concludes that God does have a nature, and that this nature is distinct from God himself . What he denies is that having a nature conflicts with sovereignty in the way the tradition feared. A related misunderstanding is that Plantinga is defending a secular or naturalistic view of God. He is not: he is a committed Christian theist working within the analytic tradition, and his goal is to show that classical theism can be formulated coherently without the doctrine of divine simplicity, which he regards as a philosophical mistake rather than a datum of revelation.