JONATHAN EDWARDS’ PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENT CONCERNING GOD’S END IN CREATION
Authors
Walter J. Schultz
University of Northwestern St. Paul
Keywords:
Philosophy, Early Modern History
Abstract
Providing a coherent concept of God’s purpose and motive in creating the world in view of God’s self-sufficiency (i.e., aseity) and how this may be related to morality was a problem addressed by many philosophers and theologians in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The problem involves a cluster of questions. What is God’s end in creation and what explains God’s acting to achieve it? Furthermore, if God is a se, then how could it make sense for God to have purposes at all, much less to act from motives in the first place? Is God free? How does creature compliance or non-compliance with God’s will relate to God’s purposes?
