In this book, Richard Brian Davis explores various attempts to solve the Dependence Problem - the problem posed by the following question: How can necessary truths stand to God in a one-way relation of dependence when neither they nor God could have failed to exist? Critics charge that this problem is insoluble. Davis argues at length that the most powerful and promising contemporary solutions to this problem - those offered by Linda Zagzebski, Brian Leftow, Thomas V. Morris, and William Mann - are all fatally flawed. In making his case, Davis treats the reader to helpful and interesting discussions of counterpossibles, broadly logical necessity, identity statements, as well as the divine attributes of sovereignty, aseity, and simplicity. He concludes with what is perhaps the most forceful and sustained defense of the claim that necessary truths can stand to God in an asymmetrical relation of causal dependence.
"Many philosophers, such as D. M. Armstrong and Wilfrid Sellars, have maintained that widely accepted versions of philosophical naturalism require a rejection of abstract objects since these are non-spatiotemporal entities and, thus, not within the cosmos, and since it is hard to depict knowledge of them by way of scientifically acceptable forms of causal interaction. Moreover, modal realism regarding properties, relations, and propositions is also a problem for traditional theism because these entities are at the same time necessary beings and asymmetrically dependent on God for their existence. Richard Brian Davis's 'The Metaphysics of Theism and Modality' is a rigorous, careful treatment of this problem. Its greatest strength lies in two areas: First, it provides a helpful survey of important solutions to the problem and, second, it proffers a modest solution unique to Davis. This book is another sign of the vitality of contemporary analytic philosophy of religion and it advances the discussion admirably." (J. P. Moreland, Professor of Philosophy, Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, California)