God freely chose to create this particular world, objectifying it by way of manifesting certain of His thoughts as a particular set of abstract truths (mathematical and metaphysical) which underly this world and from which this particular world is shaped. And He brought those truths into creaturely being by way of decisions which were freely made, free in an absolute sense. In order to shape abstract being, those mathematical and metaphysical truths, into this particular world, He made more specific decisions — free though conditioned by His prior decisions in creating that body of abstract truths which underly the concrete world. In my only published book to date, “To See a World in a Grain of Sand”, I gave the name ‘Primordial Universe’ to that body of abstract truths.
For just a moment, think of God — analogically — as being depicted as a gigantic circle. This is God in His transcendence, God who exists necessarily and absolutely as the supreme Act-of-being, His own Act-of-being. He is not a God who is the conclusion of an argument, nor is He the one God who happens to exist out of a large list of possible Gods. The God of Jesus Christ exists necessarily. He could not have not existed. He is the most basic fact of all, no matter how complex and non-intuitive we human beings might find the Triune God to be. He is the source of all truths, even such seemingly simple or basic truths as: 1 + 1 = 2.
In creating this world, God made specific decisions and made them freely, manifesting a particular world, by way of creating basic truths and then shapes them into a particular concrete universe, which universe becomes a world when seen in its moral order — the purposes for which God creates this world or, equivalently, tells this story. Inside of the great circle which is God in His transcendence, a little circle has taken form — the decisions of God which He made to create this world will be seen by rational thinkers as aspects of God or aspects of a self-sustaining Cosmos. God revealed His transcendance to Moses and other prophets, but it was only in the Incarnate Son of God that we have a revelation of God’s inner-life.
In the above paragraph, I added a complication by bringing God’s creative acts into the active present for nothing can exist but by way of a constant and ongoing act of creation which is equivalent to saying that God is telling the story which is this world and also is present as the absolutely dominant participant in this story. That is, God did not create this universe 15 billion years ago, being then free to step back and communicate with His creatures through angels, if He bothered to communicate with them at all. No, God created this universe 15 billion years ago and He continues to create it, to carry out acts-of-being, even as I write these words.
The great pagan thinkers, such as Plato, see this world, realize what it is to a great extent and consequently see God’s acts as a Creator of a particular world. That is, Plato saw, with amazing clarity, the aspects of God which human beings can see when they perceive God as the Creator of this particular world. Plato saw, with some clarity, that smaller circle which is creaturely perceptions of some freely-chosen aspects of God, freely-chosen when He decided to create this particular world. In perceiving God from this natural viewpoint, we see not the true God, God in His transcendance. Rather do we perceive the acts of God in creating this particular world. We see aspects of the transcendent God which He freely took on when He chose to create this particular world, to tell this particular story.
In other words, Plato and other great pagan thinkers saw truly and clearly but they saw only contingent aspects of the God who is not contingent in and of Himself but only in His free-will decisions as a Creator of worlds and things other than Himself. This same problem holds for Intelligent Design advocates and any Christians — or Jews — who think proofs of God’s existence are meaningful outside of a complete theology which is built upon God’s self-revelations to Moses and the other Hebrew prophets or — better still — God’s self-revelations which were, and are, the Incarnation of His Son as a man, Jesus of Nazareth. At best, those proofs will point to that smaller circle which is just some freely-chosen and contingent aspects of God. Personally, I don’t think they even validly point to that smaller circle, but I won’t even try to argue that position right now.
In still other words, Plato and other great pagan thinkers, including Liebniz and some other modern thinkers, saw God in His relationships with this World, as its Creator. One problem, present in nearly all Christian thinkers and even in St. Thomas — though only implicitly, is that we think there is one body of abstract truths independent of God because it is the body of abstract truths which underlies this world, the body of abstract truths from which this world was shaped in my way of speaking of these matters. Even that body of abstract truths is contingent at least in the sense that it would have been meaningless if God had made other decisions as a Creator. I’m not claiming that God could have created a world in which it would not be true that 1 + 1 = 2. That may or may not be possible but it’s not part of my claim: God could have created a world in which the truth 1 + 1 = 2 would not have necessarily been a basic, manifested truth Perhaps it would have not been part of the body of abstract truths underlying that particular world or perhaps it would have been a higher-level truth reachable only by great intellectual effort on the part of any creatures in that world. Even the most abstract of truths is not perceivable by a creature unless God creates it as part of a manifested body of truths, a primordial universe in my terminology.
And yet we Christians have joyfully joined in this task of reducing the God of Jesus Christ to a conclusion of a human argument or even the God who happens to exist out of a number of possible Gods. We have reduced God to the God of the pagan philosophers, and all philosophers or theologians become pagans when they begin to think that human analysis can substitute for God’s self-revelations or even be used to deny those self-revelations.