Abstract

There is a traditional view, maintained by Aquinas and others, which holds that there is a mutual entailment between the power to Create Ex Nihilo and the property of omnipotence. In his Metaphysical Disputations, however, Suarez attacks the traditional view by pointing out a seriousflaw in Aquinas’s argument. Suarez claims that there is no reason in principle why God cannot miraculously bestow CEN-power to creatures––albeit in a limitedform––even on the assumption that God cannot make creatures omnipotent. In this paper the authors argue that the debate can be resolved in favor of Aquinas;that CEN-power does indeed strictly imply omnipotence. After clarifying a sufficient condition for the property of omnipotence, the authors argue that attention to amodest possible worlds semantics and some interesting properties of counterfactuals are together sufficient to show that beings with CEN-power are in every case beings that are omnipotent