Divine Creative Freedom
God is omnibenevolent. This very plausibly implies the No Inferior Choice principle: (NIC) Necessarily, when choosing between options that include A and B, if A is a better than B, then God does not choose B. Denying NIC would seem to require one either to suppose that God may be ignorant of which option is better, contrary to omniscience, or to suppose that God can choose against better reasons, which would conflict with perfect divine rationality. Unfortunately, NIC has problematic consequences. Suppose that choosing to actualize wA is better than choosing to actualize wB if and only if wA is better than wB. Rowe (2004) has argued that (NOMAX) For any world that God could actualize, there is a better world that he could actualize. Then it follows that if God exists, he cannot choose which world to actualize, since whichever world he chose to actualize, he would have been choosing between options that included a better option than the one he chose, contrary to NIC. Nor are matters much improved if there there is a world that is better for God to actualize than all others. For then God cannot choose other than that best world, contrary to the very plausible Divine Creative Freedom principle: (DCF) Necessarily, God creatively chooses what to actualize among a great variety of significantly different types of worlds and the No Necessary Creation principle: (NNC) It was possible for God to choose not to actualize any contingent beings. Now, DCF is a very plausible thesis about divine creation. It is worth distinguishing it from omnipotence. If, per impossibile, only three worlds were metaphysically possible, God might well count as omnipotent if he could actualize each of them, since then he could do all that can be done, but DCF would not hold. DCF could then be seen as giving some concrete content to omnipotence. NNC, on the other hand, seems to be an important