How Free is God’s Will?

That “Hellenistic” view is pretty late, of course– the Homeric gods (and gods of say, Socrates) are also limited and quasi-anthropic.

Any idea when the ontololgical-ground notion came around?

The classical debate, among Christian scholastics at any rate, is whether God’s will precedes his reason, or vice versa. If his will precedes his reason, than his will would presumably be irrational and arbitrary. On the other hand if his reason precedes his will, then it would seem that his will is dictated by it.

The thing is, in a creatio ex nihilo world, it is a pretty pointless to argue about what constraints God’s nature places on his creation of the universe. The reason is that it is illogical to consider such a God to be constrained by anything, or more particularly that his nature isn’t anything he wants it to be, and furthermore that his nature isn’t good simply by virtue of his own choice of it.

As soon as you start evaluating the nature and actions of God by an external or independent standard you have departed from a creatio ex nihilo universe to one where God is not, by any means, the absolute, or ground of all Being. Something more like the way God tends to considered by Mormon theology – subject to one or more independent constraints.

And certainly if one is a Mormon who does not believe that God is subject to any independent natural or metaphysical constraints, he is a creatio ex nihilo theist in all but name. Pretty popular position to hold among the doctrinal cognoscenti these days, apparently.