Almost all classical theists hold that God’s existence is necessary; indeed this claim is so fundamental that before modernity few philosophers, atheist or theist, thought to dispute it. Necessary here is meant in the strongest sense, that of logical necessity—for every way reality could be that way includes God’s existence6. That the Divine is that for which it is impossible not to be is one of the most ancient tenets of Western metaphysics dating back to Parmenides7. This intuition has been central to our notion of God for centuries before thinkers had the conceptual tools to explicate it within a particular logical framework—indeed it has been one of the prime motivations in philosophers’ seeking additionally sophisticated ways to articulate modal truths.
Necessary existence is a natural way to understand the Platonic label ‘Being itself’, a definition of God taken up by Augustine and other Church fathers. In the Latin West, God’s necessary existence was clearly articulated by Anselm in his analysis of ‘that than which a greater cannot be thought’ as ‘that which cannot be thought not to exist’, which makes up the ontological argument given in the third chapter of the Proslogion. It was Ibn Sina and the Arabian philosophers who first provided a fully developed ontological assay of necessity in their theories of a real distinction between essence and existence with some essences having existence as an inseparable part. These developments continued throughout the Middle Ages with scholastics such as Duns Scotus offering increasingly sophisticated and systematic accounts of contingency, possibility and necessity. In the early modern period this research arguably reached its culmination in the work of Gottfried Leibniz, which provided the possible world framework contemporary metaphysicians use to analyse modal concepts8.
Unfortunately it was virtually impossible to discuss necessary existence in the language of early analytical philosophy for a number of reasons. The first was that twentieth century philosophy in general had inherited the Kantian confusion between the necessity and the a priori. Since that philosopher it was taken for granted that knowledge deriving from experience, so called ‘a posteriori’ knowledge, could never get us access to necessary truths9. Instead all necessary truths were either trivial tautologies, ‘analytical’ propositions, or substantive metaphysical truths derived somehow from the action of reason alone—the so-called synthetic a priori. That latter category had come under heavy attacks from the Logical Positivists, the same group who were also responsible for popularising the Humean thesis that there existed no necessary connections in nature.
The second bizarrely enough was the popular acceptance of another Humean claim, that conceivability entails possibility10. Here as before few gave any great thought as to exactly what ‘conceivability’ consisted of, in fact in a lot of cases the bare assertion of a statement appeared to suffice. When some account was given most of the time it appealed to the disastrous image theory of meaning put forward by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus.
By and large these were problems inherited from previous movements, a mixture of Humean empiricism and Kantian epistemology strained through the British idealists. The biggest problem however was decidedly modern in nature. The new logic, the extensionalist first-order predicate logic formulated by Russell, Frege and Whitehead, which attempted to formalise reasoning along mathematical grounds (and vice versa!), offered no way of expressing modal concepts within its language. To many, at this time when it was optimistically believed that many philosophical problems could be clarified and possibly resolved by linguistic analysis, this suggested one thing: that modal concepts themselves were incoherent. A prime example of this can be found in the debate between Russell and Coplestone in which the former objects to the argument from contingency on the grounds ‘I don't admit the idea of a necessary being and I don't admit that there is any particular meaning in calling other beings "contingent." These phrases don't for me have a significance except within a logic that I reject’.
Philosophers responded to this charge in a number of ways. Those friendly to divine necessity stood their ground and opined that the necessity in question was different from that of formal logic or that the new logic’s inability to handle modal concepts signified its radical incompleteness. Others accepted that necessity was essential to the meaning of deity and took the incoherence of the former to be evidence against the latter. J N Findlay even offered an ontological disproof of God’s existence based on these considerations11.
A significant number of philosophers however conceded the critic’s point and accepted that God could not be a necessary being, at least if necessary was taken in the logical sense. Instead they claimed although the non-existence of God was a possible state-of-affairs the deity could still be called necessary in some more palatable weaker sense. One such philosopher, John Hick, suggested God was best understood as a ‘factually necessary being’ which he further stipulated as meaning ‘that God is, without beginning or end, and without origin, cause or ground or explanation’. Others philosophers such as Richard Swinburne, Terence Penelhum, and David Schrader gave similar accounts linking this supposed necessity to eternal existence or immutability.
It is hard to exaggerate the ramifications this has for the traditional conception of God. Disputes over simplicity and property exemplification pale in comparison to it. If God is no longer a necessary being then our understanding of divine ultimacy and most purported theistic proofs must be substantially revised. For instance, it is no longer the case that God is necessarily the ground of being, that on which the existence of all contingent entities depends. Certainly Hick and Swinburne are keen to stress that God will be creator of all other beings in any given world in which He exists. If the deity is not logically necessary however there will be some worlds which do not include His existence and do presumably include the existence of other contingent beings. It might be the case that atheism is true and you and I exist as we do now.
Similar issues apply to God’s axiological status. We must bid farewell to the Platonic vision of God as the Form of the Good in which all good things must participate to some degree. If God’s existence is contingent then God’s status as the most perfect being is also contingent, for in worlds without God another being fits that description12. Consider God is the most perfect in Chronos, the actual world, but maybe in another world, a very small world, Barack Obama or Donald Trump holds that title. Contingency also rules out God being the source or ultimate guarantor of moral imperatives, at least if moral truths do not to vary between worlds (the best one could say is that moral truths only hold in worlds containing God).
The ramifications for natural theology are similarly radical. Modal arguments such as the ontological argument are straight out the window for they rely on deriving God’s existence from His status as a necessary being itself derived from some further attribute or description. Likewise for arguments that ground some necessary aspect of reality (e.g. possibilities or abstract objects) in the Divine Nature. Some form of the kalam argument may be possible if one admits divine timelessness but traditional cosmological arguments from contingency are right out, for the aim of such is to show that the existence of contingent beings entails the existence of at least one necessary being. Specifically the theist cannot appeal to the principle of sufficient reason, either in its strong or weak formulation. In such arguments, as well as first cause arguments like those of Aquinas, the explanation for the existence of contingent being is sought in a being the existence of which is self-explanatory, one whose essence entails or includes existence. The champion of ‘factual necessity’ cannot make the same claim about his or her God for that God is a contingent being just as much as the universe it would potentially explain. They might claim—as Hick does—that God is still explanatorily ultimate in as much as His existence is ‘the ultimate given circumstance behind which is not possible to go with either question or explanation’ but on their theory this has a radically different meaning13. In the case of traditional principle of sufficient reason arguments explanation terminates in the fact of its not being possible for a certain state-of-affairs not to be the case (i.e. for a necessary being not to exist), whilst in the case of a factually necessary being explanation simply cannot be found. Unlike in the case of other contingent states-of-affairs there is necessarily no reason why factual God’s existence is the case. In other words, the existence of God just is a brute fact.
If these considerations are taken into account then one of the most famous misrepresentations of natural theology, the ‘What caused God?’ objection to the cosmological argument, begins to make sense. If God is a necessary being then of course it makes no sense to ask the cause of His existence—if on the other hand God is a contingent being then as with any other contingent being it does makes sense to ask what brought His existence about—indeed, this is just what the principle of sufficient reason bids us to do. Is it any surprise the ‘What caused God?’ objection first arose amongst those influenced by David Hume, who, in his Dialogues on Natural Religion, attacks the very idea of a necessary being? As has been mentioned above Russell made it clear in his debate with Coplestone that he found the cosmological argument dubious solely because it involves such modal notions. If we consider God as a factually necessary being what reason do we have to prefer theism to some other ultimate brute fact, say the existence of certain base particles? It seems that if God is a contingent being then natural theology is reduced to arguing why we ought to prefer a theistic brute fact to an atheistic one.
Thankfully, philosophy of religion has progressed greatly over the last fifty years and, at the time of writing, most philosophers, atheist and theist, are willing to admit that God is to be understood as a necessary being14. This is in no small part due Saul Kripke and Alvin Plantinga, whose works on the semantics and ontology of possible worlds have shown that modal notions such as necessity and contingency can be clearly expressed in the language of modern logic. Their work has also helped dispel epistemic confusions pertaining to apriority and analyticity which had obscured the debate for over a century. Nowadays philosophers work with accounts of modal ontology and metaphysics nearly equal in sophistication those developed by the late medieval and Baroque scholastics.
It is easy to forget the confused state of early analytical metaphysics and that this did not simply go away when people started noticing the self-defeating nature of the verificationist criterion, as theists are too often prone to suggest. Instead it was the results of hard labour on the parts of analytical metaphysicians clearing away literally centuries of confusion15. For the most part this labour was not done by classical theists striving to reawaken the world to a lost wisdom but by open-minded secular thinkers and philosophical Protestants desirous of a better metaphysical framework with which to express their religious beliefs. Debates between Plantinga and Aquinas pale in comparison to those with proponents of a factually necessary God or Wittgenstenian fideism (indeed it might be harder to maintain the old versus new narrative with Plantinga if instead of Aquinas one compared him with some of the Scotists). Because of this one might charge proponents of the classical theism narrative of paying insufficient attention to history. To an extent this is unfair, as the texts pushing this narrative, often manuals and introductions, themselves belong to a certain period and were intended to wake people from their dogmatic slumbers and get them to pay attention to an historically important divine attribute (i.e. simplicity), which they had previously been content to reject with mere pejorative. I would strongly suggest however that the time for this has gone and that further developments in philosophy of religion require all parties moving beyond this narrative.
Footnotes
6. The necessity in question is sometimes called metaphysical or broadly logical necessity to distinguish it from the necessities of logical form or narrow necessity. A narrowly necessary truth is one guaranteed by logical syntax alone whereas a broadly logical truth makes reference to the nature of beings in questions. An example of the former would be X cannot be Y and Not-Y whereas X cannot be completely Green and completely Red is an instance of the latter.
7. See John Palmer’s Parmenides and Presocratic Philosophy for an extensive case that Parmenides argued for the necessity of divine being. Numerous other attempts have been made to trace the roots of the ontological argument backs to Parmenides' poem (e.g. M P Slattery’s ‘The Negative Ontological Argument’).
8. Although a strong case can also be made for Scotus being the father of possible world metaphysics. In as far as Leibniz was himself very influenced by then contemporary Scotists, this makes sense.
9. To make matters worse philosophers differed greatly as to what qualified as a priori, with Kantians, logical positivists and neo-Thomists all offering different equally unhelpful definitions.
10. As some readers will have already guessed the claim ‘If a state-of-affairs is conceivable then that state-of-affairs is possible’ qualifies as an informative a priori truth (and a significant one at that!) on just about any account of apriority ancient or modern.
11. Findlay’s disproof attempted to parallel the notion of a perfect being employed in Anselm’s ontological argument.
1. God is a perfect being.
2. Being a perfect being requires being a necessary being (necessary existence is a perfection).
3. The notion of a necessary being is incoherent.
4. There are no necessary beings (from 3).
5. God does not exist (from 1 and 4).
Charles Hartshorne responded to Findlay’s argument by offering a valid modal version of the ontological argument as a way of showing God to be a direct counterexample to premise 4. Others (e.g. Coplestone) suggest that a successful ontological argument is possible, though we have yet to formulate it and may never be in the epistemic position to do so. Findlay himself later rejected premise 4 as well.
12. This should be distinguished from the claim that God has the property of being a perfect being contingently. This would imply there are worlds where God does exist and lacks that property. Although the philosophers named above insist that God is not logically necessary and differ over whether or not God has his attributes essentially (in every world in which he does exist), neither view entails the other. Those who hold that God is a contingent being might still hold that God is the greatest possible being.
13. For a penetrating critique of Hick’s views on the cosmological argument and God’s status as a factually necessary being see D R Duff-Forbes’ ‘Hick, Necessary Being and the Cosmological Argument’.
14. There are holdouts however. As of 2018 Swinburne retains his anti-necessitarian views and William Hasker devotes much of his article ‘Analytic Philosophy of Religion’ in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion to attacking the notion of God as logically necessary.
15. For excruciatingly detailed accounts of the rise and fall of verificationism and exclusively a priori necessity see Brand Blanshard’s Reason and Analysis and both volumes of Scott Soames’ Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century.
Bibliography
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