{"id":11620,"date":"2010-05-09T14:50:54","date_gmt":"2010-05-09T14:50:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2010\/05\/09\/god-necessary-or-noncontingent\/"},"modified":"2010-05-09T14:50:54","modified_gmt":"2010-05-09T14:50:54","slug":"god-necessary-or-noncontingent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2010\/05\/09\/god-necessary-or-noncontingent\/","title":{"rendered":"God:  Necessary or Noncontingent?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"TEXT-ALIGN: justify\"><font face=\"Georgia\"><a href=\"http:\/\/maverickphilosopher.typepad.com\/.a\/6a010535ce1cf6970c0133ed6d6176970b-pi\" style=\"FLOAT: left\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Anselm_01\" class=\"asset asset-image at-xid-6a010535ce1cf6970c0133ed6d6176970b \" src=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.typepad.com\/.a\/6a010535ce1cf6970c0133ed6d6176970b-320wi\" style=\"MARGIN: 0px 5px 5px 0px\" \/><\/a> Many theists in the tradition of Anselm and Aquinas define God as a necessary being.&#0160; But if God is a necessary being, then he cannot not exist: he exists in all broadly-logically possible worlds.&#0160; The actual world is of course one of these worlds.&#0160; So it would seem to follow from the very definition of God favored by Anselmians that God exists.&#0160; But surely the existence of God cannot be fallout from a mere definition!<\/font><\/p>\n<p style=\"TEXT-ALIGN: justify\"><font face=\"Georgia\">I have <\/font><a href=\"http:\/\/maverickphilosopher.typepad.com\/maverick_philosopher\/2009\/01\/existence-god-and-the-randians.html\"><font face=\"Georgia\">hammered<\/font><\/a><font face=\"Georgia\"> the Objectivists (Randians) for their terminological mischief as when they rig up &#39;existence&#39; in such a way that the nonexistence of the supernatural is achieved by terminological fiat.&#0160; So doesn&#39;t fairness demand that I hammer the Anselmians equally?&#0160; (This is one way of attaching sense to Nietzsche&#39;s notion of philosophizing with a hammer, although it is not what he had in mind.) <\/font><\/p>\n<p style=\"TEXT-ALIGN: justify\"><font face=\"Georgia\">The trouble with defining God as a necessary being is that &#39;necessary being&#39; conflates modal status and existence.&#0160; For any item we ought to distinguish its modal status (whether necessary, impossible, or contingent) from its existence or nonexistence.<\/font><\/p>\n<p style=\"TEXT-ALIGN: justify\"><font face=\"Georgia\">The concept of God as &quot;that than which no greater can be conceived&quot; is the concept of a being that exists in every possible world if it exists in any world.&#0160; But from this one cannot validly infer that God exists.&#0160; For it might be (it is epistemically possible that) God exists in no world,&#0160;in which &#0160;case he would be impossible.&#0160; God is either necessary or impossible: that was Anselm&#39;s great insight.&#0160; He cannot be a contingent being.<\/font><\/p>\n<p style=\"TEXT-ALIGN: justify\"><font face=\"Georgia\">If we want one word to express this disjunctive property of being either necessary or impossible, that word is &#39;noncontingent.&#39;&#0160; So we should not say that God is a necessary being.&#0160; We should say that he is a noncontingent being.<\/font><\/p>\n<p style=\"TEXT-ALIGN: justify\"><font face=\"Georgia\">Companion post:&#0160; <\/font><a href=\"http:\/\/maverickphilosopher.typepad.com\/maverick_philosopher\/2010\/05\/contingent-necessary-impossible-a-note-on-nicolai-hartmann.html\">Necessary, Contingent, Impossible: A Note on Nicolai Hartmann<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Many theists in the tradition of Anselm and Aquinas define God as a necessary being.&#0160; But if God is a necessary being, then he cannot not exist: he exists in all broadly-logically possible worlds.&#0160; The actual world is of course one of these worlds.&#0160; So it would seem to follow from the very definition of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2010\/05\/09\/god-necessary-or-noncontingent\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;God:  Necessary or Noncontingent?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[143,235,271],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-god","category-modal-matters","category-ontological-arguments"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11620\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}