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Necessity Ever since Aristotle, God has been conceived in Western philosophical theology as a necessarily existent being ens necessarium. On the basis of his argument for God from eternal motion, Aristotle claims to have proved the existence of an eternal, unchanging, uncaused, incorporeal cause of change.1 Because God is immaterial, he is not subject to generation and corruption, as are things composed of form and matter. For Aristotle God’s necessary existence probably meant simply his immunity to generation and corruption and, hence, his permanent existence.2 3.1 Biblical Data Concerning Divine Necessity What scriptural data support the notion that God exists necessarily From the time of the Church Fathers Christian theologians have interpreted the revelation of the divine name to Moses “I am that I am” Ex 3.14 to express the idea of divine necessary existence.3 Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name’ what shall I say to them” God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” Necessity 53 And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I am has sent me to you.’” God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’ this is my name for ever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations” Ex 3.13–15. It is significant that the divine name is not a name given by human beings to God but is revealed by God himself. Since proper names were understood in ancient Israel to reveal their bearer’s character, God intends thereby to provide a selfrevelation to Moses. Although some interpreters have suggested that God’s enigmatic reply to Moses’ question is a refusal to provide God’s name, as if to say, “None of your business” such an interpretation is unlikely because i the formula “I am who I am” does not mean “It is none of your concern” but is a play on the Hebrew verb hāyâ to be ii God’s further statement, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I am has sent me to you’” shows that the reply was not a refusal and iii it is unlikely that the thousands of subsequent uses of YHWH Lord in the OT 6,823 times are only a remembrance of God’s refusing to give his name.4 The difficulty lies in understanding what the divine name was meant to convey. OT scholars have struggled to come to consensus concerning the import of the divine name revealed to Moses. Indeed, Brevard Childs comments that “Few verses in the entire Old Testament have evoked such heated controversy and such widely divergent interpretations.”5 Although modern interpreters have largely dismissed the traditional exegesis of this passage to support divine necessary being as misled by philosophical interests, Childs insists that it is far from obvious that the ancient Hebrews had no concept of being, such as seems to come to expression in the divine name. God’s name is revealed in v. 14a to be ’ehyê ’ăšer ’ehyê and then abbreviated in v. 14b as simply ’eyeh. Although the full expression can be variously translated as “I am who I am,” “I will be who I will be,” “I will be who I was,” “I was who I will be,” etc.,6 the present tense version deserves pride of place since the statement in v. 14b featuring the abbreviated name could hardly mean “‘I was’ or ‘I will be’ has sent me to you.” Although commentators have often seen the divine name as an expression to Israel of God’s abiding presence with them, such an interpretation does not at all exclude and might well comprise God’s eternal being as a precondition of his abiding presence. Although it would doubtless be anachronistic to read into the name an expression of God’s necessary existence in a broadly logical sense, ancient Hebrews in general and the Pentateuchal author in particular certainly had the conception of God as one who has never come into being and will never go out of being and therefore as necessary in the Aristotelian sense.7 God’s necessary existence in a broadly logical sense is thus one of those properties which is underdetermined by scriptural data but arguably a natural extension of God’s existence along the lines of perfect being theology, since God would be even greater were he to exist necessarily rather than contingently.8 3.2 Two Notions of Divine Necessity 3.2.1 Factual Necessity Scripture clearly supports God’s necessary existence in the Aristotelian sense, in virtue of its affirmation of divine aseity, eternity, and supreme power.9 The Aristotelian conception finds its counterpart among those contemporary philosophers who defend the idea of God’s “factual” necessity.10 According to this notion, God exists necessarily in the sense that, given that God exists, it is impossible that he ever came into or will go out of existence. He is uncaused, eternal, incorruptible, and indestructible. 3.2.2 Logical Necessity During the Middle Ages, however, Islamic philosophers such as alFārābī began to enunciate an even more powerful conception of God’s necessity God’s nonexistence is logically impossible.11 Fārābī based his distinction between necessary being and contingent being upon his distinction between essence and existence. Something exists in a logically necessary sense if and only if its essence somehow includes existence. This latter distinction allows Fārābī to treat beings which are necessary in an Aristotelian sense as not absolutely necessary or necessary per se, but merely derivatively necessary or necessary ab alio, once their cause is given. Fārābī’s conception of absolutely necessary existence lay at the heart of Anselm’s ontological argument if God’s nonexistence is logically impossible, then it follows that he must exist.13 As Anselm writes, For it is possible to conceive of a being which cannot be conceived not to exist and this is greater than one which can be conceived not to exist. Hence, if that than which nothing greater can be conceived can be conceived not to exist, it is not that than which nothing greater can be conceived. But this is an irreconcilable contradiction. There is, then, so truly a being than which nothing greater can be conceived to exist, that it cannot even be conceived not to exist and this being thou art, O Lord, our God.14 On this view God is not merely factually necessary, but logically necessary in his being. This concept of God as a logically necessary being came to dominate Western conceptions of God, featuring prominently in the works of thinkers like Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Clarke. Powerful philosophical and theological reasons can be given for taking God’s existence but logically necessary, in his being.15 Philosophically, whether or not one regards the ontological argument as a successful piece of natural theology, Anselm was right in thinking the conception of God as a being than which a greater cannot be conceived to imply his necessary existence in the logical sense, since logically contingent existence is not as great as necessary existence.16 As many contemporary thinkers have observed, even if existence itself is not a property, the necessity of one’s existence is a property, and a greatmaking one at that. Moreover, various arguments of natural theology, to be discussed in the sequel,17 if successful, go to establish the existence of a logically necessary being. Leibniz’s cosmological argument from contingency, for example, terminates in a logically necessary being, for only such a being can supply an adequate answer to the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing” A conceptualist argument for God’s existence as a ground for the existence of abstract objects like mathematical entities also entails the existence of a logically necessary being in order to ground the realm of necessarily existing abstract objects. The moral argument for God as a foundation for the objectivity of moral values and duties leads naturally to such a being, since many moral values and principles are not plausibly logically contingent. Theologically speaking, a God who just happens to exist even eternally and without cause seems less satisfactory religiously than one whose nonexistence is impossible. An attitude of worship and adoration toward God seems inappropriate if God exists accidentally and possesses contingently various greatmaking properties.18 Hoffman and Rosenkrantz rightly maintain that in light of the degree of awesomeness of its attributes, a maximally great being “is maximally worthy of worship and reverence.”19 Mere factual necessity does not seem to capture the fullness of divine being. 3.3 Coherence of God’s Necessary Existence 3.3.1 Criticism of Logically Necessary Existence Since the critiques of Hume and Kant, however, philosophers have until recently widely rejected the notion of God as a logically necessary being. Hume’s brief criticism may be found in Part IX of his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. “Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as nonexistent. There is no being, therefore, whose nonexistence implies a contradiction.” Since we can without contradiction conceive ofany being as nonexistent, we lie under no necessity of supposing God to be necessarily existent “in the same manner as we lie under a necessity of always conceiving twice two to be four. The words, therefore, necessary existence, have no meaning or, which is the same thing, none that is consistent.”20 The thrust of Kant’s criticism, which may be found in the section entitled “The Impossibility of an Ontological Proof of the Existence of God,” of his Critique of Pure Reason, is to show that the existence of God cannot be inferred from the concept of absolutely necessary existence.21 Such a critique does not invalidate the concept of a necessary being as such, which Kant grants may be defined as something the nonexistence of which is impossible. His critique of the ontological argument, rather, is the same as Hume’s the existence of God can be denied without contradiction. “But if we say ‘There is no God,’. . . there is . . . not the least contradiction in such a judgment.”22 That is because “if the predicate of a judgment is rejected together with the subject, no internal contradiction can result, and this holds no matter what the predicate may be. . . . I cannot form the least concept of a thing which, should it be rejected with all its predicates, leaves behind a contradiction.”23 Ironically, Kant holds that existence is not a real property which is predicated of things. “If, now, we take the subject God with all its predicates . . . and say ‘God is’, or ‘There is a God,’ we attach no new predicate to the concept of God, but only posit the subject in itself with all its predicates, and indeed posit it as being an object that stands in relation to my concept.”24 If Kant is correct, then there can be no objection to taking “God exists” to be a synthetic, necessary truth, even though its denial is not a contradiction. Therefore, however subversive his critique may prove to be for the ontological argument, it does nothing to invalidate the concept of a logically necessary being. Brian Leftow observes that “In the dark night of postKantian Europe, it is hard to find a philosopher who considered the matter” of logical divine necessity.25 As late as 1971, Robert Adams could observe that it is “widely believed” that the claim that no proposition asserting the existence of something can be logically necessary “has been established so conclusively that arguments for the logically necessary existence of a real thing can be rejected out of hand, without further examination, on the ground that such logically necessary existence is known to be impossible.”26 It was often said that to speak of a logically necessary being is flatly a category mistake propositions are logically necessary or contingent with respect to their truth value, but beings are no more necessary or contingent than they are true or false. If one replied that the theist means to hold that the proposition God exists is necessarily true, then the response was that existential propositions are uniformly contingent. Besides, the proposition God does not exist is not a contradiction, so that God exists cannot be logically necessary. Moreover, many philosophers insisted that the distinction between necessarycontingent truth is merely a result of linguistic convention, so that it becomes merely conventional to assert that God necessarily exists. 3.3.2 Broadly Logically Necessary Existence Philosophical reflection during the second half of the twentieth century has largely overturned these critiques.27 The recovery and development of modal logic, widely neglected since the time of medieval logicians, has proved revolutionary.28 Pruss and Rasmussen point out that “Using modal logic, we may express propositions about contingent and necessary things without presupposing that there is any such property as existence, necessary existence, or contingent existence.”29 So, for example, we may translate “C exists contingently” as ∃x x C ◻ ∃x x C.30 Using the language of contemporary modal logic, we can thus express assertions of necessary existence independently of whether there is a property of existence, so that Kant’s objection falls by the wayside. The development of possible worlds semantics to express modal logical claims has provided a useful means of expressing the theist’s claim that God exists necessarily.31 To say that God is a logically necessary being is to say that God exists in every possible world “God” in this case being a proper name and, hence, rigidly designating its referent, that is to say, picking out the same entity in every possible world in which it exists. In other words, the proposition God exists is true in every possible world. There is no good reason to think that such an existential proposition cannot be true in every possible world, for many philosophers make precisely similar claims about the necessary existence of various abstract objects like numbers, properties, propositions, and so forth.32 Though abstract, such objects are thought by many philosophers to exist, in Plantinga’s words, just as serenely as your most solidly concrete object.33 Thus, it would be special pleading to privilege these objects with necessary existence while denying the possibility of God’s existing necessarily. Furthermore, the modality operative in possible worlds semantics is not strict logical necessitypossibility, but broad logical necessitypossibility. Strictly speaking, there is no logical impossibility in the proposition The Prime Minister is a prime number but we should not want to say, therefore, that there is a possible world in which this proposition is true. Broad logical possibility is usually construed in terms of actualizability and is therefore often understood as metaphysical possibility.34 There are no clear criteria which can be applied mechanically to determine whether a proposition is metaphysically necessaryimpossible. One chiefly has to rely on intuition or conceivability.35 Propositions which are not strictly logically contradictory may nonetheless be metaphysically impossible, for example, My desk could have been made of ice or Socrates could have been a hippopotamus. Similarly, propositions need not be tautologous like If it is raining, then it is raining or analytic like Even numbers are divisible by two in order to be metaphysically necessary for example, Gold has the atomic number 79, Whatever begins to exist has a cause, or Everything that has a size has a shape. Intuitions may differ over whether some proposition is metaphysically necessaryimpossible. Thus, with respect to the proposition God exists, the fact that the negation of this proposition is not a contradiction in no way shows that the proposition is not metaphysically necessary. Similarly, the proposition that Nothing exists is not a logical contradiction, but that does not show that the proposition is broadly logically possible. If one has some reason to think that a metaphysically necessary being exists, then it would be questionbegging to reject this conclusion solely on the grounds that it seems possible that nothing should exist.36 Finally, as for the conventionalist theory of necessity, such a construal of modal notions is not only unjustified but enormously implausible. As Plantinga points out,37 the linguistic conventionalist appears to confuse sentences with propositions. Sentences are linguistic entities composed of words propositions are the information content expressed by declarative sentences. We can imagine situations in which the sentence “Either God exists or he does not” would not have expressed the proposition it in fact does and so might have been neither necessary nor true but that goes no distance toward proving that the proposition it does express is neither necessary nor true. Moreover, it seems quite incredible to think that the necessity of this proposition is in any wise affected by our determination to use words in a certain way. Could it really be the case that God both exists and does not exist 3.4 Concluding Remarks In summary, while the Scriptures give ample ground for taking God to exist necessarily in at least an Aristotelian sense, the requirements of perfect being theology rightly propel the Christian theologian to affirm a more exalted conception of God’s necessary existence that of a metaphysically necessary being, one that exists in every possible world. Objections to such a conception are now widely recognized to be failures and are therefore obsolete. The Christian theologian should not be deterred by them. We may agree with Leftow that “the doctrine of divine absolute necessity may well deserve the wide adherence it has found.”38 The conception of God as a necessary being in a broadly logical sense seems a coherent notion which properly belongs to Christian theism.39