NECESSARY EXISTENCE (ASEITY)
A thing has necessary existence if it would have existed no matter what, and if it would have existed under any possible circumstances - Peter Van Inwagen
A thing has necessary existence if its non-existence would have been impossible - Peter Van Inwagen
You and I are contingent creatures because we only exist because our parents met and conceived us. If our parents had met other people - or had just met at a different time and under different circumstances - we wouldn't be here.
In Back To The Future (1985), Marty McFly stops his parents from falling in love and finds that he is fading out of existence. This is a pretty striking illustration of contingency.
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"Possible worlds" refers to all the different possible ways the world could be. For example, the world could have been hit by a meteor millions of years ago, wiping out all life. Or the Nazis could have won World War II. Or an atomic war could have destroyed civilisation in the 1960s. Or Firefly could never have been canceled. It's fun to think about all these possible worlds, but Plantinga's point is that a maximally great (necessary) being would be one which would still be in that world regardless of how it turned out there. A maximally great (necessary) being is unaffected by the circumstances of the world and no circumstances can ever be imagined that would make such a being not-exist.
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Superheroes like the Flash and Supergirl often use their powers to travel to other possible worlds
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"I am that I AM" - Exodus 3: 14 God identifies himself as "I AM", which becomes his holy name in Judaism. God seems to be claiming for himself a special sort of existence or being - that he exists in a way which no other creature exists; indeed, God seems to be saying he's the only being who can really, truly be said to exist at all.
The scene occurs at 1:10 in this clip from Prince of Egypt (1998), which tells the Biblical story of Moses, who may have lived in 1300 BCE.
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Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent. There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction - David Hume
Imagine seeing a difficult mathematical equation written on a blackboard. You might say that it's possible that the equation is true and it's possible that it is false. You are expressing epistemic uncertainty about the equation's truthfulness. But as a piece of mathematics, the equation is either necessarily true or necessarily false. You just don't know which.
Similarly, imagining a world without God in it doesn't show that God's necessary existence is impossible. |
YES
The idea that God is eternal is found in the Bible and supported by the religious experiences of mystics, who feel themselves to be in the presence of a Being that makes them feel almost non-existent by comparison. At the beginning of monotheistic religion, God identifies himself to Moses as a necessarily existent being.
Even if you think you can imagine God not existing, that just shows you haven't really grasped God's definition. You can say the words "God doesn't exist" but you can't really imagine it, just like you can say the words "A four-sided triangle" but you can't imagine that either.n If you think you're imagining a world without God, you're really imagining something else.
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NO
It makes no sense to talk about a being who logically must exist if we can imagine such a being not existing. The whole point about logical necessity is that you can't imagine a contradiction of it, like you can't imagine of four-sided triangle. But you can imagine God not existing. As John Lennon said, "It's easy if you try."
Necessary existence is incoherent in other ways too. How can a non-contingent being be a 'person'? How can they choose to do things or take actions? To choose or act is to respond to your environment and that means being contingent. A necessary being wouldn't do anything. It would be more like a force or a scientific law. It would just be "there" but you couldn't pray to it and there'd be no point in worshiping it.
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