The Necessity of God's Existence

Waldmark, 19 June 2008

Philosophers are uncertain whether the God of Jews and Christians, when He exists, exists necessarily. This is because they approach the issue from a philosophical perspective. For answers one should count God Himself as amongst one's teachers.

At a Philosophy of Religion course our class were discussing the properties of the theistic God as defined by Professor Tim Mawson of St. Peter’s College, Oxford University, in his book ‘Belief in God’ (Mawson). One of these properties is the necessity of God. Daniel Dennis, course tutor, asked us to reflect on how one can be confident that God is necessary if one does not really know what it is for God to be necessary. Isn’t knowing that God exists, whether or not He necessarily exists, sufficient to relate to Him and have absolute trust in Him?

My position is that absolute trust in God is closely linked to the belief¹ that He necessarily exists. If God could exist but equally well could not exist, if God’s existence would not be necessary, then I propose one could not have absolute trust in Him. It is one thing to merely believe that God exists, it is quite another to trust that everyone and everthing depends on God.

God being necessary means that without God nothing that depends on Him would exist either. So if God would not necessarily exist, this means that the universe could exist just as well without there being a God. But if the universe could exist without needing God to bring it into existence, then what’s the point of God?

The questions: if God exists, does He exist necessarily? or, could God exist without the need for Him to exist? revolve around the fourth definition of the word necessity as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED): ‘An imperative need for or of something.’

Most of my class would agree that God could not exist without being necessary, if only because the alternative, holding that God could exist without the need for Him to exist would classify God as being contingent or even accidental²: God could exist but God could also not exist and whether He does would be the result of chance, and even then His existence would depend on the universe existing first. The opposite of necessity.

Philosophical discussions about the necessity of God lead to interesting questions, such as whether or not the universe or universal values and laws can exist outside of God. Consider the question whether logic could exist without logic having been created as part of a larger whole: is it possible to conceive of a system in which logic exists but right and wrong do not? After all, logic pivots around the central concept of validity – reasonable, rational, justifiable, defensible, viable – and therefore involves distinguishing between right conclusions and wrong conclusions. Logic, and mathematics, revolve around the distinction between right answers and wrong answers but where are right and wrong rooted if the natural world is defined by chance?

The theistic God is worshipped as the Creator of the Universe. Why would someone strive to honour this God as Most High if He could also not have been? How would the God of Heaven and Earth not be necessary for people who believe that Heaven and Earth are made by Him? If people believe in God then they believe that the the universe did not come about by accident, but was created by God. For a believer the existence of God is, therefore, necessary and the existence of the universe contingent on the existence of God, not the other way round. It does matter that God exists necessarily in order to relate to Him and to have absolute trust in Him.

Notes

¹ Belief in the definition of ‘accepting as true,’ not the Oxford definition of ‘feeling.’

² Contingent means entirely dependent for its existence on something or someone else. Accidental means dependent on chance.

References

T.J. Mawson. ‘Belief in God, an Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion.’ Oxford Univeristy Press. Oxford. 2005.

The Oxford English Dictionary of English, Second Edition.

The Holy Bible, Exodus 3:14-16