Is Necessary Existence a Perfection

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Symposium Papers, Comments and an Abstract: Is Necessary Existence A Perfection? Author(s): William J. Wainwright Source: Noûs, Vol. 22, No. 1, 1988 A.P.A. Central Division Meetings (Mar., 1988), pp. 33-34 Published by: Blackwell Publishing Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2215546 Accessed: 24/01/2009 10:07 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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Is NecessaryExistenceA Perfectioln? WILLIAM J. WAINWRIGHT THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MILWAUKEE

Robert Adams believes that though it may be reasonable to think of God as a necessary being, "the ordinary concept of God" doesn't require "God to be a necessary being in the relevant, broadly logical sense of 'necessary'." I think Adams is right, and for reasons similar to those he gives for believing that the possibility of a necessarily existing God can only be determined in relation to "broad theoretical considerations. " I shall argue that "If God exists, He exists necessarily" isn't clearly entailed by theism. To derive it from the concept of God, one must show that necessary existence as such is a perfection or show that necessary existence follows from other divine perfections. The former appeals to intuitions that aren't shared by all theists. The latter places controversial constructions on one or more divine attributes and/or employs controversial philosophical theses. The philosophers who have believed that God is a necessary being have seldom supported their belief by arguments. (Aquinas and Hartshorne are notable exceptions.) Henry More, for example, simply observes that even if it weren't obvious that "existence is better than non-existence and implies no imperfection in it," it would nevertheless be obvious that necessaryexistence is a perfection since it is "the highest and most perfect manner of existing." Appeals to the claim's intuitive self-evidence aren't entirely satisfactory, however, for theists' intuitions differ. The arguments philosophers have offered are equally controversial. The difficulties involved in constructing a compelling proof for the necessity of God's existence will be illustrated by examining four of them-an attempt to show that God'? independence entails necessary existence, Hartshorne's claim that a perfect knower can't exist contingently, a family of proofs that appeal to the implications NOUS 22 (1988) 33-34 ? 1988 by Nous Publications 33

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of created being and God's creative power and activity, and an argument from the contention that God is pure act. I shall argue that all four arguments make controversial assumptions. For example, the argument from independence is persuasive only if negative contingent facts are parasitic on positive contingent facts. Hartshorne's argument depends on a non-standard interpretation of omniscience or perfect knowledge. I will suggest that the plausibility of his interpretation partly depends on the ontological status of possible worlds; it is more plausible if possibilism, and not actualism, is true, and most plausible if indexical possibilism is correct. (If sound, this should trouble Hartshorne since Hartshorne is an actualist.) Arguments from the concepts of created being, creative power, and creative activity place controversial constructions on these notions and/or introduce theses that are no more (though no less) plausible than the claim being proved. Examples of the former are interpretations of perfect creative power and activity which imply that God is the cause of all contingent being (as distinguished from, e.g., being the cause of all otherconcrete beings). An example of the latter is the thesis that contingent beings or states of affairs are essentially dependent. Finally, I shall argue that the only sense in which divine perfection clearly precludes potentiality doesn't entail that God's essence is His being. Arguments that purport to show that God's perfection excludes everysort of potentiality (and hence any distinction between His essence and existence) rely on controversial philosophical assumptions. If this is correct, the argument from God as pure act isn't fully persuasive. I conclude, then, that the doctrine of God's necessary existence is neither explicitly contained in a mature theist's conception of God nor obviously entailed by it. It doesn't follow that a mature theist should reject it. The intuition that necessary existence is itself a perfection is supported by other intuitions. (For example, that the creative power and activity of a being who is the cause of the existence or non-existence of contingent beings in every world is more perfect than that of a being who is the cause of their existence or non-existence in only some of them.) While these intuitions may be weak, they provide each other with some mutual support. The doctrine also has explanatory value. It explains less controversial features of deity such as causal independence and essential causelessness, and (as Adams points out) helps explain such nontheological facts as the existence of contingent beings, and the necessity and objectivity of necessary truths.