Essay #7: Theism, Necessity and Invalidity

Abstract

This essay deals with the necessitarian concept of God. It is a response to the widespread acceptance in the second half of the twentieth century of the modalities of necessity and possibility. This was primarily due to the “possible world” semantics developed by Saul Kripke and others, and to the scholarship of Alvin Plantinga. The contention of this paper is that when a modal concept of God is adopted, some of the theist’s crucial ordinary intuitions concerning which arguments are successful misfire. The main thesis of the essay is that the theist employing such a modal concept of God cannot hold any argument for God’s existence to be invalid on pain of logically implying the denial of theism.

The modal concept of God involves the following two conditionals: (1) If God exists, then necessarily God exists, and (2) If God does not exist, then necessarily God does not exist. In other words either God exists in every possible world, including the actual world, or God exists in no possible world whatsoever. That is, either it is necessarily true that God exists, or it is necessarily true that God does not exist.

The core of the essay concerns the argument: 1. Evil exists. Hence, 2. God exists. Since the theist is committed to the truth of both the premise and the conclusion, the soundness of the argument turns solely upon the validity or the invalidity of the argument. The thesis of the essay is that contrary to one’s ordinary intuitions, the argument cannot be rejected as invalid. The theist cannot endorse the proposition which says: It is not the case that the existence of evil entails the existence of God. This result is demonstrated with a ten step argument, the conclusion of which is the proposition that God does not exist. The derivation definitely shows that the theist holding the modal concept of God cannot reject any argument for God’s existence as invalid on pain of implying the truth of atheism. The theist employing the modal concept of God must hold that: “Evil exist. / hence God exists.” is a sound argument.