Necessary Being is not Impossible

It seems to me that the accurate position of the Christian (or any other theist) is that it is necessary that God possess some contingent property or other, but there is no particular contingent property that God possesses necessarily. Am I going in the right path, or am I missing some important aspect of your argument? Thank you for taking the time to read this. (letter to William Lane Craig)[1]

Read more: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/must-some-contingent-being-or-other-exist#ixzz2RC8nrV2X

....I'm always running into atheists who try to argue that necessary being is impossible. The other day I saw an atheist on a message board who was wondering "why do Christians mess around with this absurd idea of God as necessary? Why don't they just say God is contingent, it's so much more logical since God in the Bible is contingent?" In trying to clarify this mystery for him he plunged deeper into the unknown and asserted that a necessary God can't exist becuase being necessary would mean he can't create or do anything. Intrigued by this bit of whimsy I had to find out why. The logic is pretty straight forward: If God creates something he becomes creator. If he becomes creator then his status as creator is contingent upon his having done it. That makes God contingent: The argument might look like this:
....The problem is this is totally wrong, in fact he's wrong on both counts: it would be absurd to posit that God is contingent, then he wouldn't be God anymore, and it would be it is false to say that God become contingent if he does an act. Psalm 90:2 declares: "Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God." God is eternal. While Colossians 1:16 says: "For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him."
....In other words, God is eternal and creator of all that is. That means all that is is contingent upon God who has always been, thus having never been created and not being dependent upon other things God is not contingent but necessary. God's necessary status is not only based upon being NON-contingent but upon being necessary to all that is as the lynch pen and origin of it's existence. This has been the basic Christian concept since before Christianity: the Hebrew faith had it first (Genesis 1:1 for example). The one major thing that sets God of the Bible apart from all other concepts of God is the fact that it is based upon God as necessary and all things as contingent upon God. Zeus and Thor and Ishtar and all the gods of mythology are contingent, they are all produced by parents or the abyss or some such thing that preceded their existence and brought them into being. Not so with the God of the Bible he is the one and only God-figure who is necessary creator, non contingent himself but maker of all that is. It would be a super idiotic move to bail out of the whole tradition and render God on a par with all the godages of mythology who have only recently found new fan clubs.
....It's also wrong to assert that action makes God contingent. In all the message board fracases of which I've been apart I've gathered three basic concepts of contingent: that which can fail or cease to exist; that which is dependent upon something else (ontologically higher up the ladder of hierarchy) for its existence, or that which is not contradictory if the term is substituted for another. This last one is the counterpoint to logical necessity: All husbands are married men is a logically necessary sentence. If you change the terms; all Texans are married men, it becomes a matter of empirical nature. Perhaps only married men do live in Texas, we have to go check. But the concept of "married man" is descried as "husband" thus all husbands are married men and we know that just by knowing the meaning of the word. Yet this last version of contingency can be ruled out because we are not discussing the ontological argument thus I have not argued that God's existence can be understood from the nature of the terms. The other two versions can be collapsed into one thing: that which can cease or fail to exist, does so because the conditions that make it so could have changed or could change in future. So really contingency is basically about dependence for existence upon something else.
....Once we understand this we can see that God can't be contingent. If he was that would make him a creature then he would not be form everlasting to everlasting nor would he be the creator of all things. He would be mere demiurge. The creator of God would be God and there would still be a God so the atheist's purpose in argument would still be frustrated. Moreover, the doing of actions such as creation does not render God contingent. This argument really depends upon treating treating contingency like a virus. If God is contingent in one respect, such as his title as creator, then he becomes wholly contingent. That's only a title. God's actions do not make him what he is. His actions are an extension of who he is they dont' determine who he is. Contingency is not like a disease that spreads to the whole being. God's actions are contingent, they are contingent upon God's essence as necessary being.
....The atheist letter writer addressing William Lane Craig, speaks of contingent "proprieties" of God (at the top). I don't think contingency is a property. Its' a mode of being. It corresponds to the modal operators, such a necessity and contingency. In this case it's not the mode of being for God himself, not his essence, that thing that makes him what he is, his divine nature, but the mode of being for his title as creator, for example. So God can be contingent in title as creator but so what? Had God not created he would still be. The things he created would not be but he would still be. Therefore, God does not become contingent being if he becomes does contingent acts.
.... The standard concept for which I argue is always that God is being itself not merely "a being." This concept would help us here too. To the letter writer, Craig could have said (if using this concept) that since he acknowledges that some form of being must be that basic acknowledges God since God is the term we take to the concept of being itself or the ground of being. That is what is being expressed "Bede Rundle's position that it is necessary that something or other exist (namely, some physical Universe or other), but nothing in particular exists necessarily." That does not exclude God if God is being itself. IF God is a particular localized being, one of many then it might exclude him but how could it exclude the ground of being?

[1] Letter to William Lane Craig, "Must Some Contingent Being or Other exist?" Q and A Reasonable Faith website URL: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/must-some-contingent-being-or-other-exist
The issues with Craig's letter are much more complex then the one's I present here.

To be or not to be: Necessary or Contingent

I argue that since eternal being can't be contingent it must be necessary. Many atheists tell me this is utterly illogical, but they do on assuming (I think) that there is some third choice or that contingency is just arbitrary.

This is actaully quote logical given the assumptions that I make:

(1) Necesity = That which cannot fail or cease to exist.

(2) Necessity = that which can fail or cease to exist.

(3) The other type of necessity is dependence for existence upon something prior or ontologically higher existent.

(4) both types of contingency are related given that 3 is the only concrete example we can give to explain why 2 would be the case.

(5) Necessity and contingency are the only choices for an existent.

I have argued the correct nature of the first four elsewhere. I would now like to demonstrate why assumption 5 is true.

Aside from Being and nothingness, the most basic categories that can ever been made concerning existence are these:

Necessity/impossibility

Contingency/ fiction

These can be subdivided But these are the most basic you can't draw up a fifth category. These take in all other matters related to existence. Note that impossibility and necessity are related. Impossible is just the "down side" or "negative" version of Necessary. That's why Hartshorne argues that God must be either necessary or impossible, because the concept of God rules out contingent.

Fictional is the negative of contingent. What all of this means is a thing can be either necessary or impossible, if it is not contingent. If it is contingent it can either be contingent or fictional. So functional things are contingencies that don't exist in the "real" world.

Examples:

Necessary: Being itself. It can't cease or fail to exist. This means something that is necessary has to be and it has to what it is, there are no circumstances through which it would have been different.

Impossible Meaning an impossibility cannot exist as a matter of logical self contradiction; there's a flaw at the base of the concept which contradicts and because of that it can't exist; example is square circles.

Contingent An existing thing that can fail or cease to exist. When we say it can fail it means the circumstances that produced could have been different and it would not have been; example would be one's parents. My mother could have married another man and I would not exist.

Fiction Something that does not exist but it could have, just doesn't happen to becuase the circumstances that would have produced it just didn't materialize; example, Huckleberry Finn. He was made up by Mark Twain but had there been people like his parents then he could have existed, there is no contradiction in the concept that would prevent his existence.


There are no other possibilities. This no fifth choice. Either a thing is necessary or it is contingent. If it is not contingent it can only be either impossible or necessary.

A fictional thing is contingent but it is non existent contingency, meaning if it did exist there would be no logical contradiction to it's existence but it fails to exist because the circumstances that would produce it failed to materialize. That's the negative side of contingency.
I call that "fictional."


Arguments

When I say being has to be necessary if it is not contingent, this is why I say so. Because it cant' be impossible or it wouldn't be being. It can't be functional or it would not be being, so it can only be N or c and if it not c then it must be N.


Naturalistic things are all contingencies. Atheists will always argue that this can't be proved. But they also can never give an example that contradicts the basic fact that all things we encounter in nature are always contingent. There are no counter examples.

They say QM particles.

While it is true that QMp's don't seem to have direct causal agents, they do require frameworks to be already in place; time, physical law and vacuum flux. That means they require prior conditions. So they are contingent.

The whole of the universe

They will say drawing the conclusion about the whole form the parts is fallacy of composition. Two answers.

(1) Logicians say that if the parts are all identical then the whole can be understood as derived from the parts and it is not the fallacy of composition. That means since the parts are all contingent then whole is contingent.

Example would be dominoes. you have a row of them and one falls they all fall down. You can't then say "but the whole is standing up, just because the parts are laying down doesn't mean the whole is standing." Well, yea, it does. The whole is not standing.

(2) Atheists would have to prove that the natural realm has to exist and can't be different than it is in order to show it's not contingent. There is no argument based upon empirical data that we can turn to that shows us that the natural world has to exist as it is.

Moreover the option of the universe just popping into existence out of nothing is illogical. We could point to a lot of reasons but the main one is there's no becoming in a timeless void. Total absolute nothing (the nothing it pops in from) would be timeless because time is something. Nothing could ever change if there was a timeless void.

Therefore eternal being must be necessary being.

The problem with connecting the dots and drawing the rest of the God attributes from being and then arguing "therefore God" is that atheists feel cheated because they are not willing to accept where logic takes us.