The Logical Status of ‘God’

Abstract

We are all of us by now familiar with the argument that God's existence is necessary. The argument takes many and varied forms but generally contains a premiss to the effect that our conception of God, or God's nature, entails necessary existence. Professor H. D. Lewis writes:It is not part of the nature of anything normally that it must exist. We find that there are certain things — we could not deduce this from the concept of them. We also sense that in the last resort nothing could just be by chance, but the element of necessity here is not to be found directly in finite things themselves but in a Reality beyond themselves and in their dependence, in some way we cannot further comprehend, upon it. It is thus part of the nature of this Ultimate Reality that it must be; and this, along with the perfection which this kind of existence carries with it, is all that we can know directly about God. He is a Being who exists by necessity.