Is necessary existence a great-making property?

notes on a controversial divine attribute

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A lot of theists think necessary existence is a great-making property.

A great-making property is a property which, if something has it, contributes to that thing’s degree of intrinsic greatness, all else equal. (For example: goodness seems like a great-making property. If a being is good, that will contribute to the being’s greatness. Same with power, knowledge, etc.)

Let’s agree that—for all we know—God might be a necessary being. (That is, let’s agree that there are no decisive arguments against God being metaphysically necessary, or against there being necessary beings more generally.) That assumption granted, is there a rational path from the claim that God is maximally great to the claim that God is metaphysically necessary? Would a necessary God be greater than a contingent God?

I have thoughts.

I. Uniqueness

One suggestion appeals to God’s uniqueness. If God exists, he’s very different from other things that exist. Even if we reject ontological pluralism, and admit there is only one way or mode or type of existence a thing can have (meaning God exists in the same way that garlic, toadstools, and submarines exist, even though he’s very different from them in other respects), you might think God just wouldn’t be God if he weren’t extremely different from all other beings that exist. Uniqueness—we might think—is a great-making property.

If we can show why we’d expect God to be different from other beings in virtue of being necessary (as well as in many other ways), that would lend support to the claim that God is necessary.

There are two types of differences God could have to other beings: differences in degree, and differences in kind. Difference in degree (e.g., God is more powerful than creatures, since their power is finite and his is maximal) is orthogonal the question I’m asking, since necessity is a binary property—you either have it or you don’t—that admits of no degrees. The difference between necessary beings and contingent beings is a difference in kind. Would we expect God to be different in kind in this way, having necessity when other beings don’t?

If we think God is so utterly unique that he’d be different in kind from other beings along literally every dimension, he’ll be different in kind along this dimension as well, and be necessary. Sadly, there’s at least one way in which God is uncontroversially in the same ontological boat as creatures. Namely, God—like creatures—is a concrete object (meaning he, like us, has causal powers), even though God being an abstract object (e.g., a number, or a proposition—things that lack causal powers) would widen the ontological gulf between creatures and himself. God is different, but not in every respect.

Alternatively, we might think God ought to be in a different ontological category to creatures in at least one respect, but that no other attribute besides necessity can do this job. I find this argument more plausible: if one already thinks there are immaterial souls with various degrees of power, knowledge, virtue, and so forth, then if God is also a contingent being, it’s plausible God will only be different to created persons in degree, not kind. This argument has some pull, but only if you don’t think there are any other ways God would be in a different ontological category to other persons. (Note: I’m speaking in terms of ontological categories, rather than more generic differences in kind, because many ways in which God is different in kind aren’t essential to God, i.e., the fact that he, and no other being, created the universe, inspired the Upanishads, etc. What we’re really looking for is an essential attribute of God that makes him different in kind from creatures.)

It’s going to be controversial whether God has no other attributes that could do the trick of making him ontologically different in at least one respect. For example, Christian physicalists like Peter van Inwagen think God is different in kind in virtue of being the only immaterial mind in existence. Thomists will say there are a variety of other ways in which God is different from creatures (being absolutely simple, being outside of time, being immutable, etc.)

Most importantly, though, the main alternative to God being metaphysically necessary also implies that God is different in kind from all other created things. According to Richard Swinburne, while God isn’t metaphysically necessary, he is factually necessary, meaning, as Swinburne writes, that God is “essentially everlasting and essentially not causally contingent on the existence of any other being for its own existence”. Thus, while God only exists in some possible worlds, in the worlds where he exists, God is essentially everlasting and not causally contingent on any other being—a pair of attributes possessed by God and God alone. This makes the argument from divine uniqueness to divine necessity dialectically inert against Swinburne—who, in this discussion, is literally the one person who needs persuading.

II. Supremacy

Perhaps we can derive divine necessity from one of God’s attributes. One attribute we might want to derive it from is supremacy. God, we might think, is maximally supreme—the hallmark of divine greatness. But, we might add, God is only supreme over a world if he exists in it. So if God is only supreme over some possible worlds—as he would if he’s contingent—then he isn’t maximally supreme.

In reply, I think this intuition only has pull if we think modal realism is true. According to modal realism, every possible world exists in exactly the same way as the actual world (where ‘actual’ is an indexical term picking out this world, the world we happen to live in).

But if God is contingent, that means there’s an infinite number of real, concrete, spatio-temporally disconnected worlds that are Godless. And it seems intuitively obvious that a being who’s supreme over every possible world is greater than a being who isn’t. So if we’re modal realists, we should think God is necessary.

I don’t think this argument holds water, though, if we adopt some other metaphysics of modality. Take modal actualism, according to which possible worlds are abstract objects that depict, or in some way spell out or represent, each coherent way the world could be. If God didn’t exist in all possible worlds, on modal actualism all that would mean is that there are some abstract depictions of worlds, (none of which depict the actual world) in which there is no God. But this doesn’t seem like it would undermine God’s supremacy.

By analogy, there are many plays, novels, and works of philosophy which depict a world with no God. But the existence of these earthly depictions doesn’t seem to count against God’s supremacy.

Of course, abstract possible worlds—if they exist—are necessary, while plays, novels, and so on are contingent, making the two things different. But while this is a genuine difference, I don’t see how it’s a relevant difference.

III. Lucklessness

One more suggestion comes from Charles Hartshorne, who writes:

To exist contingently is to exist precariously, or by chance (for to say, by cause or intention is to prompt the query, is the cause or intention necessary—achieving its result necessary?—or non-necessary?), but to exist precariously or by chance is an imperfection, appropriate only to imperfect individuals.

In one sense, existing ‘precariously’ does seem like an imperfection. If something in reality can bring God out of existence at any moment, God would exist luckily, by its permission—and that seems like an imperfection. But if Swinburne is right, and God is factually necessary, then even though God is contingent, there is nothing in reality that can in fact bring God out of existence. So we don’t need metaphysical necessity to solve this problem.

Here is a more plausible way of spelling out that intuition. Some theists have thought that God cannot be subject to luck. To quote Nicholas Rescher:

To be sure, God is exempt from the operation of luck: luck is something that has no place in the affairs of an omniscient being who knows all outcomes, or of an omnipotent being who controls all outcomes. One may (in a way) be fortunate to be such a being: luck as such has no place in its life. Luck inheres in incapacity: in its absence there is no place for luck.

There’s something that rings true here: insofar as a being lucky invokes lacking control, we’d expect God to be as in control as possible. Moreover, insofar as luck undermines praiseworthiness, we’d expect God to be exempt from luck, since otherwise he’d be less praiseworthy (to motivate: we’re meant to praise God for his works, we don’t praise someone who saves a child by random accident—responsibility matters). But if God is exempt from all luck, he’ll also be exempt from modal luck—luck as to whether you exist in the actual world. And the only way to be exempt from modal luck is to be necessary. Thus, God is necessary.

However, God cannot be exempt from all luck. As Andre Rusavuk has pointed out, God enjoys an enormous amount of constitutive luck. Constitutive luck is luck about one’s make up, or constitution. Being born with a high IQ, healthy lungs, and a sound temperament all make one constitutively lucky. But God, by the necessity of his own nature, has every great-making property to the maximum degree. Constitutively, he’s the luckiest being alive!

This in mind, it doesn’t seem like either of aforementioned reasons why God would be exempt from luck apply to the case of modal luck. Being factually necessary rather than metaphysically necessary doesn’t seem like it would undermine God’s control over anything. Sure: if God is lucky about the fact that he exists, he doesn’t have control over whether he exists. But if God is metaphysically necessary, he wouldn’t be able to control that either. And, sure: if God is lucky about the fact that he exists, he might not be morally praiseworthy for the fact that he does. But if that’s true, and God is metaphysically necessary, God won’t be morally praiseworthy for that, either.

IV. Conclusion

I don’t really have a take on whether God is necessary. But I don’t see how to get there simply from God’s greatness. The most promising route is probably by way of Stage I Contingency Arguments, which try to show that contingent reality is explained by at least one necessary being. If contingent reality is explained by at least one necessary being, and we already believe in God, it seems right to identify the two.

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