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Divine Independence and the Ontological Argument – A Reply to James M. Humber

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Alan G. Nasser
Alan G. Nasser
Affiliation:
Member of the Faculty, Philosophy, The Evergreen State College
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Extract

In a detailed and spirited critique, Professor James M. Humber has found my defence of the ontological argument unconvincing. Humber's case rests upon his claim that my ‘error’ is due to my ‘having accepted an incorrect definition of “physically necessary being” … ’. Now I do indeed claim that God must be conceived as a factuall necessary being, i.e. as eternally independent. I take the notion of God's aseity or eternal independence to be relatively straightforward and uncontroversial; it is accepted as an essential component of the concept God by many philosophers who also insist that there is no acceptable form of demonstrative theism. Thus, it is widely held that ‘God is a factually necessary being’ does not imply ‘God is a logically necessary being’; that God is eternally independent does not imply that he exists in all possible worlds. But it is precisely this view that I have argued is incorrect. While I concur that there is an intelligible concept of God as factually necessary, I deny that the existence of such a being is logically contingent, a mere matter of empirical fact. Indeed, a rigorous inspection of the concept of an eternally independent being reveals that whether that concept is instantiated, i.e. whether there exists a being exemplifying that concept, is knowable a priori. My claim is in fact stronger than this. I argue that the existence of an eternal, independent, omniscient and omnipotent being (God) is demonstrable by conceptual analysis. It is Humber's contention that my alleged demonstration of God's existence crumbles upon the discovery of the unacceptability of my definition of ‘factually necessary being’. Let us see.

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Articles
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Religious Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , September 1979, pp. 391 - 397
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

page 391 note 1 Humber, James M., ‘Causal Necessity and the Ontological Argument’, Religious Studies (September 1974).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 391 note 2 Nasser, Alan G., ‘Factual and Logical Necessity and the Ontological Argument’, International Philosophical Quarterly, XI (September 1971).Google Scholar

page 391 note 3 Humber, , p. 292.Google Scholar

page 391 note 4 Humber writes of a ‘physically necessary being’, whereas I use the term ‘factually necessary being’. It is clear from the contexts of both my and Humber's articles that the terms are used synonymously.

page 391 note 5 Hick, John, ‘A Critique of the “Second Argument”’ in The Many Faced Argument, ed. Hick, John and McGill, Arthur (New York, 1967), pp. 241–56Google Scholar; Penelhum, Terrence, ‘Divine Necessity’, in The Cosmological Argument, ed. Burrill, Donald R. (New York, 1967), pp. 143–61Google Scholar; Rainer, A. C. A., ‘God and Necessity’, Mind, LVIII (1949), 75–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 391 note 6 This is not meant to imply that the are the only characteristics of G. As will be shown in what follows, a being possessing at least these four properties necessarily exists, and I call this being ‘God’.

page 392 note 1 A first-level concept is a concept considered as the conjunction of those descriptive constituents whose possession by an object is both necessary and sufficient for that object being an instance of the concept in question.

page 393 note 1 It has been customary in some philosophical circles to define ‘omnipotent’ as ‘capable of performing any logically possible task’. But the definition must be unacceptable to a theist, for (a) there are many logically possible tasks, such as making a table not made by God, which God cannot perform, and (b) we are convinced that this ‘inability’ does not jeopardize his omnipotence. (See Plantinga, Alvin, God and Other Minds, New York, 1967, pp. 168 ff.) The definition in the text above circumvents this sort of counter-example.Google Scholar

page 393 note 2 See Hartshorne, Charles, The Logic of Perfection (La Salle, 1962), pp. 68–70.Google Scholar

page 394 note 1 The claim that perfectly just and perfectly merciful are incompatible is an example of (1), and the controversy surrounding the concept of omnipotence an example of (2).

page 394 note 2 Humber, , p. 293.Google Scholar

page 394 note 3 Humber, , p. 293.Google Scholar

page 394 note 4 Humber, , p. 297.Google Scholar

page 394 note 5 Humber, , p. 294.Google Scholar

page 395 note 1 Humber, , pp. 294–5.Google Scholar

page 395 note 1 Humber, , p. 295.Google Scholar