If you believe God exists you may be asking yourself why many other people do not notice him. So we should look at what there is about God which could reasonably lead us to notice him.
God is said to be an omnipotent being, so we could argue that not only should he just happen to exist, but he should have to exist. If his existence is happenstance (a contingency) then his existence is dependent on other factors, or is a freak one-off event, whereas if he is all-powerful and eternal then his existence rests solely on his own nature so that he must exist or everything else fails.
What is the essential difference between a contingent truth and a necessary truth?
Well, as the above statement about God shows, a contingent truth relies on other factors being true. For instance, you and I are contingent truths. For us to exist we rely on our parents bringing us into existence, and they on their parents in turn. When we look all the way back through history we see that even the Earth is reliant on several billion prior events for its formation to have occurred. It is a contingent truth. A necessary truth is different. The fact that the number 19 falls between 18 and 20 is a necessary truth, as is the fact that it is a prime number.
As a rule we do not encounter necessary truths in our day-to-day lives. They tend to be more abstract entities such as numbers which by themselves can have no direct impact on our world. God is not supposed to be an abstract entity. He is supposed to completely different to everything else we experience in our lives. He is an "other". Yet some people claim that such a being must exist against all the evidence to the contrary.
The Argument from Contingency
In the 17th Century there lived a German mathematician and philosopher named Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz is famously thought to have developed calculus at the same time, yet separately, as Sir Isaac Newton. and invented component parts to the world's first calculators, As part of his work in philosophy however, Leibniz developed seven principles promoted by Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Anaximander, one of which was the Principle of Sufficient Reason which states that "there must be a sufficient reason for anything to exist, for any event to occur , for any truth to obtain." Nothing is, therefore, without reason.
Leibniz admitted contingent truths on the basis of there being an infinite series of events to which God alone had knowledge of all but the final event, since the series is infinite after all. God, he said, must exist in order to explain the sequence of contingent truths leading up to the cause of our existence and beyond.
Leibniz was never tasked to answer whether his model included many gods working together, or a creator of the God he claimed must exist for us to, or whether the God continued to exist after we came to be, or whether the God he had in mind had any of the characteristics of the gods we have imagined over our species' lifetime.
Also, if the Universe's contents are contingent is there a reason to believe that the Universe itself is contingent? After all a car's parts cannot move along the road themselves, but together they can. Even further, if it is true that the Universe is in fact contingent why should we assume that the reason it exists is anything other than an accident?
The Argument from Necessity (the Ontological Argument)
The argument from necessity is ontological; it centers around what we know must exist. We do not need to prove the nature of everything in the world to prove the existence of God in the same way that we do not need to examine all of our surroundings to define the necessary properties of triangles. René Descartes, the philosopher famous for the line "I think, therefore I am" put forward an argument from necessity for the existence of God. Put simply this is it:
1. God has all of the perfections.
2. Existence is a perfection.
3. Therefore God must exist.
In order to decide whether the conclusion of an argument is true we usually have to make certain that the first and second premises of the syllogism are themselves true. In this case the first assumption is true and one could argue that the second is also, therefore we must conclude, must we not, that the conclusion is also true. So, why does this feel wrong?
Because it is.
What if you were to substitute "God" in the first line for "The Perfect Dragon", would the same conclusion, that of its existence not also be true? Since we all know that dragons do not exist*, and perfect ones most certainly do not, we know immediately that this argument is flawed.
Modern atheists will be familiar with the "work" of William Lane Craig, possibly our most famous proponent of the ontological argument. His more long-winded version of it goes something like this:
1. It is possible for a maximally great being to exist.
2. If a maximally great being does exist then it exists in a possible world.
3. If 2 is true then it exists in every possible world.
4. If 3 is true then it is possible that it exists in our world.
5. If 4 is true then it exists in our world.
6. Therefore a maximally great being exists.
7. God is a maximally great being, therefore God exists.
Why does Craig assume that this "maximally great being" is God? Well, this comes from the work of St Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century. Anselm proposed that if one could conceive of the greatest ever being, then that being would be God. Whatever our imaginations could cope with, at the extreme edge of our thoughts of greatness would lie the essence of what God is. If we imagine another yet greater being then that being would be God.
The one flaw (among many) that is immediately obvious in Anselm's argument is it relies on what we can conceive as being the greatest ever being, but as with all things which we can think of as the greatest ever, such as numbers, we can always add a bit more to the equation to gain a yet greater whole. It is therefore possible for a "greatest conceivable being" to exist in our Universe, but a greater being of which we cannot conceive, to exist in another yet greater Universe. If our Universe is an accidental by-product of the bigger Universe the whole thing falls apart.
Hence Craig's replacement of "greatest ever conceivable" with "maximally great". Craig's argument is no stronger than Descartes' original. In fact if anything, with the new parameters it seems to fall even flatter. Yes, it is possible for a god to exist, and yes it could exist in a possible world, but not necessarily in all worlds, nor in ours... so are we done here yet?
In neither argument for the existence of God presented here is the case proven conclusively, so the arguments only propose possibilities in a nice-sounding philosophical package. One says that a contingent Universe must have a central non-contingent overseer, or cause, whilst the other assumes the possibility of there being a God as proof that there is one.
So are we convinced by either of these? Personally, I would have to say no. So it's back to the drawing-board for you Mr Craig.
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*Discounting Komodo Dragons of course.
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