f God

Thisbrings usnaturally to the question ofwhat we might considerto be an
adequate concept of God,whether or not wewish to argue forthe existence
of such abeing. Someprofound remarks weremade on this by J. N. Findlay
inhis article (‘Can God's Existence be Disproved?’ (Findlay 1949). The
heathen may worship stocks and stones butdoes not see them as merely
stocks and stones. More andmore adequateconceptions of God still portray
God as limited in various respects. A fully adequateconception of God,
Findlay said, would see God as not only unlimited in various admirable
properties butalso as anecessarily existingbeing. Thus ‘There is one and
only one God’ wouldhaveto be alogicallynecessarytruth. Nowlogic, he
held, istautologous and without ontological commitment. So God'snecessary
existence wouldhaveto be somethingdifferentfromlogicalnecessity. The
trouble is how to seewhat this could be.It might bereplied that there are
non-trivialnecessary existentialpropositions in mathematics, such as
‘There are infinitely manyprimes’which implies of course ‘thenumber 7
exists’. (We can ignore the unhelpful ‘Something exists’which is allowed
bystandardfirstorderlogicpurely forconvenience as few would need to
applylogic to discourse about an emptyuniverse forwhich in anycase
there are separate rules for determining validity orotherwise.) It iswell
known that Frege inhis Foundations of Arithmetic claimed to reduce
arithmetic tologic. However ineffect he wasusing afreelogic without
ontological commitment. Claims to reducesettheory (and so analysis) to
logic are of courseevenmoreproblematic. Would it help towards an
adequateconception of God if we said that Godhas the sort of existence or
non-existence thatprimenumbershave? One might say ‘notmuch’. In any
case it is dangerous to talk of types of existencebecause it treats
existence as though it was aproperty. Atthe time that he wrotehis
article Findlay was following thelogical positivist line thatlogic and
mathematics are aliketautologous. In thecase of mathematics this can be
seriously questioned. Alsomost theists would say thatprimenumbers are
tooabstractto becompared to God, thoughperhaps not John Lesliewhohas
argued that God is aprinciple thatbrings value into existence (Leslie
1979 and 1989). We are still left with Findlay's challenge as towhat a
conception of God as anecessarybeing could be.One thing that will not
differentiatethe theistfrom the atheist is to say that God, if he exists,
isnecessary in thesense of notbeingdependent onanything else forhis
existence. The atheist will say that theuniversefits this billbecause
theuniverse containseverything that there is and so is not caused by
anything else. It is indeed hard to seewhat an adequateconception of God
andhisnecessary existence could be. For thepurposes of this article, let
us explorewhat the relations and lack of relationsbetween atheism and
agnosticism could be. Here we shall neglect therequirement ofnecessary
existence and in a latersection we shall consider thecase ofa
posteriori arguments forthe existence of a mind-likecreator of the
universe. Of course without therequirement ofnecessity it raises the
intelligent child's question ‘Whomade God?’ Still, this might beregarded
as inevitable but excusable in an a posteriori argument inwhich the
hypothesis of apurposivecreator isput forward and claimedto be
justifiedmuch in the manner of anyscientifichypothesis.