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The Logical Status of ‘God’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Ian Walker
Ian Walker
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University College, Swansea
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Extract

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.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , June 1980 , pp. 217 - 228
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

page 217 note 1 p. 145. The Philosophy of Religion, (London; Teach Yourself Books, 1965).Google Scholar

page 217 note 2‘Anselm's Ontological Arguments’, Philosophical Review, LXIX (1960).Google Scholar

page 218 note 1 Notably, Ryle, G., ‘The Nature of Metaphysics’, ed. Pears, D. F. (New York, 1957), p. 150Google Scholar; Crombie, I. M., ‘Theology and Falsification’ in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Flew, A. G. N. and MacIntyre, A., (London: SCM, 1955), pp. 109 ff.Google Scholar; Prof. Smart, J. J. C., ‘The Existence of God’Google Scholar, Ibid. pp. 28 ff.

page 218 note 2 ‘Can God's Existence be Disproved?’ in New Essays in Philosophical Theology.

page 218 note 3 Ibid. p. 55.

page 218 note 4 Ibid. pp. 55–6.

page 219 note 1 Ibid. pp. 52–3.

page 221 note 1 ‘Naming and Necessity’ in Davidson, and Harman, (eds.), The Semantics of Natural Language (Dordrecht; Reidel, 1972), pp. 253–355.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 226 note 1 One difficulty I do find in this alternative is that I can't understand what it could possibly mean to ‘know the bearer of “a” or “b”’ when the bearer is said to have the properties He does. This, however, is more a question for the epistemology of religion than for the semantics of ‘God’.

page 221 note 1 See e.g., Durrant, M., The Logical Status of God and the Function of Theological Sentences (London: Macmillan, 1973Google Scholar), especially chapter I, and an answer to some of his arguments against the idea that ‘God’ is a proper name in Attfield, R., ‘The Individuality of God’, Sophia, X, 1 (April, 1971Google Scholar), and ‘The Lord is God: There is no Other’ in Religious Studies, XIII, 1 (March, 1977).Google Scholar

* Mr Howard Mounce, of University College, Swansea, read this paper after I had written it. He commented to the effect that the way in which God's properties are necessary is not the same kind of necessity that we find in propositions like ‘All bachelors are unmarried men’ but is more like ‘Aristotle wrote the Nichomachean Ethics’. In other words, the necessity is more like that which we find in the relation between a name and its definite descriptions than between a concept and its definition. Although I have noted objections to this view I believe that it has not a little intuitive plausibility. However, I find myself unable, at this time, to formalize this intuition and thus feel that it is better to leave it for consideration at a later time.