Necessity & Being
An analytical view of the idea of a necessary being.
Necessity & Being
To say that x exists necessarily is to say that by virtue of the predicates of x, x cannot not exist or, in other words, existence is an essential characteristic of x. Furthermore, it follows logically that if x essentially is, then x is uncaused. Beyond the problem of whether such a logical task can really be carried out in light of existence being of a different logical order than other predicates, there is the devastating problem of the validity of the premises used to deduce the necessity of x.
Let us say that for the necessary being x there is a class of predicates k such that k makes up all the characteristics of x. Given that to speak of all the properties k is to refer to x, how is it we come to know all the properties of x, namely k? This question, I believe, is of utmost importance and neglecting it renders the idea of a necessary being incoherent. However many advocates of an a priori necessary being would very much like to ignore this question for they cannot adequately produce an intelligible answer to how we come to know k. Usually, when speaking of a necessary being, it is understood to mean we are speaking of God or some other omnipotent presence. Hence, Biblical or Divine scriptures are pointed to as the spring of knowledge concerning k. This is hardly, in my opinion, a strong base for affirming that we really know that there is an x such that it has all the properties k. How much can we really take at face value from text? The obvious objection to this is that we regard history books, provided the author credible, to be worthy of our assent to fact. However, the proviso “provided the author credible” is my argument exactly. I do not necessarily question the veracity or intent of the authors of Divine texts, but rather the likelihood of what is described in these works to be the case.
When we hear of miracles and profound transcendental revelations being described in Divine texts we can understand what is trying to be said. There are, of course, many logical difficulties in what is described in certain instances, but nothing which is said is entirely logically impossible. The question is not strictly logical whether or not we accept the testimony of these religious scholars, but rather we revert to our own experiences. David Hume made this point quite exquisitely in his work On Miracles. He argued, and I concur, that when we are presented with any proposition of which we cannot directly make ourselves aware of, that is one that we cannot personally verify such as statements of the past of future, we must and cannot but rely upon our own collection of experiences and decide whether or not the state of affairs expressed in the proposition are likely or not. For example, if I was presented with the proposition “A twenty-armed man jumped over the Golden Gate Bridge yesterday” I would be ready to dismiss it is foolishness. The same, I should maintain, would hold true of such propositions as “Mary, who was a virgin, gave birth to Jesus”. Such pictures do not coincide with our conception of reality as derived from our experience.
There are various arguments to try to refute this point, but I do not find any of them successful. Most fall back upon denying that reason has anything to do with faith and, at that point, the argument cannot progress. Are not our expectations and basis on deciding what is likely happen and likely to be the case determined by our experience? If one of my friends, whom I know well, is hypothetically put in a certain situation, I can reasonably guess how he or she will act under the given conditions by basis of my experiences of how this friend has acted previously and his or her character. If, however, a stranger were put in the same circumstances, I should be at a loss to say how he or she would act and if I were asked whether he or she would do X or Y; moreover, if X or Y were things that were senseless or things that I could not conceive because I have no experience of such occurrences, then I would be compelled to say that it is unlikely that either X or Y is the case.
Therefore, if my arguments are sound, we have no rational grounds for believing explicitly in certain events or descriptions found in Divine text. To say that there is a necessary being, namely God, who has this-and-that properties solely based upon a religious texts seems highly unwarranted in my view. On the same ground that we do not deem religious texts as credible, we also cannot accept mystical personal revelation.
Insofar as revelation goes there exist two fundamental problems concerning the legitimacy of this mode of knowledge of a necessary or divine being. God, as he had been traditionally conceived in the Judeo-Christian tradition and as described by such theologians as St. Anselm and Augustine, is transcendent. By transcendent it is taken to mean that God exists outside of this universe and cannot be located anywhere in time or space. God is timeless. Presuming this premise correct it then seems that one becomes entangled in a logical noose of one’s own making. To say, as the Saints surely did, that God is transcendent logically precludes Him from being experienced. Is it at all meaningful or sensible to say that one can experience some thing that is neither in time nor space? Can such an object even being conceptualized or imagined?
Let us take this question further. Imagine I have in my sense-field an object x. Surely, of any possible thing I could see there are at the very least two legitimate questions that can be raised about my sensation of x: 1) Where is x? and 2) When is x? It hardly needs to be noted that these questions both presuppose that the x that I did perceive exists in some sense both in space and time. I say “some sense” only because it can be argued that hallucinations do not exist spatially in the same sense that a book would, but this topic is beyond the scope of this paper. Anyhow, I doubt any religious person would attempt to formulate an argument that God is nothing more than a hallucination or misperception. Even if he should take this unlikely route, it does not escape the fact that whatever is a constituent in a sense-field is always locatable temporally. To even say that “I perceived x or y” logically entails that x and y can be located temporally for to be perceived is to stand in relation to the present class of sense-contents or experiences. Much to the theologian’s sorrow there cannot be any escape from this argument.
The second difficulty in granting personal revelation as proof to the existence of a necessary being is actually quite simple: if one genuinely had an experience with some being, by what criterion or means would one come to know that the being is in fact a necessary being? This may, to some, present itself as a bizarre question for, if one did in fact experience this being, does not that prove God’s existence? Ex hypothesi, perhaps, although there would be a great deal of questions concerning the testimony and legitimacy of such an experience as we have seen. However, the question is not whether or not this would count as sufficient grounds to believe in the existence of God, but whether or not it would be sufficient to believe in a necessary being. The aim of this paper is an attempt to demonstrate the illegitimacy of the conception of a necessary being itself and by this it would follow, by some accounts of God, that He too would suffer the same fate as conceived.
With this acknowledged we can proceed with the inquiry as to what would constitute necessity in experience? This too is a difficult question because the idea of necessity in connection with a being is very muddled and unclear. We know, from the definition of a necessary being, that it is existent, uncaused, and therefore eternal. While in our experience we have knowledge of existent things we have no knowledge of things that are uncaused of eternal. True, there are many things will exist and will continue to exist beyond our mortal lives and beyond the point of when mankind itself will be extinguished. These things are not eternal though. However, even though necessity may not be entirely apprehended by us we can still get on well enough with the analysis.
It is at once obvious that the predicates of "being uncaused” and “being eternal” are not the sorts of things one can empirically observe. Human beings are, admittedly, contingent beings and therefore are caused and have a beginning and end. Therefore the possibility of empirically verifying whether or not a certain thing x is uncaused and eternal is beyond ability because whatever x is, x has clearly existed prior for an infinite stretch of time to the emergence of homo sapiens or any other intelligent species. Even if we should, however unlikely, as a species live on eternally and keep constant visual over x, that would maybe perhaps demonstrate that x is eternal but we can never determine whether or not x was causeless. Moreover, these conditions of empirical observation are not the sorts of conditions that are described by those who claim to have “experienced God” or had “the Truth revealed” to them. They say, for instance, that God’s essence spilled unto them filling their being with the absolute and Divine Truth. They know from imbibing God’s essence that he is indeed necessary and uncaused and so forth. Leaving aside whether this sort of knowledge is even intelligible, there is the obvious question of its veracity. Pretending that God were to reveal himself to the world and demonstrate unimaginable feats of power and prediction to impress us into belief, would this not constitute as evidence of a necessary being? No, of course not and for the same reasons given above. What if he were to somehow telepathically “fill us with Truth”? Sure, if He were omnipotent this would clearly be within His abilities, but because this act is possible it does not follow that the knowledge we receive would be true. It would be logically possible that God could be deceiving us. To do so is in His power obviously so it cannot be ruled out. So even by a very generous grant of an outrageous and almost senseless hypothetical event it could not be shown that the idea of a necessary being is legitimate if even intelligible or meaningful.
In conclusion, my argument against the existence of necessary beings is that the premises from which necessity is logically deduced are arbitrary, groundless, or weak at the very best. Attempted proofs to show the existence of a necessary being are not, in reality, proofs in the strict sense of the word; they are but demonstrations of what can be deduced from unstable premises. Moreover, there does not seem to be any plausible conceptions of how one could demonstrate a posteriori the legitimacy of a necessary being. I thereby propose that any philosopher who takes even a modicum interest in logic should do well to get by without reference to such dubious and nigh unintelligible concepts as necessity in connection with being.
Necessity & Being
To say that x exists necessarily is to say that by virtue of the predicates of x, x cannot not exist or, in other words, existence is an essential characteristic of x. Furthermore, it follows logically that if x essentially is, then x is uncaused. Beyond the problem of whether such a logical task can really be carried out in light of existence being of a different logical order than other predicates, there is the devastating problem of the validity of the premises used to deduce the necessity of x.
Let us say that for the necessary being x there is a class of predicates k such that k makes up all the characteristics of x. Given that to speak of all the properties k is to refer to x, how is it we come to know all the properties of x, namely k? This question, I believe, is of utmost importance and neglecting it renders the idea of a necessary being incoherent. However many advocates of an a priori necessary being would very much like to ignore this question for they cannot adequately produce an intelligible answer to how we come to know k. Usually, when speaking of a necessary being, it is understood to mean we are speaking of God or some other omnipotent presence. Hence, Biblical or Divine scriptures are pointed to as the spring of knowledge concerning k. This is hardly, in my opinion, a strong base for affirming that we really know that there is an x such that it has all the properties k. How much can we really take at face value from text? The obvious objection to this is that we regard history books, provided the author credible, to be worthy of our assent to fact. However, the proviso “provided the author credible” is my argument exactly. I do not necessarily question the veracity or intent of the authors of Divine texts, but rather the likelihood of what is described in these works to be the case.
When we hear of miracles and profound transcendental revelations being described in Divine texts we can understand what is trying to be said. There are, of course, many logical difficulties in what is described in certain instances, but nothing which is said is entirely logically impossible. The question is not strictly logical whether or not we accept the testimony of these religious scholars, but rather we revert to our own experiences. David Hume made this point quite exquisitely in his work On Miracles. He argued, and I concur, that when we are presented with any proposition of which we cannot directly make ourselves aware of, that is one that we cannot personally verify such as statements of the past of future, we must and cannot but rely upon our own collection of experiences and decide whether or not the state of affairs expressed in the proposition are likely or not. For example, if I was presented with the proposition “A twenty-armed man jumped over the Golden Gate Bridge yesterday” I would be ready to dismiss it is foolishness. The same, I should maintain, would hold true of such propositions as “Mary, who was a virgin, gave birth to Jesus”. Such pictures do not coincide with our conception of reality as derived from our experience.
There are various arguments to try to refute this point, but I do not find any of them successful. Most fall back upon denying that reason has anything to do with faith and, at that point, the argument cannot progress. Are not our expectations and basis on deciding what is likely happen and likely to be the case determined by our experience? If one of my friends, whom I know well, is hypothetically put in a certain situation, I can reasonably guess how he or she will act under the given conditions by basis of my experiences of how this friend has acted previously and his or her character. If, however, a stranger were put in the same circumstances, I should be at a loss to say how he or she would act and if I were asked whether he or she would do X or Y; moreover, if X or Y were things that were senseless or things that I could not conceive because I have no experience of such occurrences, then I would be compelled to say that it is unlikely that either X or Y is the case.
Therefore, if my arguments are sound, we have no rational grounds for believing explicitly in certain events or descriptions found in Divine text. To say that there is a necessary being, namely God, who has this-and-that properties solely based upon a religious texts seems highly unwarranted in my view. On the same ground that we do not deem religious texts as credible, we also cannot accept mystical personal revelation.
Insofar as revelation goes there exist two fundamental problems concerning the legitimacy of this mode of knowledge of a necessary or divine being. God, as he had been traditionally conceived in the Judeo-Christian tradition and as described by such theologians as St. Anselm and Augustine, is transcendent. By transcendent it is taken to mean that God exists outside of this universe and cannot be located anywhere in time or space. God is timeless. Presuming this premise correct it then seems that one becomes entangled in a logical noose of one’s own making. To say, as the Saints surely did, that God is transcendent logically precludes Him from being experienced. Is it at all meaningful or sensible to say that one can experience some thing that is neither in time nor space? Can such an object even being conceptualized or imagined?
Let us take this question further. Imagine I have in my sense-field an object x. Surely, of any possible thing I could see there are at the very least two legitimate questions that can be raised about my sensation of x: 1) Where is x? and 2) When is x? It hardly needs to be noted that these questions both presuppose that the x that I did perceive exists in some sense both in space and time. I say “some sense” only because it can be argued that hallucinations do not exist spatially in the same sense that a book would, but this topic is beyond the scope of this paper. Anyhow, I doubt any religious person would attempt to formulate an argument that God is nothing more than a hallucination or misperception. Even if he should take this unlikely route, it does not escape the fact that whatever is a constituent in a sense-field is always locatable temporally. To even say that “I perceived x or y” logically entails that x and y can be located temporally for to be perceived is to stand in relation to the present class of sense-contents or experiences. Much to the theologian’s sorrow there cannot be any escape from this argument.
The second difficulty in granting personal revelation as proof to the existence of a necessary being is actually quite simple: if one genuinely had an experience with some being, by what criterion or means would one come to know that the being is in fact a necessary being? This may, to some, present itself as a bizarre question for, if one did in fact experience this being, does not that prove God’s existence? Ex hypothesi, perhaps, although there would be a great deal of questions concerning the testimony and legitimacy of such an experience as we have seen. However, the question is not whether or not this would count as sufficient grounds to believe in the existence of God, but whether or not it would be sufficient to believe in a necessary being. The aim of this paper is an attempt to demonstrate the illegitimacy of the conception of a necessary being itself and by this it would follow, by some accounts of God, that He too would suffer the same fate as conceived.
With this acknowledged we can proceed with the inquiry as to what would constitute necessity in experience? This too is a difficult question because the idea of necessity in connection with a being is very muddled and unclear. We know, from the definition of a necessary being, that it is existent, uncaused, and therefore eternal. While in our experience we have knowledge of existent things we have no knowledge of things that are uncaused of eternal. True, there are many things will exist and will continue to exist beyond our mortal lives and beyond the point of when mankind itself will be extinguished. These things are not eternal though. However, even though necessity may not be entirely apprehended by us we can still get on well enough with the analysis.
It is at once obvious that the predicates of "being uncaused” and “being eternal” are not the sorts of things one can empirically observe. Human beings are, admittedly, contingent beings and therefore are caused and have a beginning and end. Therefore the possibility of empirically verifying whether or not a certain thing x is uncaused and eternal is beyond ability because whatever x is, x has clearly existed prior for an infinite stretch of time to the emergence of homo sapiens or any other intelligent species. Even if we should, however unlikely, as a species live on eternally and keep constant visual over x, that would maybe perhaps demonstrate that x is eternal but we can never determine whether or not x was causeless. Moreover, these conditions of empirical observation are not the sorts of conditions that are described by those who claim to have “experienced God” or had “the Truth revealed” to them. They say, for instance, that God’s essence spilled unto them filling their being with the absolute and Divine Truth. They know from imbibing God’s essence that he is indeed necessary and uncaused and so forth. Leaving aside whether this sort of knowledge is even intelligible, there is the obvious question of its veracity. Pretending that God were to reveal himself to the world and demonstrate unimaginable feats of power and prediction to impress us into belief, would this not constitute as evidence of a necessary being? No, of course not and for the same reasons given above. What if he were to somehow telepathically “fill us with Truth”? Sure, if He were omnipotent this would clearly be within His abilities, but because this act is possible it does not follow that the knowledge we receive would be true. It would be logically possible that God could be deceiving us. To do so is in His power obviously so it cannot be ruled out. So even by a very generous grant of an outrageous and almost senseless hypothetical event it could not be shown that the idea of a necessary being is legitimate if even intelligible or meaningful.
In conclusion, my argument against the existence of necessary beings is that the premises from which necessity is logically deduced are arbitrary, groundless, or weak at the very best. Attempted proofs to show the existence of a necessary being are not, in reality, proofs in the strict sense of the word; they are but demonstrations of what can be deduced from unstable premises. Moreover, there does not seem to be any plausible conceptions of how one could demonstrate a posteriori the legitimacy of a necessary being. I thereby propose that any philosopher who takes even a modicum interest in logic should do well to get by without reference to such dubious and nigh unintelligible concepts as necessity in connection with being.