Philosophers from anselm and scotus to hartshorne and malcolm have argued that the true claim that God is a necessary being implies that theism is a-Priori demonstrable. Philosophers such as hick, Penelhum, And geach have denied this, Contending 1) that god's necessity is factual, Indicating his eternal independence, Rather than logical, Indicating his existence in all possible worlds, And 2) that from the former nothing follows a-Priori about the truth or falsity of theism. I argue that factual and logical necessity (...) are conceptually inseparable, That God can be demonstrated to exist in all possible worlds. I take statements about the modalities of existence of things to be equivalent to statements about the modalities of instantiation of concepts, And argue that the concept God is necessarily instantiated, I.E., That God necessarily exists. The argument is compared and contrasted to a similar argument of hartshorne's. (shrink)

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 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. (shrink)