Could God Fail to Exist?

Abstract

I apply developments in modal reasoning to the question of whether God has necessary existence. My larger task is to assess the main reasons to think that God is not a metaphysically necessary being. I consider Hume’s conceivability-based argument, and then I pay attention to more recent arguments, including Swinburne’s neo-Humean argument and the subtraction argument. I show that such arguments face a ‘parity’ problem, since the very reasoning that gets them off the ground also launches parallel arguments for an opposite conclusion. In my closing section, I sketch an argument schema designed to illustrate a new, general strategy for deducing the necessary existence of God by building upon recent modal cosmological arguments.