This is an analytic or conceptual truth, because it is part of our concept of a chemical kind
that the chemical formula of a substance is definitive of its chemical kind. Instantiating,
this yields:
If water is a chemical kind, then if water's chemical formula is H 2 O, it is necessary that
water is H 2 O.
When combined with the empirical information that the formula for water is indeed H 2
O, this yields the desired modal conclusion: necessarily, water is H 2 O. Clearly, much
more needs to be done to fully develop this modal conceptualist proposal and to defend
its viability. I believe, however, that it can account for all clear cases of necessary truth
without embracing the profound obscurity and the dubious rationalism that attend modal
realism.
If modal conceptualism is accepted, what will be the impact on philosophy of religion? It
is always a gain for any branch of philosophy when fundamental concepts that are clear
and well understood replace those that are obscure and confused. In view of the
prevalence of modal and essentialist reasoning in philosophy of religion, the implications
of the proposed replacement are bound to be far-reaching. Almost certainly, the
ontological argument will be recognized as being unsound, and not merely dialectically
ineffective. Pace Anselm, no one has come close to showing that possible worlds lacking
God are thereby rendered self-contradictory. Some, to be sure, will see the denial of
logically necessary existence as a diminution of the divine majesty. But for God to exist
necessarily means merely that worlds (nonactual states of affairs) lacking God contain a
contradiction, and it is difficult to see how the greatness of the Creator of all things
hinges on the presence or absence of such a contradiction.
The abandonment of logically necessary divine existence should spur a more thorough
exploration of alternative (nonlogical) senses in which God's existence may be said to be
necessary. It should also encourage study of versions of the cosmological argument that
do not depend on the notion of logically necessary divine existence. The doctrine of
divine simplicity, already on shaky ground, will not be able to survive the abandonment
of necessary divine existence, since what God is and that God is will turn out to be, after
all, distinct facts. And the disappearance of simplicity removes what, in the minds of
many supporters, is the main bulwark of divine timelessness. On the whole, the
recognition that God's existence is logically contingent should be highly favorable toward
the conception of God promoted by the open or free will theism discussed in the first part
of this section. The stakes in the question about the nature of necessity are not low.
The Analyst among the Philosophers of Religion
What can be said about analytic philosophy of religion in the broader context of
philosophical studies of religion? A good starting point is to compare the analytic
approach with other approaches. Some of the differences between the approaches merely
represent varied interests, and the results achieved by one approach can in principle be