202 ARGUMENTS: MONOTHEISTIC CONCEPTIONSSuppose that God exists, and is omnipotent and omniscient. Then God
will lack no power, and no knowledge, failure to have which would allow
some enemy to do God in. God’s existence is utterly safe; it is logically
impossible that this being be destroyed from without. Suppose God is also
perfectly good. A perfectly good being won’t commit suicide or deicide.
There are no conditions under which a perfectly good being who is
omnipotent and omniscient will ever decide that destruction of itself
would be a good thing for it to do. It is logically impossible that such a
being, while remaining perfectly good, will cause itself to implode. Were
it ever to do so, or act in some other wrong way, then it would always
know it would do so. A being that always knew that it would act wrongly,
and never did anything about it, would never be morally perfect after
all.^25
God’s moral perfection is conceived by monotheists in two different
ways. On one account, what is true is Necessarily, God is morally perfect;
on the other, what is logically contingent and true is God is morally
perfect.^26 On the former account, it is logically impossible that God
commit deicide. On the latter account, it is not logically impossible that
God commit deicide, though one may properly trust God not to do so. On
neither account of divine moral perfection is it logically possible that God
depend on anything for God’s existence.
Two points relevant to the Cosmological Argument
Consider two claims:
1 Possibly, X is contingent entails X is contingent if contingent means
logically contingent ( = neither necessarily true nor necessarily false).
2 Possibly, X is contingent does not entail X is contingent if contingent
means depends for existence on something distinct from itself.
The Cosmological Argument requires that both of these claims be true.
Argument for 1
A proposition has its modality necessarily; thus whatever modality a
proposition lacks, it lacks necessarily; logical contingency is a
modality; hence whatever has it has it necessarily, and whatever lacks
it lacks it necessarily; hence if it is possible that a proposition is
contingent, then it is.