The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

30 The Idea of God
worlds: those in which he never creates anything. Jews, Christians, and
Muslims insist that whether God creates a world—that is, whether he
creates anything—is a matter of his free choice. Nothing in his nature
compels him to create. He is not, for example, compelled to create by his
moral perfection, for it is not better that there should be created things
than that there should be no created things. It could not be better, for
all goods are already contained—full and perfect and complete—in
God. (In the matter of his free will, he does not have a free choice
between good and evil, as we imperfect beings do, but he does have
a free choice between various alternative goods, and there being created
things and there being no created things is one of the pairs of alternative
goods between which he has a choice.) But if being a creator is an
accidental property of God, then, by our criterion it cannot occur in the
list of divine attributes. The solution to this problem is simply to say
that the following is the relevant attribute: God is
—the creator of such things other than God as there may be.
God has this property vacuously, as philosophers say, in those possible
worlds in which he exists and creates nothing, and non-vacuously in all
other worlds in which he exists; but he has it in every world in which he
exists, and it is therefore one of his essential properties.
I have just used the phrase ‘in those possible worlds in which he
exists’; but are there any possible worlds in which he does not exist? His
possession of the next attribute in our list implies that there are none:
God is
—necessary.
That is, he exists in all possible worlds; he would exist no matter what.
Thirty or forty years ago, many philosophers denied that the concept of
a necessary being made any sense. It is easy to refute them. Consider me.
I might not have existed; I am, therefore, in the language of metaphysics,
a contingent being. And, surely, if the concept of a contingent being
makes sense, the concept of a non-contingent being makes sense. If a
concept is intelligible, then the concept of a thing that does not fall
under that concept is at least prima facie intelligible. (I say ‘‘at least prima
facie intelligible’’, for Russell’s Paradox threatens the general thesis. But
Russellian scruples hardly seem relevant to the present case. The thesis
‘If the concept of a contingent being is intelligible, the concept of a