The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

The Idea of God 31
non-contingent being is intelligible’ seems no more implausible than
the thesis ‘If the concept of a thinking being is intelligible, the concept
of a non-thinking being is intelligible’.) Of course, from the fact that
a concept makes sense, it does not follow that it is the concept of a
possible thing, that it is metaphysically possible for anything to fall
under it. The concept of a method for trisecting any angle using only
a stylus, straightedge, and pair of compasses makes sense, but it is an
impossible concept. It may well be that the concept of a necessary
being is an impossible concept. The question whether this is so falls
outside the scope of these lectures. 9 We should note that if God is, of
conceptual necessity, a necessary being, then the old taunt, ‘‘But then
who created God?’’, is conceptually defective; one might as well ask who
created the natural numbers. (Kronecker’s famous aphorism, according
to which God created the natural numbers, cannot be regarded as a
serious contribution to the metaphysics of creation.)
The final item in our list of divine attributes is this: God is
—unique (and necessarily so).
That is, he is the only being who possesses the properties in our list in
any possible world. This is, as philosophers say, a modal statement de
re, or, equivalently, a statement that involves ‘‘identity across possible
worlds’’. But that’s all right, I suppose. The concept of God (to put
everything together) is the concept of a being who exists in every possible
world, who has the attributes in our list in every possible world, and who
is the only omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, immutable, omnipresent,
necessary creator who exists in any possible world.
I suppose someone might object to my saying this on the ground that
it is a gross anachronism for me to use the language of possible worlds to
describe the attributes that have historically been ascribed to God in the
Abrahamic religions. I dispute the charge. To speak in terms of possible
worlds is—I say—simply to a use a slightly refined version of the
modal idioms we use in everyday life; and this is what philosophers and
theologians who use modal concepts like contingency and necessity and
essence and accident have always done. I use a refinement of ordinary
modal idiom that is not quite the refinement of ordinary modal idiom
that, say, Duns Scotus used, but it is a refinement of the same idiom,
and his way of talking and mine are intertranslatable because they grow
from the same root and have in fact not grown very far away from each
other. I do not deny that in saying this I say something controversial