A more adequate notion of necessary being is that the necessity is metaphysical or factual: a necessary being is one that if it exists, it neither came into existence nor can cease to exist, and if it does not exist, it cannot come into existence.

However, if we understand “necessary being” in this sense, we can dispose of the cosmological argument as irrelevant; what is needed rather is an argument to establish that God’s existence understood as logically necessary is possible, for if it is possible that it is necessary that God exists, then necessarily God exists (by Axiom S5). However, this need not be the sense in which “necessary being” is understood in the cosmological argument. A more adequate notion of necessary being is that the necessity is metaphysical or factual (Hick 1960). A necessary being is one that if it exists, it ne...