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    Carmelics

    A reasoning platform. Break down any belief into clear reasons, explore both sides, and weigh the evidence honestly.

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The identity in God of essence and existence, possibility and actuality, is the ground of God's necessary existence.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Essence and existence are distinct categories: essence specifies what a thing is, while existence adds that it is, as Kant argued in the Critique of Pure Reason.
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    • 2.If existence is not a real predicate or determination of essence, then no identity of essence with existence can serve as an ontological ground for necessary existence.
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    • 3.The claim therefore collapses into a sophisticated restatement of the ontological argument, inheriting all its vulnerabilities to Kantian and Humean critiques.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Divine simplicity requires that God's essence just is God's existence, but Scotus argued this obliterates the formal distinction between divine attributes, rendering God's nature unintelligible.
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    • 2.A being whose essence is identical to its existence provides no explanatory traction over brute necessity, since we can equally posit that the universe's existence is necessary without grounding that in an essence-existence identity.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.A necessary being is one whose possibility entails its existence, and whose nonexistence entails its impossibility.
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    • 2.Something must ground this necessity of existence.
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    • 3.Saying that God exists in all metaphysically possible worlds does not provide a ground, but merely a graphic Leibnizian representation of the notion of necessary being.
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