Why does God exist?

Why does anything exist? Because God created it. Right, then -- why does God exist? This is considered a childish question, because it's one of the first things children think to ask about God -- if he created everything, who created him? -- but I don't consider that a point against it. Do we need to know why God exists? No. "I know that he loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things" (1 Ne. 11:17). But how we answer the question does have important metaphysical ramifications.

While "proofs of God" properly address the question of how we can know God exists, rather than why he does in fact exist, a few of them also suggest answers to that latter question.

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One of these is the Ontological Argument of Anselm, which runs as follows.

1. Let us give the name "God" to the greatest being we can conceive of.
2. A being which exists is greater than a being which does not exist.
3. If God did not exist, then we would be able to conceive of a being greater than this non-existent God -- namely, a God who did exist.
4. Therefore, "God does not exist" is logically self-contradictory and necessarily false. So God exists. 

By Anselm's reasoning, asking why God exists would be like asking why circles are round. Circles are round because that's what the word circle means. If it weren't round, it wouldn't be a circle. "Some circles are not round" is self-contradictory and therefore necessarily false.

Of course, this is no proof that there actually are any circles. It only means that if there are any circles, all those circles are necessarily round. That necessity is conditional, not absolute.

In the Ontological Argument, though, the predicate in question is not roundness but existence itself, and the necessity is therefore presented as absolute. It isn't, though. Circles are by definition round; therefore, if there is a circle, that circle is necessarily round. God by definition exists; therefore, if there is a God, that God necessarily exists. Since "there is x" and "x exists" are two ways of saying the same thing, this is an uninteresting tautology which applies to everything, not only to God.

The illusion of absolute necessity is created by conflating "thinking of a being as existing" with "thinking of a being which in fact exists." The same sleight of hand can be used to prove that absolutely anything exists. If you think of the Loch Ness monster, you necessarily think of it as living in Loch Ness; therefore, the monster you are thinking of actually lives in Loch Ness. (Of course I believe in the Loch Ness monster; after all, it lives in Loch Ness by definition!) Or think of the scariest werewolf imaginable. Now what's scarier, a werewolf that's just imaginary or one that actually exists? Or, better yet, one that not only exists but is standing behind you right now! Every predicate presupposes existence, and sophistry can "prove" that any P exists by deriving from "P does not exist" the contradiction "P is not P."

If Anselm's argument fails, and it does, can we still maintain (as classical theology generally does) that God "exists necessarily," in contrast to other beings, whose existence is merely contingent? I don't see how. The necessity in question can only be logical necessity, since physical necessity would not apply to the being who created the physical universe itself -- and, well, how can the existence of anything be logically necessary?

I suppose people who reject Anselm's argument (as everyone should) but still insist that God exists necessarily, must think that his existence is logically necessary in some way that we don't yet understand, just as the necessary truth of, say, Euler's identity (e^iπ + 1 = 0) is not at all obvious to the layman. Perhaps some future theological Euler will succeed where Anselm failed and demonstrate the logical necessity of God's existence? Can we say with certainty that "God exists" is not true-by-logical-necessity? 

Well, yes. Yes, we can say that. All necessity is conditional and relational. An equation, such as Euler's expression of a necessary relationship among five constants, is the sort of thing that can be logically necessary; and a flat existential statement, such as "There are butterflies in Madagascar" or "God exists" is the sort of thing that can't. I can say with complete confidence that no purely logical argument (with no existential or empirical premises at all) can ever prove the existence of God -- or of anything else for that matter.

So I consider this type of explanation for God's existence -- that he exists because it is impossible that he should not exist -- to be a dead hypothesis. It wouldn't voom if you put four million volts through it. What else is there, then?

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The other relevant "proof of God" is what is called the Kalām Cosmological Argument, Kalām being the Muslim counterpart to Scholasticism.

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause for its coming into being.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause for its coming into being.

If the cause-of-the-universe also had a beginning, then the same logic would apply to it. Therefore we must finally trace all causes back to something that did not have a beginning, and this is Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.

This argument is what brought me back around to belief in God after nearly a decade of hard atheism -- but it did so indirectly. In fact, I thought of it not as a conclusive argument but as the Kalām Paradox, and it was the attempt to unravel the paradox that led me to belief first in agency and then in God. Let me retrace some of that thought.

Where Kalām parts ways with Anselm is in the assumption, implicit in the first premise, that God can just exist for no particular reason. Only changes -- comings-into-being -- require causes, and if God has always existed, there is no need to pretend he "exists necessarily" or to give any other reason for his existence. He just does exist, as a brute fact, and that's all there is to say.

But isn't the whole idea of a "Creator" based on the assumption that things don't just exist for no reason at all? Why can't we just say that the universe has always existed, for no particular reason, and leave it at that? That's where the second premise comes in: The universe began to exist. This is asserted not because of any empirical evidence for the Big Bang theory or anything like that, but because the universe is temporal, and time elapses finite interval by finite interval. No process of adding up finite quantities can ever reach an infinity, so it is impossible that an infinite amount of time has already elapsed. Therefore, only a finite amount of time has elapsed, and the universe had a beginning. This makes a lot of potentially debatable assumptions about the nature of time, but let's just accept it for now.

So the universe began to exist, which means it had a cause, God. And in order for this to explain anything, we must assume that God himself has always existed. But didn't we just argue that nothing can "have always existed," since it is impossible for an infinite amount of time to have already elapsed? Isn't that the whole basis of the first premise of the Kalām Argument? Why doesn't the same logic apply to God?

Well, the only way to make God a valid exception is to posit that he is not only everlasting but atemporal. Time does not elapse for God, and there is thus no need for an infinite amount of it to have already elapsed. God exists outside the time stream like, like -- well, no actual atemporal entities come to mind, but I guess he's supposed to be timeless in the way mathematical abstractions and such are, whatever that could possibly mean. Anyway, let's grant it. (For the record, I myself do not believe in atemporal entities, though I do believe in higher dimensions of temporality.)

Now here's the part that turns the Kalām Argument into the Kalām Paradox. God is supposed to be a sufficient cause for the existence of the universe, and God has always existed. How then to account for the fact (assumed in the second premise) that the universe has not always existed? How can a strictly timeless cause have a temporal effect? It can't, obviously.

How, according to the argument, do we escape this paradox? By assuming that God is personal and has free will. The existence of the universe must have been caused not by the existence of God but by a free act of God. As I wrote in my 2012 post "The Kalam Argument,"

I was very impressed with this part when I first read it, since it’s the first real argument I’ve found for the paradoxical idea of free will — of causation without determinism. If the rest of the kalam argument holds, then, yes, it would seem to follow that the universe must be the result of free will.

Thinking about it more deeply, though, I soon came to two conclusions: (1) It's impossible as it stands. If we take seriously the thesis that God is atemporal, then it is true in the very strictest of senses that he cannot change and therefore cannot act. Action just-is an inextricably temporal thing. A God who has already created the universe is different from a God who has not created the universe yet, and that distinction cannot exist without some sort of time. (2) All the explanatory work is done by the (inherently temporal) act, and none of it by the supposed timeless God behind the act. The correct conclusion is not that everything ultimately owes its existence to some incomprehensible timeless Allah, but that everything ultimately owes its existence to an act, or acts, of free will. Goethe's Faust wasn't just playing word games with his translation of John 1:1 but had it exactly right when, after considering and rejecting word, mind, and force, he finally arrived at this:

Mir hilft der Geist! Auf einmal seh' ich Rat

Und schreibe getrost: Im Anfang war die Tat!

The Spirit helps me. Boldly I proceed --

And write: "In the beginning was the deed."

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Agency has to be accepted as a primitive metaphysical concept, and as the ultimate origin of absolutely everything. Anselm tries to make logical necessity more fundamental than agency. The Kalām Argument tries to make the "randomness" of brute fact more fundamental. But I maintain that absolutely nothing is more fundamental. God exists for no other reason than that he chose to exist: Im Anfang war die Tat, und die Tat war bei Gott, und Gott war die Tat.

In principle, that one original creative act could be the ultimate cause of everything else. However, there is no reason to postulate only one such act and good reason to assume the opposite. We ourselves have free will, which means that our own ultimate origin might be like that of God.

Joseph Smith, the Prophet, wrote,

Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.

All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence.

Behold, here is the agency of man (D&C 93:29-31).

The orthodox interpretation of this is that just as God has always existed, so man -- or the uncreated intelligence at the core of man -- has always existed. I would interpret it differently now. "In the beginning" does not after all imply a beginningless eternity. God was in the beginning. The beginning was an act, and God was in that act, and God was that act. Man, too, was in his own beginning. Man, too, is an agent, and acted himself into existence. Otherwise there is no existence.