The existence of God is trivial. Now I don’t mean trivial as in “unimportant,” but I mean that if you take a more or less workable system of metaphysics, it will necessarily follow that God exists. In order to understand why this is, I’m defining God as “the necessary being.” Such a move isn’t problematic, since there is no one who would define God as a merely possible being, and to anyone who would do so, we’d point out that their understanding of God is wrong. Besides, there is in fact a necessary being, so what else is there that could be recognized as God?
The argument that there is a necessary being is easy to make, and follows of very basic and widely agreed premises.
1) There is a necessary set of possibilities 2) A possibility must be grounded in a being 3) There is a necessary beingThe first premise is a basic truth. There are things which are possible, i.e. things which could fail to exist that might exist, and taken as a whole these possibilities comprise a set. Those who disagree with this are Parmenideans of various sorts, and certain ways that one might try and argue for ¬1 will be dealt with at a later time. For now, I’m confident there is virtually no one who will attack 1.
The second premise is also a basic truth, and it only requires some further explanation for those who happen to not understand what possibility means. In order for something to be taken as a possibility, it must be the case that this is a possibility stated of beings and their relations to other beings. For example, in order for it to be possible that a coin lands heads up, there must be the coin with a heads side and another object that it lands upon as well as another object that makes it fall (these last two requirements could be the same thing, i.e. the coin falls on the earth, which happens to be what makes it fall). No coin, no heads up possibility.
This has to do with the fact that possibility is something stated of beings. No being, nothing to state possibility of. Hence, a possibility must be grounded in a being.
So the necessary set must be grounded in a being. Since the set is necessary, it follows that the being must like be necessary. Therefore, there must be a necessary being.
I’m having difficulty understanding you, but I am sincerely trying to understand. Could you “dumb it down” a tad? Or put it in more practical terms?
Let’s see. There are possibilities. There can only be a possibility if it is grounded in some real being. The only thing that could account for the whole range of possibilities is a being. Since this range of possibilities is necessarily existent, it follows that the being which grounds this range of possibilities is also a necessarily existent being.
And this necessary being is God.
Since the fact that there are possibilities is trivial (easy to know), and the fact that possibilities have to be grounded in real beings is trivial, the conclusion that there is a necessary being, i.e. God, is trivial. Thus, the only real question is what God is like, not so much whether He exists.
So God would be the necessary being that grounds the set/range of possibilities?
Yes.
Could it not simply be the universe that is the necessary being which grounds the various possibilities?