God as the Necessary Being

one

Does God Exist?

What good reason is there to think that God exists? As a matter of fact, it’s misleading to talk about a good reason to think God exists. It’d be better to say that everything, literally everything we see, gives us a good reason to be confident that there is a God. Because everything we look at, everything we see, ourselves included, everything in the universe is something we can point to and say, “Where did that come from? How did that get here?”

You can say that about literally everything in the universe. Because nothing in the universe is self-explanatory.

Everything comes from something else. Everything was born, or evolved, or was fused and formed or simply composed out of parts taken from other things.

Everything in the universe has an explanation outside itself. Something else explains why it’s here. So what explains why the universe is here?

two

Everything might not exist

We say that a thing is “contingent” if it might not have existed, and if it depends on something else for its existence.

You and I depend for our existence not only on our parents, but on the oxygen we breathe and the food we eat. The Sun and stars and planets depend on the laws of gravity and the bonds of attraction between atoms, otherwise they’d disintegrate instantly.

Therefore everything depends on something else to exist. But when you depend on something else for your existence, it means you don’t exist necessarily. You don’t have your own private reservoir of existence, which is why you’re constantly relying on something else, (even if it’s just the continued unity of your different parts).

So nothing in our experience exists necessarily, meaning nothing has to exist. Whether it’s a planet or a particle, a black hole or a burst of energy, whether it’s the pyramids or a piece of grass, it’s all impermanent. These things all come into existence for a while, and then they go out of existence. Why? Because they don’t have to exist, that’s the point. They don’t have to exist, and yet, for a little while, anyway,  they do exist.

What can explain that?

three

Is the Universe Necessary?

At this point, secular people get nervous. They see where things are heading.

They say, “Well, maybe nothing in the universe is necessary. Maybe nothing in the universe has to exist. But why can’t we just say the universe itself is necessary? That would explain everything, right?” Not even close.

Remember, the universe is nothing more and nothing less than the whole collection of the things we’ve been talking about, things that are contingent, that don’t have to exist, that come in and out of existence. But a collection doesn’t have a qualitatively different character than the things it’s made up of.

If I put a bunch of blue skittles into a pile, guess what color the pile is going to be? It’s going to be blue!

If you pile up a bunch of contingent, non-necessary things into one universe, guess what that tells you about the universe?

It tells you that the universe is contingent. It tells you that the universe is non-necessary. It tells you that the universe didn’t have to be here. It doesn’t matter how long the universe has been around, and it doesn’t matter how big the universe is. If the universe is contingent, if the universe didn’t have to be here, then the universe doesn’t explain itself. It can only be explained by something else.

So why is the universe here? What is the explanation?

four

Explaining everything that can’t explain itself

If you take all the non-necessary, contingent things, everything that doesn’t have to exist, including the universe, and you put all that in one bucket, how are you going to explain it?

You can’t explain it with one more non-necessary thing, that would just be one more thing that has to go in the bucket. It would be just one more thing that needs an explanation.

No, the only way to explain all the non-necessary things is to point to a Necessary Thing, something that has to exist.

There must be something Necessary, some Original Thing, that explains how all the little created contingent things got here.

This is God. And this is why it doesn’t make sense to say, “What made God?” Because that’s the point. “God” is the name we give to the Necessary Being, the thing that has to exist, that doesn’t come into existence or go out of existence.

If there isn’t such a Being, a Necessary, Original Being, then we can never solve the mystery of anything existing at all. Somewhere, we have to reach the final explanation and final means final.

Otherwise, none of it makes any sense, none of it can be explained. A view of the world that makes sense, that gives explanations, will always be preferable to a view of the world that doesn’t make sense, and that can’t explain anything. And that’s why belief in God will always be superior to atheism. Because belief in God stands for reason, and meaning, and understanding. It explains why we’re here.

On the other hand, atheism stands for pure incoherence and incomprehension. Atheism robs the human being of the chance of understanding anything at all.  So just as the existence of every single thing gives us a reason to believe in God, so too the existence of every single thing is one more fact that the atheist can’t explain.

five

God sharing His existence

Look now at your hands, your feet. Look around at your house. Look at your spouse or your children. Look out your windows. Think for a second that none of this has to exist. All of it might not have existed.

Do you know what we call it when something is given to us that didn’t have to be given to us?

We call it a gift. We’ve used the word contingency, and non-necessity, and non-self-explanatory but that all means gift. Everything that exists unnecessarily is a gift from the one who Does Exist Necessarily.

And the proper response to a gift is to say, “Thank you.”

So while we pray this last decade, turn your head and look at everything surrounding you. It’s all powered by the same Divine Energy, it’s all a gift. It’s all kept in existence by the same Infinite Generosity. So look around, and say  “Thank you” as your eyes fall on all the gifts surrounding you. Thank God for their existence, and for yours.