A conflict between Necessitism and Traditional Theism - Reasons for Theistic Meinongianism

 Necessitism is the thesis that "Necessarily, everything necessarily is something/exists." Formalized as:
□∀x□∃y x=y 

Essentially, for any individual or object, that object exists in every possible world, in every possible world. Or in other words, for any individual or object, if ◇P -> □P. Intuitively, this seems insane. Clearly, I can concieve of my cat not existing, or atleast have an extremely strong intuition behind it. The most important part to this conflict between Necessitist and the Theist is how the Necessitist would respond here: Your intuition and conceivability claims are misguided, what you are actually thinking about, is that your cat could have been non-concrete, rather than not existing simpliciter. In that way, things do exist in every possible world, necessarily so, but whether or not they're concrete varies between world to world. An important bit to keep in mind, is that I - following Craig - disagree with Williamson that these objects are not abstract in virtue of them being "merely logical existences" according to Williamson. If all by "Abstract" we mean causally inert, then it seems clear to me that I fulfill said criteria in the worlds in which I'm non-concrete. In those worlds, I'm timeless, spaceless, and causally inert. How is this not just describing an Abstract Object? I take it that this dispute is extremely minor though, and that "logical existences" pose the exact same problems even if we don't want to call them Abstract. But I'm going to call them Abstract regardless throughout the post, as I feel that's more important. So now we have established the following: - Necessitism is the thesis that necessarily, everything exists necessarily. - Our intuitions behind saying "P could have not existed" are actually just saying P could've been non-concrete, individuals and objects are concrete in some worlds and abstract in others. Hence, nothing is essentially concrete (this might seem like a leap, but I'm willing to elaborate on this later.) I think it's very easy to see how this sort of view is incompatible with Traditional Theism (TT), or at the very least heavily undermines TT. First, we need to appeal to the fairly uncontroversial notion of "Aseity" (Atleast in some forms) - or atleast the general principle that everything which is external to God depends on God's creative activity for it's existence, and is contingent (dependant) on God. Combined with Divine Freedom, we get the possibility of an "Alone World", one where God exists alone. But given Necessitism, such a World is metaphysically impossible. I, and anything else, would've existed regardless if God "created" me or not. This is just what Necessitism entails. Hence, Necessitism threatens a basic principle of most theistic worldviews - that God could've existed alone. I think something most people would instantly realize is that we really can't make sense of "Creation" under Necessitism. When a theist says God creates some Individual, this process usually means the Individual did not exist beforehand and was brought into existence by God. However, under Neccesitism, God's act of creation simply refers to making me concrete, not "existent". I would've existed regardless if God made me concrete or not, hence God really has no say over if I would've existed or not. God's holy acts are just him picking and choosing which of these already existing, necessary individuals/objects which he has no "control" over, would become concrete. I don't think this view is even plausible to the casual theist, but at the very least contradicts the common usage behind "Create" when referring to God. Again, back to Creation, It's also very easy to see how this violates Creatio ex Nihilo, not only does God not really "create" anything, he can't do it out of "nothing" either! Because necessarily, there are things, necessarily. God doesn't create from "nothing", he simply excersies his causal powers over already existing objects. Hence, Creatio Ex Nihilo is simply incoherent under necessitism. One might appeal to Divine Conceptualism here, but this just seems wrong-headed. Individuals and Objects in this context are not clearly suited to play the conceptual role of Divine Thoughts at all. This sort of view is incredibily poorly motivated and does not seem to be tenable at all. Furthermore, Divine Thoughts are Concrete, Necessarily so. So how are they supposed to "be" Abstract Individuals in some worlds? This seems to make all Individuals and Objects essentially concrete, which contradicts the core of Necessitism. I'd like to focus on another part too - that God "excerises his causal powers" over these Abstract Objects. Again, since Abstract Objects by definition, cannot stand in causal relations, it becomes even harder to see how God would "excerise" his powers over these Objects and enable them to stand in this sort of causal relation. This perhaps would just be a problem for Necessitism in general, but I think this is very minor in comparison to the other objections. Necessitsm and God Another easy problem to spot is how we should interpret God's necessity and Modal arguments for God under necessitism. Modal Arguments no longer need God's "possible necessity"; but merely his possibility. But we shouldn't forget about something crucial to Necessitism: There is no such thing as essential concreteness on this view. To quote Williamson: "Necessitists and permanentists typically deny some popular essentialist theses … many philosophers regard membership of a natural kind as essential to its members. Thus a tiger is essentially a tiger, and gold is essentially gold. Hence a tiger is always necessarily if anything a tiger, and gold always necessarily if anything gold. Given those claims, necessitism implies that tigers are necessarily tigers, and gold necessarily gold. But presumably there could have been no tigers and no gold: once there were no tigers and no gold. Consequently, necessitists and permanentists should reject the essentialist theses as stated". 

Hence, God is not essentially concrete. 

I don't think it's hard to see the number of problems we can generate from this, for example:

- God is now composed of both Accidental and Essential Properties.
- It seems brutely contingent and not in God's power in which worlds he's contingent or abstract.
- A clear violation of ADS, in which God is intriniscally the same and has a sort of "Modal Immutability" between Possible Worlds.
- God is now potentially concrete in some worlds and potentially abstract in others, a clear violation of Pure Act depending on your notion of "potency".
- There are worlds in which God completely lacks any sort of causal powers and can't excerise them, given his Abstractness (Again, this problem arises even if we were to describe God as a logical existent per Williamson). Hence, he cannot manifest/incarnate, create anything, etc. In those worlds. Which also seems absurd for the Theist to accept. 

Again, it's also not hard to see how this undermines Modal Arguments for God. For example, any Modal Contingency Argument which concludes that a "Necessary Concrete" being exist. 

There are a plethra of other tensions we can draw between Theism and Necessitism, but I think this should give any theist the ability to see how strong the tension is between them and that they simply seem Incompatible.

Arguments for Necessitism:

So, given their incompatibility, a theist might start thinking about what sort of arguments there are for an absurd thesis as "Necessitism", is it seriously plausible enough to warrant a rejection of Theism? I'm going to present a few given by Timothy Williamson and others, though not all of them - as there seriously are that many arguments for Necessitism. Most of which can be found in Timothy Williamson's, "Bare Possibilia", "Modal Logic as Metaphysics" and "In defense of the Simplest Quantified Modal Logic" by Linsky and Zalta, which has been criticized thankfully by Reina Hayaki in  "Contingent Objects and The Barcan Formula" and used to motivate some Possibilism instead of Necessitism by Takashi Yagisawa's review of "Modal Logic as Metaphysics", here.

Just a warning here that the following arguments use tons of logic, so I'll try my best to translate some of the clearer arguments in natural language.

Williamson's most well-known proof for Necessitism goes as follows:

1. ∀(x)[x = x] / Theorem 2. f = f /UI 1 3. ∃(x)[f = x] /EG 2 4. □∃(x)[f = x] /Necessitation 3 5. ∀(y)□∃(x)[y = x] /UG 4 6. □∀(y) □∃(x)[y = x] / Necessitation 5 A few responses have been given to these type of arguments, for example: One can adopt a Free Logic (Rumfitt 2003), or a restriction of Necessitation (Wiggins 2003), using the same formulas to prove some sort of Possibilism rather than Necessitism (Yagisawa, 2013) or using a Neutral Logic on which the Existential Quantifier is ontologically neutral (Craig, 2016), or using Kripke's variable domain semantics (which is problematic and addressed by Williamson) I think all of these solutions are heavily problematic (not to say I myself accept Necessitism), but we have proofs of Necessitism in which Free Logic (Both Positive and Negative) simply does not help. For example: Assume the following: First-order being constraint: (1) □Ɐx1 □… □Ɐxn □ (Rx1…xn → ∃z (x1 = z) & … & ∃z (xn = z))
Which is just to say, necessarily, something has to be in order to be a certain way. Like having a property, (most importantly) standing in a relation, and many other examples. Williamson makes it clear how intuitive this is by just asking how a thing could be propertied if there was no such thing to be propertied? how something could stand in a relation if there is no such thing to stand in that relation? etc. Distinctness is Non-identity: (2) □ⱯxⱯy (x≠y iff ¬(x=y)) Poss-to-Nec Distinctness: (3) □ⱯxⱯy(x≠y → □ x≠y) Argument 1: Assume that a and b are contingent, independent entities - Not the case that necessarily, if one exists, then so does the other Consider a world w where either a or b exists while the other does not. Given (1), ¬(a=b), in w. Then, by (2), (a≠b). in w. Per (1), ¬(a≠b), in w – otherwise, it is possible for first order entities to stand in relations even in worlds where they do not exist. This is a contradiction: ¬(a≠b), in w (a≠b), in w Argument 2: Suppose that a and b are contingent entities that are distinct in world w. This entails (a≠b). By (3), it follows that □(a≠b). However, consider any world w* where a and b do not exist. Given (1), in w*, ¬(a≠b). (Distinctness is a relation, hence they cannot be distinct from one another if they don't exist.) This entails ¬□(a≠b). (It's not necessary they're distinct, given the possible) worlds in which they don't exist Thus it follows that ¬(◇a≠b → □ a≠b). (Necessarily, they're not distinct)

In turn, this entails ¬□ⱯxⱯy(x≠y → □ x≠y). This is a contradiction: ⱯxⱯy(◇x≠y → □ x≠y) and ¬□ⱯxⱯy(◇x≠y → □ x≠y)

(They're distinct and not distinct at the same time) The second argument is sensitive insofar as objecting to it might run into problems with the Necessity of Identity, and derives a clear-cut contradiction from these fairly uncontroversial, nearly analytic principles and uses them to argue against Contingentism. (Thanks to Nathan Wildman for these arguments). It seems the only way to avoid the contradictions here is to adopt some sort of Necessitism, as far as I (and many others) can see. Both Positive and Negative Free Logic generate contradictions here aswell, so it seems like the only way out for the Theist is to get rid of the Being Constraint (as suggested in the last section.) Furthermore, considering the following proof in S5: ~∀x∃y(x = y), 0 (For some reason this wasn't working, replace the second necessity operator with ∀ and the fourth with ∃)
◇~∀x∃y(x = y), 0 (Replace the second necessity operator with ∃)
~∀x∃y(x = y), 1 (Same here)
∃x~∃y(x = y), 1 (Same here)
~∃y(a = y), 1 (Same here)
◇~∃y(a = y), 1
~∃y(a = y),2
∀y~(a = y), 2
~(a = a), 2
(a = a), 2
X
Therefore, ⊢(S5 CQML) ∎∀x∎∃y(x = y).
(Weaver, 2017 and Priest, 2008)

Or consider the following argument from Haecceitism (which I thought I was original with but I found out Williamson already made this lol):

Necessarily, everything has a haecceity, necessarily.
Haecceities are relational properties.
Hence, necessarily, everything stands in a relation, necessarily.
Given the Being Constraint, necessarily, everything exists, necessarily. (This might be invalid in natural language but Williamson has a formalized version which goes as follows:
P1 □∀y □∃X □∀x (Xx ↔ x=y)
 P2 □∀y □(∃X □∀x (Xx ↔ x=y) → ∃x x=y) (It's not hard to see how we get Necessitism here)

There are also others proofs given in S5 which are slightly less complex and less known, found here, and several other convincing arguments through the converse Barcan Formula for example, and others. This has nothing to do with the strength of the logics either, given the proofs we saw only using General Necessitation, K and M - Some with only K. Again, I want to repeat and want you to keep in mind that there are atleast 10 more ways to Necessitism which I haven't showed here, which should go to show how well-defended this thesis is.

A way out?

I really don't see any way out of here for the theist except adopting some sort of Meinongianism, once we get rid of the Being Constraint and adopt some Free Logic, then we seemingly have a way out of the arguments which can't be solved with Free Logic (given their usage of the Being Constraint). This might be motivation for The Theist to abandon S5 too.

Of course, this is ignoring the objections to Free and Neutral Logic (for example, Quantifier Invariance which the neutralist cannot accept, or objections to Free and Neutral Logics given the implausibility of the Principle of Independance, etc.). But If we do find a way out of these objections, we should be free here.

But is Meinongianism really a tenable position? Thankfully, it's been gaining alot of traction in recent times and prominent philosophers such as Graham Priest and Robert Koons adopt said position.  There has also been recent literature defending Theistic Meinongianism, which might motivate someone to seriously consider the position.

However, Meinongianism is not without it's objections. I'd like to thank my friend VerbalSiegeEngine for these explanations:

"Quine's arguments against Meinong are not the most charitable. Russell offered a stronger problem with his existent golden mountain. However, the fat man argument does have some teeth.

The Possible Fat Man Argument

(1) There are subsisting things. (Assume for reductio)
(2) If there are subsisting things, then there are possible fat men standing in the doorway.
(3) Thus, there are possible fat men standing in the doorway. (MP 1,2)
(4) If there are possible fat men standing in the doorway, then there are N fat men standing in the doorway. 
(5) Thus, there are N fat men standing in the doorway. (MP 4,5)
(6) Because there is no answer to the question, "what number is N?", there is no number of fat men in the doorway. 
(7) Thus, there are no subsisting things. (MT 2,6)
(8) Thus, there are subsisting things and there are no subsisting things, which is a contradiction. (&-intro 1,7)
(9) Thus, there are no subsisting things. (Complete reductio 1-8)

Meinong would reject (6). His reply would be to say that N has an answer, there are an infinite amount of fat men in the doorway! Quine's rebuttal is to say, really? Look over there. I don't see anyone in the doorway and if someone were to claim otherwise you and I would both agree they're mistaken. Besides, you can't fit more than one at a time, they are obese by hypothesis. Thus, even if you have an infinite number of possible fat men you can't say which fat man is in the doorway!
"What is compelling about the Possible Fat Man Argument isn't that Quine successfully commits Meinong to a contradiction, because Meinong can deny (6). Instead, Quine forces a dilemma on Meinong that makes Meinongism very implausible. Either Meinong is committed to a contradiction, or he must accept that there are (i) an infinite amount of fat men in the doorway (ii) Only one fat man can fit in the doorway (iii) Meinong can't say which fat man is in the doorway Prima facie, this seems like an inconsistent set. And it seemingly demands an explanation that Meinong cannot give."

Furthermore, consider Russell's Golden Mountain Objection:

"Russell draws out a contradiction for Meinong by taking his theory seriously. Russell notes that there are two critical postulates that end up entailing a contradiction. Meinong puts for a principle in his theory of objects that the totality of an object's properties have so-being, aside from an object's existence or non-existence. So, there is an object blue that has being blue as it's sole property. And then an object that is square and blue that has being square and being blue as its sole properties. And secondly, that existence is a property. Thus, it follows that we can form the following reductio that shows that Meinong is committed to a contradiction.

The Golden Mountain
(1) Meinong's theory of objects is true. (Assume for reductio)
(2) For every set of properties there is a corresponding object. (Entailment, 1) 
(3) Existence is a property. (Entailment, 1)
(4) Thus, there must be an object with exactly three properties: being golden, being a mountain, and being existent. (2,3)
(5) It is an empirical fact that there are no golden mountains.
(6) Thus, there is an existent golden mountain and there is not an existent golden mountain, which is a contradiction. (&-intro 4,5)
(7) Thus, Meinong's theory of objects is false. (Complete reductio, 1-6)

2 and 3 articulate the commitments above. And 4 follows necessarily from 2 and 3. So, because the only underived premises are either Meinong's theory or an empirical fact, it follows that there is an issue with the theory."
There are several others problem with Meinongianism, (for example, problems with Absisting Objects or in FOL.) Which makes the view very hard to defend. But outside of this Theistic "resort" to it, it does have some appealing arguments behind it.

In conclusion, these are the only options we can take it seems:

- Sever the incompatibility between Necessitism and Theism (if anyone has an idea how to do this, please tell me, it's the most appealing option by far).
- Adopting Necessitism and abandoning Theism (never)
- Arguing against Necessitism to preserve Theism (While I have made Necessitism seem very plausible, I definitely do think it's not impossible to defend some variation of Contingentism.) This at the very least requires you to abandon S5 which I am more than happy to (but a few theists might not want to do this, it's important to note that only Brouwer is needed for Modal Theistic Arguments for the most part.)
- Accepting Necessitism and Theism by adopting Theistic Meinongianism and overcoming all of the objections to said view + the objections to the Free/Neutral Logics needed.
- Defending Yagisawa's view against several convincing criticisms and adopting Possibilism rather than Necessitism instead to preserve Theism.

I'm myself not confident enough in taking a position yet, though I'm ruling out the transition to Atheism and might instead try objecting to Necessitism directly, which might come with several logical and metaphysical costs to my view which I am more than happy to accept. Possibilism might be appealing to some here, so I'm also open to it but not really given the promising objections levelled against it. I'd consider myself a commited actualist but again, if these objections were addressed I'd be more than happy to adopt Possibilism of the Linsky-Zalta form.  The resistance against the transition to Atheism here might seem irrational, but idrc lol

Apologizes for the poor writing.

Note: Option 1 seems the most appealing aswell because we can in-fact object to Atheism/Naturalism with Necessitism, as attempted  here.


Edit: Minor correction, Williamson doesn't think non-concrete objects are "merely logical existences", he simply stipulates this class of objects to show that concreteness and abstractness are contraries rather than contradictories. This just makes the "Non-concrete is just abstract with extra steps" point much clearer, imo.

Edit 2: This is what Leftow had to say on this issue: Theism and necessitism are compatible. Aquinas, in his Third Way, distinguishes things necessary through themselves (and so a se) and things necessary only through another (and so ab alio). You can see how it's going to go from here. On standard "divine idea" views, God has His ideas. Their contents are abstract and narrow (entirely in His "head"). He has them all necessarily. He chooses which to instantiate. On a Williamsonian variant, God would necessarily have His ideas. THeir contents would be non-concrete. They would be "externalist" contents, rather than narrow contents as on the usual views. He would thus necessarily create His ideas' non-concrete contents. (On the standard view, He also necessarily produces them, but it doesn't count as creation because they are not external.) God would then choose which ones to concretize. "Alone world" becomes "sole concrete object world." Aseity safe, creation safe, freedom safe, Williamson accommodated.