Is It Possible God Doesn’t Exist?

Maybe you believe that God exists. But is it hypothetically possible for Him not to exist? After all, there are many things in existence that — strictly speaking — don’t have to be here. (By the way, that includes you and me! God created us not because He needs us, but because He loves us so much that He wanted us to share in His divine life.)

The good news is that it is impossible for God not to exist. Here’s why.

God is logically necessary.
Therefore, there is no possible world where He doesn’t exist. It is similar to the case of a married bachelor. It is not logically possible for a married bachelor to exist because it’s a contradiction. No other world could overcome this contradiction.

The best arguments for the existence of God, such as the argument from contingency, demonstrate His necessity. And these principles would apply in other universes as well. Contingent beings require the existence of a necessary being.

Some argue that everything in our universe came from nothing. But it’s impossible for there to have been a state of absolute nothingness.

Can you actually imagine nothingness? Whenever people say they can conceive of “nothing,” likely they are thinking of blackness or a blank screen. Technically, these are something. And they are contingent beings, so they depend on others for their existence.

There is a difference between an epistemic possibility and a metaphysical possibility.
Just because you can conceive of something (epistemic possibility), it doesn’t follow that it could be obtained in reality (metaphysical possibility).

For example, there are unsolved problems in mathematics that can be true or false. You can imagine them being true and you can imagine them being false, but they can’t be metaphysically true and false at the same time. It has to be one or the other in reality.

While you may be able to epistemically imagine God not existing, given that things do exist, metaphysically imagining God not existing is metaphysically impossible.

Thank God for that!