@cottage-
I’ll explain…
“All possible necessary truths must be necessarily true.” No problem with that. (You don’t need the capitals; I’m reasonably adept at following a discussion without them)
Here is your argument:
If all possible necessary truths must be necessarily true (using the ubiquitous comparison of 2 + 2 = 4, for example), then nothing can be conceived of as not existing necessarily if it is necessarily existent.
But that is specious!
Necessary truths such 2 + 2 = 4 are not synonymous with existence; the former is an abstract concept while the latter concerns matters of fact and experience. And note also that it is not the equivalent of saying “nothing can be conceived of as necessarily true unless it necessarily true”, for whilst 2 + 2 = 4 is true in my mind, whether I publically assent to it or not, there is no necessary existential truth that is intuitively certain or immune to contradiction.
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, I think you're mistaking the form of the argument here a little bit, although it certainly doesn't help Call of the Wild; he doesn't need to say that necessary truths are somehow existent- or that the matter turns on the fact that the purportedly necessary truth is an existential claim; the point is that any proposition A such that A is necessary, is true in all possible worlds. So if A happens to be an existential claim, such as "God exists" or "Lebron James exists", and it is necessary (forgetting for the moment how or why it is necessary, just granting that it is), then that entity exists in every possible world. The same can be said for
possibly necessary truths- in certain systems of modal logic, in particular S5; this is just a matter of fact about certain modal logics, and Call of the Wild is correct on this point- so far as it goes (i.e. not very far). The reason is that, in S5,
it is a theorem that A->□◊A- (if A, then it is necessary that A is possible); from which it can be derived that ◊□A->A (if A is possibly necessary, then A), because "A is possibly necessary" is equivalent to "A is necessary". So, granted the acceptability of S5 (and that is by no means a given, for precisely the reason that such inferences as this are not intuitively valid), this much of the argument is correct- if it is
possible that God exists necessarily, then God exists necessarily, and God exists.
But is it possible that God exists necessarily? In other words, is it possibly necessary that God exists?
Superficially, it sounds like we're just asking whether its
possible that God exists- could it be that God exists necessarily? It sounds innocuous enough;
and that is precisely the trickery this argument relies on! (in part, aside from its more general, fatal flaws, discussed elsewhere)... We simply don't have a clear intuitive grasp of possible necessity, and (the untutored reader) tends to initially conceive it more as similar to
possibility than necessity; but
make no mistake, "X is possibly necessary" is logically equivalent to "X is necessary". So rather than be sneaky and ask whether it is possible that God exists necessarily, let's just come out and ask the real question- does God exist necessarily? That is what this crucial premise of the argument boils down to, and clearly it is question-begging. Darnit, eh?
(and RE that question, you're surely right that no existential claim which is possible is necessary,
because necessary truths are those propositions whose negations are self-contradictory- and "God does not exist" is NOT self-contradictory,
therefore "God exists" is not a necessary truth, and since it is not a necessary truth, it is not a possibly necessary truth either! So much for the "victorious" modal ontological argument- all it simply is is assuming the conclusion it seeks to prove!
)
