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I have argued elsewhere (Notebooks, 16 May 2003) that "God and the world are at each other's service." But in the light of my recognition of the distinction between "instrumental" and "constitutive" good, it's obviously important to understand that the "service" that God and the world perform for each other is not merely instrumental but constitutive.

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Of course, this mutual constitutive service belongs to the symmetry between God and the world, which in turn involves a more fundamental and inclusive asymmetry. For, although God is indeed constituted by the world as well as Godself, the world that is thus co-constitutive of God is not this, that, or any other particular world, but simply some world of which God is the primal source and the final end. What co-constitutes the world, by radical contrast, isn't simply some God--the God—the idea of "some God" being self-contradictory--but contradictory—but rather the one and only God there could even possibly be, whose nonexistence is as inconceivable as that of some world.

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God and the world are at each other's service---God service—God doing for the world as well as for Godself what only God can do; and the world doing for God as well as for itself what only the world can do.

But if this mutual service belongs to the symmetry between God and the world, this symmetry in turn involves a more fundamental and inclusive asymmetry. For although God does indeed require a world in order to be God, what God requires is not this, that, or any other particular world, but simply some world of which God is at once the primal source and the final end. What the world requires, on the other hand, isn't simply some God--the God—the idea of "some God" being self-contradictory--but contradictory—but rather the one and only God that there either is or could be, whose nonexistence is as inconceivable as that of some world.

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And there are at least two other valid arguments for God's existence if "God" is thus properly defined and the concept of God can be consistently conceived. There is, first, the argument for God as the primal source of all things, but for whose existence no world sufficiently ordered to be a world at all could be so much as possible. Depending on what is stressed in the argument--whether argument—whether the sheer "that" of the world's existence or the sheer "what" of its existence as necessarily ordered-this ordered—this first argument can take the form of either a valid cosmological argument for God as the ground of being or a valid argument for God as the principle of order. Then, second, there is the argument for God as the final end of all things, which-againwhich—again, depending on how it is developed--can developed—can take the form of either a valid teleological argument for God as the all-inclusive consequence or a valid argument for God as the ground of all meaning or significance.

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