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If the set is all possibilities whatever, all that is genuinely conceivable, or coherently thinkable, then what is common to the set is strictly, unconditionally necessary. If, on the contrary, the set is not all human possibilities--or all understanding existence, human or not--then what is common to the set is only broadly, conditionally necessary, i.e., necessary to any and all human possibilities, or to any and all possibilities of an existence that understands.

The modality of x is _ x '_s classification according as its appropriate mode of exemplification in existence is either contingent or necessary---or, alternatively, according as whether its nonexistence is or not conceivable.

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If this argument is sound, it is a mistake as to logical level to take the statement, "God exists," which mentions no definite particulars or the properties of such, as asserting a merely contingent truth. If this seems strange because "God" can be consistently construed only as designating an individual, the response is that the designatum of "God" is not a particular individual, even the greatest, but the one and only universal individual. If, then, "individual" is taken in the strict sense in which it is applied ordinarily to persons and things enduring and changing through time, it is to be distinguished from the still lower, indeed, lowest, logical level of events or states (of persons and things). This means that, although events or states are and must be in every case particular, this need not be so with individuals, and cannot be so with the universal individual "God."

The lowest logical level is the level of events or states, which alone are fully concrete or particular. The highest logical level is the level of transcendentals, which alone are utterly abstract or universal. In between are levels that are relatively lower or higher depending on whether they do or do not involve mentioning definite particulars or their special properties. Thus particular individuals such as things and persons, although more abstract than events or states, are still more concrete and particular than individualities, species, genera, categories. Categories, on the other hand, although more concrete than transcendentals, are still more abstract and universal than genera, genera still more abstract than species, and species still more abstract than individualities.

Any possible fact can only be an aspect of events or happenings, actual or potential. Things or persons, accordingly, can only be certain stabilities or coherences in the flux of events. The stabilities, however, are in the events, not the events in the stabilities.

The grammar of the most general terms is philosophically significant as that of more special terms is not. Why? Because the most general terms are somehow illustrated in any conceivable experience, whether or not we're good enough phenomenologists to realize it.

The sufficient reply to Post and others who object to "subject-predicate literalism, according to which 'God' must refer" is that "'God' cannot be consistently construed except as a proper name with an individual designatum" (Hartshorne).

If the essence of God integrates all metaphysical truth; and if to know this essence--"the abstract, impossibly unexemplified essence of deity"--is "to know next to nothing," then to know metaphysical truth is to know next to nothing. And this, of course, is why we may be able to know it after all.

There is nothing for empirical atheists to be thinking of when they speak of the conceivable nonexistence of God, taken as also capable of existing.

They cannot be thinking of the incoherence of the idea of God, since they have already granted its coherence in taking God to be capable of existing.

Nor can they be thinking of the actual history of the world process, since that would imply that God's existence somehow depends on what creativity produces instead of being inherent in creativity itself.

But if the idea of a possibly nonexisting God is of neither of these, it is of nothing and has the same content of nothing, and therefore is not an idea of God after all.

Although necessary truths are implies by any and every contingent fact, this is only by virtue of what any such fact has in common with any other even conceivable fact.

The world is the final subject of change, which, as such, cannot be a mere aggregate or collection. The world can be the final subject of change only if it have a unity in some sense maximal, absolute, and exceeding the unity of any of its parts. This world unity is the ground of all plurality as well as of all unity in the world parts. No "real" aspect of anything can be omitted from the final unitary subject of change.

There is and must be something, relationship to which is the universal meaning of reality, and which itself is real by its own measure, is self-existent.

The world in its generic features does not imply its inhabitants. But its inhabitants imply the world with themselves as its existing parts.