1515. Since logic cannot deal with . . .

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Since logic cannot deal with a simply empty universe, the widest class of concrete entities cannot be empty. There has to be at least this one necessarily nonempty class, even if its class properties could be instantiated in quite other instances than any in which they happen to be instantiated. But, then, properties that are universally applicable, because they are properties of this widest class, cannot be uninstantiated. 

Given the necessary nonemptiness of the widest class, or the necessary instantiatedness of the universally applicable properties of this class, we have all we need for necessary existence, even the necessary existence of God. True, it is essential to the distinction of type between any property and its instances that the latter can exist only contingently. But it is logically possible to distinguish between the property "divinity" and its necessarily contingent instances, the while excluding polytheism, even as a possibility, and affirming instead the necessary existence of one and only one divine individual. 

The key to doing this is the doctrine that the most concrete particular entities are not enduring individuals but momentary events (or "states" of individuals). According to this doctrine, the existence of an enduring individual is the actuality of a certain sort of event-sequence, which can be defined as such without specifying all the particular events in the sequence. This holds good (and must hold good, if certain well-known antinomies are to be avoided) also of the divine individual—which is to say, the property of divinity, Le., (Supreme) Greatness, or Unsurpassability, cannot be contingently but only necessarily instantiated, just as the class of the contingent instances of this property must be necessarily, not contingently, nonempty. Thus, although any of the instances, or "states," instantiating the property occurs, and must occur, contingently, that there are some such instances and that any two of them are "genidentical," or in personally ordered sequence with one another as states of one and the same divine individual, can and must be necessary. 

It may be objected to this that logic finds the idea of necessary instantiation valid at most only of properties that are universally applicable. But although the property of divinity indeed individuates one and only one individual, there is still a definite, albeit unique, sense in which it is universally applicable. Just as any entity is and must be identical with itself, so any entity is and must be related to the divine individual, and thus to divinity, as its sole primal source and its sole final end, its Creator and its Consummator. Relativity to the divine individual in this twofold sense is as essential to any entity as such as its self-identity. And to deny this is not to deny simply the existence of the divine individual but even its possibility. The necessary nonemptiness of the class of instances of the divine, or divine states, is related to the necessary nonemptiness of the only seemingly wider class of events, or states, in general, i.e., concrete entities as such, in that, for any nondivine event or state, there must be some divine event or state that is its primal source and its final end. Thus, if there must be concrete entities of some kind, as logic requires, these entities must be entities that are divinely created and consummated, the only alternative to this inference being rejection of the very idea of divinity as incoherent and so not really but only verbally an idea. 

4 February 1998; rev. 31 July 2002