Must We Presuppose God to Account for Existence?

This is a response to an argument made for God’s existence by the YouTuber mytruepower2. In a video called Is There Real Proof That God Exists?, he makes eight arguments for the existence of God. I initially addressed all eight argument in a single post called Is There Real Proof That God Exists?. This page is a slightly edited transcript of my video response to this argument, along with the video.

Proof #2: The Leibnizian Argument From Contingency

God, and Only God, Perfectly Explains This

If God exists, then God is something. And this poses an even greater mystery. God is not any mere something. God is an intelligent, omnipotent, volitional being. The chances of such a being popping into existence are infinitesimal. Imagine the odds of a tornado going through a junkyard and producing a Boeing 747. The odds of a being with the power to make this happen just popping into existence are even less. Complexity does not appear out of the blue. The first musicians didn’t play in orchestras. The first musical instruments were not electronic synthesizers. The first computers were abacuses, which were manually-operated CPUs, useful only for arithmetic. My first computer had one millionth the RAM of my present computer (8Kb vs 8Gb), and it could not be used for word processing, telecommunicating, listening to recorded music, or watching video, all things I can use my present computer for. You began life as a single cell that gradually developed into a conscious and intelligent human being. The DNA that provided the instructions for building you is the product of billions of years of evolution by natural selection. Super-powered mutants like the X-men have never suddenly appeared, because such incredible complexity never appears without a long history of ancestral forms. We can easily account for complexity without God. It is just a matter of time and natural evolutionary processes.¹ But when we account for existence by presupposing a divine creator, the problem of complexity becomes insoluble. God cannot possess power, morality or intelligence without complexity, and that complexity has no explanation if God is to be the explanation for existence.

Beyond that, you just cannot explain existence with the existence of anything, not even God. That comes down to explaining existence with existence, which is the very thing you are trying to explain. That is like trying to define a word in terms of itself. Whatever the explanation for existence is, it must lie outside existence. Now, if God’s existence were necessary, the necessity of God’s existence could account for existence. But short of any compelling reason for believing that God’s existence is necessary, the simpler explanation is that existence is necessary. The modal form of the ontological argument tries to prove that God’s existence is necessary, but that’s a different argument than this one, and I have explained why it doesn’t work in my post addressing all eight of mytruepower2’s arguments for God’s existence.

If another argument can prove the necessity of God’s existence, this argument can add nothing to it. If no other argument can prove the necessity of God’s existence, this argument has no force. Either way, this argument fails to prove the existence of God. Ultimately, this argument is circular. It cannot prove God’s existence without first assuming the necessity of God’s existence, which it fails to establish.

1. See Is God Needed for Scientific Laws? and Abiogenesis by Natural Selection, as well as other posts on evolution.