This is one of those purely philosophical things some people are going to find tedious. It arises as so many things do from one of my discussions with Mitch. Mitch had identified God's necessity with his self-existence. I said these were not identical that to say a thing is self existent is to say it did not depend on anything else for its existence while to say a thing exists necessarily is to say it could not have not existed. Mitch agreed that these were logically distinct but in the case of God tended to be the same. He went on to point out that whereas some atheists would say matter is self existent they would not say it existed necessarily whereas Christians would argue that God is both necessary and self existent though he wanted to distinguish the claim that God's existence is necessary from the argument for God from necessary existence as used by say Aquinas. Now while agreeing that God is not contingent I still wanted to fight shy of saying his existence is necessary. So why do I do this? Well it seems to me the term non-contingent can only be applied to God apophatically as a denial of contingency and not as a positive affirmation of his necessity. The reason for saying this is that normally when we talk of something being necessary we can say what kind of law entails that necessity. A necessary proposition is made necessary by the laws of logic, a sum has a necessary result because of the laws of number. It is necessary for an organism to eat or die because of the laws of biology and one can have physical and chemical and even ethical necessities but always there is a law involved. But what kind of law can God himself be subject to. He is not logically necessary because to deny there is a God is logically possible even if one sees the laws of logic as being self existent whether as part of God's being or not. The conclusion that God exists necessarily can only be drawn by applying the law of excluded middle to God's own being and taking it as an inference from his not being contingent but we are talking about a type of necessity that is absolutely unlike any other necessity we know and which can be inferred only by negation hence I would question if this is necessity at all in any meaningful sense.
Would anyone like to comment on that?