Necessity is not evidence

[MindForgedManacle]

The latter is the subtext though, as the logical reasons they state ultimately fail, and yet are never retracted. As I've said many times, you can't logic something into existence, and if your whole position attempts to do an end run around demonstrability by just arguing why it's impossible for something to not exist, well then you're probably hiding a more personal reason for why you think this thing should exist.

Well you've shown that Chad is right in that you're applying a psychological evaluation to all believers, and unjustifiably so, I think. And I think it's hyperbole to say no believer has ever retracted theit claim that God is a necessary being.

Maybe =/= Necessity.

A lot of people historically believed Thor was a logical necessity due to the existence of lightening and thunder, but were mistaken.

The necessity involved in discussions of the supposed necessarity of God's existence are nothing like that. They involve things like saying God, by virtue of his nature, must exist in all possible worlds. And to exist in all possible worlds means that one's existence is necessary, because there is no state of affairs in which that being's existence does not obtain.

The above is nothing like your Thor comparison. At best people thought Thor existed because lightning or whatever provided otherwise inexplicable evidence for Thor.

For example. Plate tectonics is true. It is necesssarily true in both the sense that there is no other competitve alternatives to explaining the evidence from geology, fauna, and flora on earth, and in that plate tectonics is necessary for earth to remain habitable to higher animal life such as yourself. Yet I bet most people don't perceive a need for it.

Plate tectonics isn't true by necessity, plate tectonics just happens to be (most likely) true, or contingently true, in other words.

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So Chad, which of these definitions do you mean when you say "necessary"?

The concept of a metaphysically necessary being plays an important role in the ontological argument for the existence of God. This concept has been criticized and partly rejected as incoherent by David Hume, Immanuel Kant, J. L. Mackie and Richard Swinburne.

The philosophers of religion John Hick[1] and William L. Rowe[2] distinguished three different types of necessary existence:

factual necessity (= existential necessity): a factually necessary being is not causally dependent on any other being, while any other being is causally dependent on it.

causal necessity (subsumed by Hicks under the former type): a causally necessary being is such that it is logically impossible for it to be causally dependent on any other being, and it is logically impossible for any other being to be causally independent of it.

logical necessity: a logically necessary being is a being whose non-existence is a logical impossibility, and which therefore exists either timeless or eternally in all possible worlds.

While most theologians (e.g. Anselm of Canterbury, René Descartes, and Gottfried Leibniz) considered God as logically necessary being, Richard Swinburne argued for factual necessity, and Alvin Plantinga argues that God is a causally necessary being. Because a factually or causally necessary being does not exist by logical necessity, it does not exist in all possible worlds.[3] Therefore, Swinburne used the term "ultimate brute fact" for the existence of God.[4]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical_necessity

That Wikipedia article is actually wrong here. Platinga's modal version of the ontological argument states that God must exist in all possible worlds, so Plantinga does believe God is a logically necessary being: that's the whole point of his argument. :p