Is God Necessary? (More about Why Does the World Exist?)

According to the book I am currently reading, Why Does the World Exist? by Jim Holt, Adolf Grunbaum says "Why is there something instead of nothing?" is the wrong question. He says that before the Big Bang there was no time, joining many earlier philosophers such as Leibniz who argued that time is a relation between events, so that if there are no events, there is no time. How this proves that, as it were, there is no such thing as Nothingness, I'm not quite clear, except that, well, if nothing happens in the forest, and no one is there to observe the lack of events, is it still a (non)happening? Grunbaum elucidates: if the Big Bang model is physically true-- if the creation of the Universe started with what is called a "singularity," that is, a one-off event that did not operate according to the same processes and principles that obtained afterwards-- then by definition that's all there ever was; time and matter came into existence at the same time, and it's impossible to speak of a 'before.' (Grunbaum thinks this disproves the existence of God, but I can't see why, since God by most definitions is outside time and space anyway.)

Richard Swinburne , on the other hand, advocates that God is, in fact, within time, that it is meaningful to say that God did one thing before another. He envisions God as "the right stopping point in explaining the world, the one that would minimize the part of reality that was left unexplained." (p. 104) He is willing to grant the conceivability of a reality that contained a universe but no God; he finds God to be not a necessary explanation, but the simplest explanation for the existence of everything else, and that there is no explanation necessary for His existence.

This, by the way, is my own position, more or less, although I find it easiest to conceptualize God as being outside  time as we know it. He may have some kind of sequential experience of metachronology, how would I know, but He very obviously is not confined to the same history that we are, and so, for me, to say that he is "within time" is not very meaningful.

What a great book!