Hello again and welcome to instalment number 3 of my series on why you should abandon your faith. If you haven't done so already, take a gander at my previous posts to catch up to where we are. This might be pretty handy because I'm just going to dive straight into some true-blue philosophy (as usual).
Right... "The Ontological Argument", lets have a crack shall we? This argument is meant to establish the existence of God through definition alone. It is very different from the 'a posteriori' arguments I've already discussed because it doesn't extrapolate from real world facts in an attempt to prove it's conclusion, it just gives us a few conditionals and we are supposed to be able to see the truth of the conclusion from these. The logical structure is:
P1: God is that than which no greater can be conceived
P2: The idea of God exists in our mind
P3: If God only exists in our mind, then we can conceive of something greater - a God that exists in the mind and in reality.
Therefore,
C1: The greatest possible being must exist both in our mind, and in reality.
Lets break it down a bit shall we? A lot of people struggle with P1, which is fair enough because Anselm was pretty vague about it... P1 basically states that God is the most powerful thing in the universe; if you think of the general property of 'greatness' that some things have, then God is the ultimate form of that property. Nothing is greater than God, nothing is more powerful, nothing is more perfect...
At this stage (P1) we've defined what God is. He's pretty great (according to Anselm). So what does this mean? It means we have an idea of what God is, floating around in our head. For most of us that means we have an image of this super powerful, super sized man with a white beard... Well, that's fair enough. It doesn't matter how you imagine God, what matters is that you imagine him as super powerful. Now -. In your mental world this imaginary, super powerful God can do anything - which is pretty 'great'. But, Anselm know's what's 'greater': a God who can do anything in your mental world, and in the real world.
This is where things get interesting. Because God embodies greatness, and it's pretty great to exist in the real world (and not just in the mind) then that means God does exist in the real world. Every aspect of 'greatness' belongs to God, and existence is an aspect of greatness.
So Anselm thought he had cracked it. He thought he had undeniable proof that God existed and that, by the laws of logic, we should all agree. "Fair enough!" says I. I mean, at a glance, that's a pretty convincing argument. But, lucky for us, we've had hundreds of years to take more than a glance at this.
Lets start our objection at P1 again. "God is that than which no greater can be conceived". Well, is He? A lot of famous philosophers, who were also Christian, disagree with this statement. St. Thomas Aquinas was a believer and he was also the leading authority on Christianity for his time, and he said no human could ever come to know the true essence of God. He thinks it's pointless to try and define God, and that includes vague definitions like the one Anselm gives in P1. So we can't take P1 as true. Don't feel too relieved just yet though. The logical structure of the argument still stands, it's possible that P1 is true (it's just not necessarily true) so if it is, it's possible that Anselm does establish God's existence despite what Aquinas thinks.
But, of course, there is more wrong with the argument: Gaunilo put forward a famous objection (the first objection in fact) that rips apart the whole thing from the inside out. He used Anselms own argument structure against him. Here's how: If we replace the word 'God' with literally anything, we can prove that the perfect version of that thing exists. Gaunilo used 'an island' in his reply to Anselm. He said, 'think of the greatest island possible... white sand, sunny, warm, clear ocean, etc' now, what island would be greater than the greatest island possible? Well, only the exact same island, if it existed in reality. So because the 'greatest island possible' exists in our mind, and it is the 'greatest' island, then it must exist in reality - for if it existed only in the mind, then an identical island that existed in reality, would be 'greater'. It's tricky to explain, but the way this works is, when you define something as being 'the greatest' then you're automatically forcing it to have the property of existence because you can only be the greatest if you actually exist... it's really a problem of self referential logic, I guess.
So it seems safe to say, you can't prove something exists just by defining it in a certain way. Kant agrees with me here, he said a lot of complicated things about this and I'll try to break them down a bit, for easy reading. (Oh and by the way, I've pretty much given up on keeping the word count small, and keeping to a proper plan, clearly talking about philosophy denies me both of those, despite my optimistic attempts). Anyway, on to Kant!
Firtsly, Kant objected to 'necessary propositions' being transfered to the existence of God. A 'necessary proposition' is exactly what we've been discussing thus far - things that are true by definition. For example: 'a triangle has three angles' or 'a batchelor is an unmarried man', but not 'God exists'. Kant first establishes that just because a proposition is necessary, it doesn't mean the thing in question actually exists in reality. Yes, if a triangle did exist then it must have 3 angles, no more, no less. But - just because we've defined how triangles must be if they exist in reality, it doesn't follow that they actually do exist in reality. I could say 'a Florp has 5 eyes and 3 legs' but that doesn't mean Florps exist, it also doesn't mean that if we find an animal with 5 eyes and 3 legs that it's a Florp... I hope we haven't strayed too far from the original point here. You can't establish something actually exists, by defining what it would be like if it did exist.
Secondly Kant objects to the Ontological Argument by showing that the definition of words might make something true in an analytic sense, but this does not make it true in a synthetic sense. I haven't had much to do with this line of reasoning, but you can see it follows a similar path to the above.
Kant's final objection to the Ontological Argument is a nice one. He asserts that 'existence' is not a predicate. That is, 'existence' is not adding any sort of property to a thing. Kant says "by taking the subject of God with all its predicates and then asserting that God exists, I add no new predicate to the conception of God". Which makes sense. Powerful, Loving, All-knowing, these are predicates. If you imagine a God with these properties, and then imagine a God with all those properties and the property of existence, does the image of God change? Kant says no. I say no. Lets compare this to a horse. I can tell you to think of a horse. Now think of a horse that is white. The image of your horse has (probably) changed, correct? Now think of a horse that is real. Has the image of the horse changed? No. Existence clearly is not a predicate - not a property that helps define or describe something.
And I think that's about it for the Ontological Argument! If anyone tries to claim God exists because he is so powerful he must exist, you're now properly equipped to cut them down swiftly. And if you used to think God exists, because he's so powerful he must exist, then I hope you've taken in some of the logic here and a started to reconsider the logical reasons for why you think His existence is true.
What did I say I was going to do this time a well? Ah, the Argument from Design. Well, I'm not going to do it now - I'll do it next time. It's a good one too so if you've come this far, you'll definitely want to see that.
Until next time, stay analytical people!
