Abstract

In this passage I will aim to describe the ontological argument in its various forms. First we will open with explaining the non-empirical nature of an ontological argument then present the one presented by St. Anselm Archbishop of Canterbury (1033-1109) for the existence of God. This argument faced serious criticism from contemporary as well as other philosophers over time, so we will illustrate the issues they pointed out and how some of the assumptions on which the argument is built could be problematic.

Presenting The Ontological Argument

The ontological argument set forth by St. Anselm is better to be thought of as a member of a family of ontological arguments of which he is the originator rather than a standalone single argument since other versions of it were presented later on. We could say that the argument presented is a definitional/conceptual ontological argument as it relies on the very definition and concept of God to prove its existence. A very interesting and quite remarkably bold take from St. Anselm when he constructed it and included it in his 1078 work: The Proslogion; it was the most used argument at the time and evidently the most convincing, as many thinkers thought it to be perfect and that it undoubtedly proves the existence of God.

The ontological Argument is an a priori argument, one that does not depend on observations from experience. Rather, it depends on (what it takes to be) a fundamental conceptual truth. Its core layout is that once we truly understand the idea of God, we can then understand why God exists. To present the argument, St. Anselm begins by defining God as a perfect being, meaning that God is the being which none greater than can be thought. He said that if we were to say that we understand the concept of God as that of a being which no greater than can be thought then God necessarily exists in our understanding. Yet, if we conceive of this very being as existing solely in our understanding, then we would be holding somewhat of an oxymoronic definition; since there would be a being greater than it, namely, the one that exists in reality as well as our understanding. At first, this logical form seems to be leaning on a recursive definition of God to prove its existence, in essence, God is the greatest being there is and the supreme standard of perfection, and if we were to understand this then God must necessarily exist in reality since this is part of its own definition. This line of thinking drives the necessity then to specify and define what St. Anselm means by two key elements in his argument: existence and greatness.

Detailing the Argument

The notion of existence that St. Anselm discusses in his argument leads us to distinguish how the existence of some things is necessary and that of others is contingent. If we were to say that something exists means that this thing exists in reality while one that does not exist, is one that is not part of reality; then, we could draw from this that there are certain things that do exist in reality that could have not been part of it and others that do not exist in reality that could have. We can then see that there is a potential or possibility for existence of some things (as well as the non-existence of others). Baseball exists in our reality yet it could have never existed, just as Leprechauns with buckets of gold do not, yet they could have. Of the things that do not exist in our world then, there is a feature that enables their contingency, namely, the metaphysical possibility of their existence. Leprechauns do not exist but there is no metaphysical inconsistency in saying that they might have. On the other hand, a triangle with four sides also does not exist, but, it is logically inconsistent for us to claim that it could have existed somehow as it entails a contradiction in terms. So if we were to say that God can possibly exist, it follows that the concept of God is metaphysically possible, or that God is a possible being which is one of Anselm’s assumptions for his argument. We can then say that for Anselm, existence is existence in reality, while existence in understanding is the possibility of existence, or the existence as a coherent concept or idea in the mind. It follows then that anything that does not exist in reality must necessarily exist in understanding. This is a very important point to highlight, as it is at the core of the contradiction that Anselm tries to clarify.

We had pointed out that Anselm defined God as the being which none greater than can be thought. But then again, greatness here would have to be explained in terms of something. If I were to say that I am greater than Barack Obama, because I can write better computer code or that he is greater than me because he is the president of the United States, greatness in this case would be defined from a comparative view along a single dimension, i.e. coding or holding a governmental position. Greatness for Anselm is also defined in terms of characteristics or properties called great-making properties, and since god is of ultimate greatness, then he has the maximal amount of all the great-making properties. More importantly however, the core idea in the ontological argument is that existence itself is a great-making property. Which means that, that which exists in reality is necessarily greater than that which only exists in understanding (per the definition we had illustrated earlier for existence) if all other properties are left unchanged.

With these definitions and basic presentation of the idea of the ontological argument in mind, we can see that Anselm makes the following assumptions:

1- We have a clear and coherent definition of the concept of God, and so God exists in the understanding.

2- God could possibly exist in reality and so God is a possible being

3- Existence is a perfect/great-making quality (if something exists only in the understanding and might have existed in reality, then it might have been greater than it is).

If we take these assumptions to be true then we could construct a reductio ad absurdum proof as follows:

Reductio ad absurdum argument
P1- God exists only in the understanding (reductio assumption);
P2- If God existed in both the understanding and in reality, then God would be more perfect than he would be if he were to exist only in the understanding;
P3- If God exists only in the understanding, it follows that the being which none greater than can be thought, has a being greater than it. (contradiction);
C- God cannot exist only in the understanding.

If we first suppose that God does not exist in reality and exists solely in our understanding, that is to say, we have a coherent idea of a possible being of ultimate greatness which none greater of can be thought (P1). However, since we accept that existence is a great-making quality, then If God were to exist in both the understanding and reality, he would be greater than if he were to exist in just the understanding (P2). Here we have established a contradiction. If I say I think of a being which no greater than can be thought but that being only exists as an idea in my mind, then that being would also have to be one which greater than CAN be thought, namely one a that exists both in my mind as an idea and in reality (P3). So we can conclude that God cannot exist only in the understanding and would necessarily have to exist in reality.

It is undebatably necessary to take a moment and appreciate how beautiful this argument is, yet as elegant and neat as it seems, we have to remember that it relies on set of assumptions for it to work. If these assumptions were faulty, then the whole argument breaks down, and it was for these that it received a lot of criticism.

Criticisms

The first major objection to Anslem’s argument was presented by Gaunilo of Marmoutiers, one of his contemporaries. The problem that Gaunilo posed is that the argument is prone to analogy and parody and can be used to prove the existence of anything that does not exist in reality. For if the idea of God, he remarked, could be used to prove his existence, then so the idea of a perfect island can be used to prove the existence of such an island. Gaunilo simply employed the same logical form as Anselm and argued that if we can think of the greatest island, one which no greater than can be thought, then it would necessarily have to exist in reality. Therefore he pointed out that the argument could be applied to much more than it was intended for, and is therefore unsound since it works for things that are necessarily non-existent in reality. Anselm could argue in this case, that his argument was intended for a supreme necessary being and not contingent things, or that the definition of the perfect island would not be possible or coherent, for we cannot construct it in our understanding. Yet again, this could be brought around to the assumptions that he himself made regarding the coherence of the definition of God.

Another major criticism is the on made by Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) whereby he questioned whether we could assume that existence is a perfect-making property. Kant argued that existence cannot be used as a predicate to describe a thing or entity nor be one of its attributes. If we were to have a set of identical beings whereby their existence is the only differentiating factor, these beings would still be identical, for if we were to compare them, or describe them we would have to presuppose that they exist. The problem then with Anselm’s claim, Kant would argue, is that defining a being which none greater than could be thought, and including existence as predicate in that definition to construct the ontological argument, would be like saying that God is a being of ultimate greatness that exists. The latter would be taken as redundant if it were said about something that already exists, like saying “I have a beautiful cat” and “I have a beautiful cat that exists” but, this would be problematic when assigning it to a being whose existence we are trying to prove.

Just as Kant pointed out a serious problem with the assumption that existence is a great-making property or even a property in the first place, we can similarly find major problems with the other assumptions. Assumption 1 as presented above, states that we have a clear and coherent idea of the concept of God. But lengthy discussions about the consistency of the idea of God in terms of the basic and necessary attributes show that this is not the case. If we were taking God as being the Abrahamic Omnigod, that of perfect-goodness, divine foreknowledge and ultimate power, then we could not reconcile the incompatibility of the attributes when it comes problems of contradiction such as the problem of evil. We could then use this same issue of incoherence to question the second assumption of God being a possible being; since, if we have a contradiction in terms in the definition of God’s attributes or an incompatibility between different attributes necessary to define him, then we would rightly question the metaphysical possibility of the existence of such a God.

References

Ontological Arguments (2019). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Rowe, William L. (1978). Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction.