Cutsinger's Ontological Argument

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I stumbled across a paper written by James S. Cutsinger,actually a lecture given at Thomas Aquina College on 20 April 2001, which advances a stout defense of the ontological argument from Proslogion II. This form of the argument is largely regarded as having been defeated by such luminaries as Aquinas and Kant. So Cutsinger’s take on the OA was of great interest to me, a long-time fan of the argument in its modal form found in Proslogion III.

It goes like this:
  1. God is that than which nothing greater can be thought (TTWNGCBT).
  2. TTWNGCBT can be thought.
  3. Whatever can be thought exists in the mind.
  4. Whatever exists in the mind either exists in the mind alone or exists also in reality.
  5. To exist in reality is greater that to exist in the mind alone. [Take this to mean: existing things as a class, are greater than any purely mental being. So, for example, a speck of dust is greater than an imagined mansion.]
  6. Suppose TTWNGCBT exists in the mind alone. But then this leads to a contradiction because if that were so, I could conceive of something greater, namely any particulare thing which exists in reality. Therefore, TTWNGCBT cannot exist in the mind alone.
  7. TTWNGCBT must exist in reality.
  8. Therefore God must exist.
I thinks this works.

Kilbourne
 
Immanuel Kant dealt Anselm’s argument a devastating blow with his repudiation of “existence” as in any way a property of anything. Rather, existence contains properties, or accidents, or essences that are variable from one existing thing to another. According to Kant, Anselm had failed to provide a bridge from the essence of God to the existence of God. Moreover, since the truth of God’s existence is not subject to verification, as other truths are, God is not provable to exist simply by thinking about Him. Kant’s refutation is reminiscent of the arguments of Gaunilon and Aquinas. Bertrand Russell once was impressed by the ontological argument but later in his History of Western Philosophy repudiated it, saying “… it is easier to feel convinced that it must be fallacious than it is to find out precisely where the fallacy lies."

What’s interesting about Russell is that he never commented in the same book on Pascal’s Wager Argument, which he surely knew about. Pascal and Russell, both being mathematicians, you would think Russell would have been eager to take on Pascal. (But I digress!:D)
 
Hi Charlemagne,

Cutsinger thinks that Kant’s objection is not germane to this version of the OA. If you look at it carefully, it does not assume existence is a predicate. Rather, it assumes a continuum of being, ranging from mere ideas (mental beings) to the lowest existing beings to the highest existing being…

Gotta go to charch. Be back later.

K
 
Rather, it assumes a continuum of being, ranging from mere ideas (mental beings) to the lowest existing beings to the highest existing being…

But isn’t the “highest” a predicate? :confused:
 
This does not seem essentially different from Anselm, and does not escape Aquinas’s refutation.

Logic Fail.

I can imagine God existing in reality, which is different from Him actually existing. If I imaginied Him as a purely imaginary Being, than yes, my phantasm would be incomplete, but I can imagine HIm as an actually existing Being without thereby giving Him existence.
 
Hi Ch 2 and katholisch,

Ch 2 wondered whether “highest” is a predicate, and indeed it is. The question is whether Anselm’s Prosl 2 version of the argument tries to make existence a predicate. As Cutsinger put it, he doesn’t think “Anselm came anywhere near to the scene of that crime.”
 
But then if “highest” is a predicate and you drop “highest” from the proof, what is left?
 
Cutsinger asks us to assume, with Anselm, a hierarchical universe or Great Chain of Being. In other words, existence itself is a matter of degrees. Certain links in the chain have more existence than others. For example, an atom is more real (has richer existence) than a Higgs Boson, a molecule has even greater existence than an atom, an amoeba is greater than a molecule, and on up the line.

He also asks to assume that ideas are not nothing. Ideas or imaginations, while they comprise the weakest and tenuous type of being, are nevertheless beings. Norris Clark, for one, agrees that mental beings are part of the order of real being.
 
Hi Ch 2,

We can’t drop highest or greatest from the argument. Point no. 5 is absolutely essential. The question is whether the “greater than” principle of the argument, as formulated by Cutsinger, is vulnerable to Kant’s objection.
 
Are we treating existence as a predicate when we say to exist in reality is greater than to exist in the mind alone. With the Great Chain of Being in mind, doesn’t it stand for the proposition that it is greater for anything to exist in reality than for anything to exist in the mind. In other words, will not the merest speck of dust on my desk always have greater ontological stature than my conception of grand palace or my proof of Poincare’s conjecture?
 
Kilbourne
**
Norris Clark, for one, agrees that mental beings are part of the order of real being.**

Isn’t “mental” also a predicate?

My point is that Anselm cannot avoid predicates when talking about God. If an atheist chooses not to believe in a being of which no being greater can be conceived to exist (it being possible that the chain of beings is infinite) how has Anselm proven anything to him?
 
Hi Ch 2,

You sed:
Isn’t “mental” also a predicate?
Click to expand...
My point is that Anselm cannot avoid predicates when talking about God.
Click to expand...
How can we talk about any subject without a predicate? Kant’s objection, as I understand it, isn’t that we can’t ascribe predicates to God. Rather, it is that, however many predicates we may ascribe to God, we don’t add anything to the idea of God by declaring that God is.
 
Katholisch,

Where precisely in steps 1-8 is the “logic fail”?

K
 
Kilbourne said:
Katholisch,

Where precisely in steps 1-8 is the “logic fail”?

K
Click to expand...
  1. Suppose TTWNGCBT exists in the mind alone. But then this leads to a contradiction because if that were so, I could conceive of something greater, namely any particulare thing which exists in reality. Therefore, TTWNGCBT cannot exist in the mind alone.
Click to expand...
I can conceive of something as existing in reality without it actually existing in reality. Thus, TTWNGCBT can still have the conceptual attribute of existing in reality while still being limited to my phantasm.
 
Hi Spirithound,
I would dispute this premise, on the grounds that we can never fully comprehend the infinite.
Click to expand...
I think Anselm would agree that we can never fully comprehend God. In fact somewhere in the Proslogion Anselm declares that God will always be greater than we can conceive. But fully comprehending is different that not being able to conceive of God even in a limited fashion.

Now if you are saying that TTWNGCBT is simply not conceivable, that is something else. That, in fact, was St. Thomas’ objection.
 
Still, it begs the question to say that God is a thing of which nothing greater can be conceived. If the atheist says there is nothing that answers this description because the number of being needn’t be limited (another predicate) but could be** infinite** (yet another predicate) why should he buy into your predicate and you not buy into his?
 
Hi Ch 2,

You and Spirithound seem to question the conceivability of TTWNGCBT. You are in good company, for St. Tom of Aquino also thought so. According to Cutsinger, this was because St. Tom thought it always possible to think of something greater than any given thing. Just like we can’t think of an unsurpassable number (we can always add one more), we can’t think of TTWNGCBT. If St. Tom is right, TTWNGCBT cannot be thought, and the argument never gets off the ground. If I can only think of things which are in their nature surpassable, then Anselm is asking us to do the impossible.

Incidentally, logical positivists also attack the OA on this score.

But Cutsinger thinks he as an answer which saves the argument.
 
Katholish said:
I can conceive of something as existing in reality without it actually existing in reality. Thus, TTWNGCBT can still have the conceptual attribute of existing in reality while still being limited to my phantasm.
Click to expand...
Hi Katholisch,

We can conceive of many things (islands, pizzas,…) which don’t necessarily exist in reality. We call them contingent beings. The question is whether all conceivable beings are contingent.
 
Regarding the conceivability of TTWNGCBT, it has be conceded that God cannot be a datum of consciousness like a tree or a cat. After all, who has seen God this side of the grave? But Anselm insists that God can be thought of as TTWNGCBT. Cutsinger summarizes Anselm’s reply to Gaunilo this way:

“…the “way” of which St. Anselm is speaking is the way of negation, the via negative. Beginning with some contingent and therefore deficient thing, our minds can ascend, through a series of denials, to something which is no sense contingent, but instead absolute. Moving up the Great Chain of Being and Knowing, our awareness passess from the mortal to the immortal to the aeviternal and thence finally to what is truly eternal.”

But both Anselm and Cutsinger, while maintaining that we can think about God, do not say that our minds could ever grasp or surround Him. This, incidentally, is Father Robert Barron’s take on TTWNGCBT. He gave a lecture—I think at Sacred Heart Seminary—titled something like “The Very Strange God of St. Anselm," in which he calls Anselm’s definition simply “mind-blowing” yet perfectly intelligible.
 
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