Ontological Argument

[Aristotle_1]

I do not believe you can prove God exists though logic. That’s what you need Faith for.

Mark 11:22 Jesus said to them, "Have faith in God.

 

[Betterave]

I’m not sure if I understand your question.

I will respond to the rest of your post, but first I’m curious about this: How do you understand my question? What are you unsure about?

 

[Betterave]

I am indeed with Prodigal Son on this issue, and it takes me somewhat by surprise that Betterave is happy to admit that he’s merrily defining beings into existence.

There obviously are such people, and they are people who care about whether their beliefs are true or not.

If you’re just interested in “defining” the pals from your fantasy-life into reality and then pretending that your word games have any meaning whatsoever in the real world, then knock yourself out, but don’t expect other people to be wowed by it.

Watch, I’ll do it now:

1. The leprechaun TsiehtItna is defined as the most perfect leprechaun possible, possessing every perfection that it is possible for a leprechaun to have.
2. The leprechaun TsiehtItna that exists has a greater perfection that the leprechaun TsiehtItna that doesn’t exist.
3. The leprechaun TsiehtItna exists.

This line of reasoning is only true if the first premise is true, and you can’t make it true by thinking about it.

A quick request for clarification before answering in detail: which perfections is it possible for a leprechaun to have? (A closely related question would be: what is a leprechaun?)

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Ah, I see. So the great unquestioned assumption is: there are some people who are averse to defining beings into existence - and obviously you believe that you are such a person.

I take this to mean that I make the following assumption:

“There are some people who are averse to defining beings into existence, and I believe I am one of them.”

Why this assumption is significant, to me, seems rather hazy. Now, you might say that we are constantly defining beings into existence, and call this process “naming”. But I think you realize that naming is a process of seeing the reality, and then giving it a name.

Case in point: Aquinas argues that there cannot be only contingent beings, but there must be a necessary being. He then calls this being “God”. He “sees” a thing, and then gives it a name. But this is not defining beings into existence, at all.

As for the second part, I certainly do assume that I believe I am one of them. My belief in this is sincere, even if the belief is mistaken.

 

[Betterave]

You’ve gone well beyond answering my question here, so now I’m torn between addressing what you have written here, or going back to answer the original post as I promised… why do you do this to me?? I’ll answer this one for now and ask you to reassert your previous points if you feel they are salient.

I take this to mean that I make the following assumption:

“There are some people who are averse to defining beings into existence, and -]I believe/-] I am one of them.”

Why this assumption is significant, to me, seems rather hazy.

The first point to note is simply that it *is *an assumption… which then allows you to ask the question whether it is actually true, and on what grounds it is justified.

Now, you might say that we are constantly defining beings into existence, and call this process “naming”. But I think you realize that naming is a process of seeing the reality, and then giving it a name.

That sounds pretty simple, but we need to ask what is entailed/implied by “seeing the reality.” You haven’t made that clear, right? Case in point, not everyone would agree that your “case in point”:

Case in point: Aquinas argues that there cannot be only contingent beings, but there must be a necessary being. He then calls this being “God”. He “sees” a thing, and then gives it a name. But this is not defining beings into existence, at all.

…is an instance of “seeing the reality.”

As for the second part, I certainly do assume that I believe I am one of them. My belief in this is sincere, even if the belief is mistaken.

I don’t want to suggest that you assume that you believe anything. I’m ready to grant that *you *know what *you *believe and don’t have to make assumptions about it.

 

[JDaniel]

Anselm’s argument is somewhat different from what the MIT professor describes. It is more like this:

God is God if I can conceive of him precisely as what he is and has always been, as I have always understood him to be: that is that being than which none greater can be conceived. This is not an argument from any kind of logic. Neither is it logic from a greater position by overwhelming the definition with all of his astounding determinants. Instead, it is more of an enlightenment of the mind based upon an act of unpolluted thinking. It is to do more with what we know and how we know what we know. IOW, it is more epistemic than syllogistic.

Upon an initial look, the argument seems to be rather easy to defeat. But a good defeater is usually not forthcoming. And nothing yet from anyone that has devised an outstanding counter-argument, one that hits you squarely on the chin. Usually, we get a re-wording of Anselm’s argument in such a way that almost all of its meanings are radically distorted. (It’s hard to believe that an MIT Professor is so bad that he/she has to resort to such crudity.) Or, we get some faerie argument as if changing the name from God to Leprechaun, et al, defeats the reality that there is a Being with a much more powerful presence that is the subject of the argument.

People can conceptualize. People do conceive. And, since the objects of conceptualization are so common to us, we hardly give them a second validating thought. Conceiving is a moment-to-moment activity for us. And when we conceive God, we conceive Him as He-who-embraces-all-of-His-determinants as his closest personal possessions. Because we think of him as his being we can and do act to conceive God. And, when we do, we tend to remember that we were told of his determinants. Though it was so long ago that we were told, it may now be just a rumor to us. But, we were always content with these conceptualizations, weren’t we, until we considered their embodiment in an extant being. Then, we got real scared and either denied them to him, or affirmed them. Usually, the direction we took had more to do with what was going on in our private lives than that we were waxing theologically

Our real question soon becomes manifest; “If He is all that we think He is via our act of conceptualizing Him, is it even conceivable that He doesn’t exist?” “And, if He exists, is He actually seeing me . . . right now?” If He does not really exist then I’m safe. But here is where the real dilemma occurs: because, if he does not really exist, that would banish all of our acts of conceptualization to the realm of unreliability. Fortunately, we are not willing to deny our ability to quickly act to correctly conceptualize. And, it is impossible to knowingly deceive ourselves in our own conceptualizing as we would then know that there is nothing that we can ever depend on. We are either outright lying to ourselves, or, we are lying to God. Some of us will try to relegate this impasse to the territory of skepticism, or, non-think. I usually found that that didn’t help.

This is a somewhat better rendition: princeton.edu/~grosen/puc/phi203/ontological.html
jd

 

[Betterave]

You raise some very good points, but I will offer one amendment:

God is God if I can conceive of him precisely as what he is and has always been, as I have always understood him to be: that is that being than which none greater can be conceived. This is not an argument from -]any kind of logic/-] logic in any merely formal sense (i.e., with the usual connotations of ‘logic’ understood by contemporary analytic philosophers).

 

[Prodigal_Son]

JDaniel – Interesting remarks. Your comments, and the website you referenced, reminded me of the tenacious character of this argument.

Everyone – Perhaps it would be best to step away for a moment, to figure out something of the relationship between a) concepts and b) things that exist.

Go back 500 years, if you will, to when the “atom” was merely a concept. There were arguments for the existence of “atoms”, that went something like this:

1. The physical world is made up of matter. (Trivially true – even if there is no such thing as a physical world).
2. Matter is divisible. (One definition of matter).
3. If there were no smallest constituents of a divisible thing, then the thing would not exist.
4. Material things exist. (Reference to the world)
5. There are smallest constituents of matter.

Then we called the smallest constituents “atoms”, and said that atoms necessarily existed. (This is nothing like our current definition of atoms, by the bye.) What I want to focus on here is the CONCEPT “atom”, which may alternately be called “smallest constituent of a divisible thing”.

Suppose there are no “atoms”, no smallest constituents. (Many sane people believe just such a thing). Nevertheless, I still have a clear concept of a smallest constituent. The fact that I have a concept is unexplained, but the fact that I have such a concept does not entail the instantiation of this concept. The concept may merely be a “compound” of various ideas: smallness, constitution, etc.

The concept of an atom, if atoms exist, points to atoms. If atoms do not exist, the concept points to nothing. At any rate, there is a world’s difference between the concept and the thing. JDaniel, you talk about the “objects of conceptualization”. And it is true that conceptions are necessarily conceptions OF, but they are not necessarily conceptions of some existing thing. I don’t imagine I’m saying anything controversial here.

If atoms are (conceptually) the smallest constituents of matter, then they (syntactically) carry the predicate of being constituents of matter.

If God is (conceptually) a necessary being, then God (syntactically) carries the predicate “existing”. But from the fact that a concept has certain predicates, you cannot jump to the conclusion that a person exists.

 

[Betterave]

1. The physical world is made up of matter. (Trivially true – even if there is no such thing as a physical world).
2. Matter is divisible. (One definition of matter).
3. If there were no smallest constituents of a divisible thing, then the thing would not exist.
4. Material things exist. (Reference to the world)
5. There are smallest constituents of matter.

I notice (3) carries no justification, which makes me a little suspicious… (Leibniz too). Care to explain?

(I suspect that it could in fact be proven that the notion of a conceptually necessary atom (i.e., the notion of a non-contingently a-tomic (un-splittable) physical atom) is in fact contradictory.)

 

[Prodigal_Son]

I notice (3) carries no justification, which makes me a little suspicious… (Leibniz too). Care to explain?

(I suspect that it could in fact be proven that the notion of a conceptually necessary atom (i.e., the notion of a non-contingently a-tomic (un-splittable) physical atom) is in fact contradictory.)

I absolutely agree that premise 3 is controversial. It is, in many ways, very similar to the premise in the cosmological argument that says that: If there was not a first event, there would be no subsequent events. (Which forbids infinite regress.) Both premises, at first, seem like common sense, but they are rather difficult to defend to anyone who doesn’t already believe them.

The most interesting thing to me about the “atom” argument is that it seems to make atoms immaterial objects, since they are not complex.

 

[Betterave]

I absolutely agree that premise 3 is controversial. It is, in many ways, very similar to the premise in the cosmological argument that says that: If there was not a first event, there would be no subsequent events. (Which forbids infinite regress.) Both premises, at first, seem like common sense, but they are rather difficult to defend to anyone who doesn’t already believe them.

Okay, so where do you think this leaves the rest of your argument?

The most interesting thing to me about the “atom” argument is that it seems to make atoms immaterial objects, since they are not complex.

Yes, interesting… However I don’t see that an atom should be thought of as entirely incomplex. By definition it is only incomplex in the sense that it is not an aggregate of other atoms. You could say that it’s not materially complex, but not that it’s not structurally/conceptually complex. And ‘not materially complex’ does not imply ‘not-material (immaterial).’

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Okay, so where do you think this leaves the rest of your argument?

My points about conceptual reference still stand. “God exists” is syntactically required, but not thereby proved metaphysically true. “God does not exist” = “A necessary being does not exist”. This, translated, becomes “A necessary being is not necessary,” which is a contradiction. But this does not prove God’s existence, because it is only talking about the grammatical rules of concepts.

Yes, interesting… However I don’t see that an atom should be thought of as entirely incomplex. By definition it is only incomplex in the sense that it is not an aggregate of other atoms. You could say that it’s not materially complex, but not that it’s not structurally/conceptually complex. And ‘not materially complex’ does not imply ‘not-material (immaterial).’

If we define “matter” as divisible, then atoms are not matter. And if they are not matter, how can they be “mater-ial”?

 

[Prodigal_Son]

You could say that it’s not materially complex, but not that it’s not structurally/conceptually complex. And ‘not materially complex’ does not imply ‘not-material (immaterial).’

An afterthought: I don’t know what it means for some thing to be conceptually complex. Concepts apply to concepts. A thing necessarily does not possess any concepts.

Now, a thing may “possess” properties. But I will take a nominalist approach to these properties, and claim that the person is in no way composed of his properties. You cannot take away my property of being nearsighted, because I *have *no such property (although I am nearsighted). If my vision were 20/20, I would no longer be nearsighted. That is all.

I’ll stop quibbling now. Oh, and – although I write them rather forcefully – take my views with a grain of salt. I’m just stumbling my way around in the dark, seeing through a glass darkly.

 

[punkforchrist]

I used to think of the ontological argument as a semantic trick, but now I think Anselm’s intuition is ingenious. Spinoza put the argument in a neat way:

1. Inability to exist is impotence. (Premise)
2. Ability to exist is power. (Premise)
3. If there is no omnipotent being, then finite beings are more powerful than an omnipotent being. (From 1 and 2)
4. Finite beings are not more powerful than an omnipotent being. (Premise)
5. Therefore, an omnipotent being exists. (From 3 and 4)

Of course, the debate over whether existence can be considered a predicate has its implications. It seems obvious to me, at any rate, that something that has no power will not exist and that something that does not exist has no power.

As for Gaunilo’s Island and similar paradoxes, I agree with promethius and Betterave on this one. The concept of a perfect island, or of any perfect physical object, is incoherent. I won’t add to what has already been said, though.

 

[Betterave]

If we define “matter” as divisible, then atoms are not matter. And if they are not matter, how can they be “mater-ial”?

Three points (with any of which you may disagree ):

1. Atoms are divisible, speaking absolutely; it is only a matter of contingent fact that they cannot be divided.
2. “Matter” should not be defined as divisible, but as composed of material atoms (properly understood) or simply as extended in space or constituted in space.
3. We know this to be metaphysically true because it is implied by the relevant concepts.

My points about conceptual reference still stand. “God exists” is syntactically required, but not thereby proved metaphysically true. “God does not exist” = “A necessary being does not exist”. This, translated, becomes “A necessary being is not necessary,” which is a contradiction. But this does not prove God’s existence, because it is only talking about the grammatical rules of concepts.

Let me analyze what you wrote earlier then:

Perhaps it would be best to step away for a moment, to figure out something of the relationship between a) concepts and b) things that exist.

Go back 500 years, if you will, to when the “atom” was merely a concept. [Was the ‘atom’ ever ‘merely a concept’?] There were arguments for the existence of “atoms”, that went something like this:

1. The physical world is made up of matter. (Trivially true – even if there is no such thing as a physical world).
2. Matter is divisible. (One definition of matter).
3. If there were no smallest constituents of a divisible thing, then the thing would -]not exist/-] BE INFINITELY DIVISIBLE.
4. Material things exist. (Reference to the world)
5. -]There are smallest constituents of matter/-]. THIS IS TRUE EVEN IF THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A PHYSICAL WORLD!

Then we called the POSSIBLE smallest constituents “atoms”, and said that atoms necessarily existed (AS CONSTITUENTS OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD… EVEN IF THERE IS NO SUCH THING!). (This is nothing like our current definition of atoms, by the bye.) What I want to focus on here is the CONCEPT “atom”, which may alternately be called “smallest constituent of a divisible thing”.

Suppose there are no “atoms”, no smallest constituents. (Many sane people believe just such a thing). Nevertheless, I still have a clear concept of a smallest constituent. The fact that I have -]a/-] THIS concept is -]unexplained/-] A NECESSARY COROLLARY OF MY CONCEPT OF A PHYSICAL WORLD, but the fact that I have such a concept does not entail the ‘REAL’ instantiation of this concept IF THE PHYSICAL WORLD IS NOT ‘REAL’. The concept may merely be a -]“compound”/-] CONSEQUENCE of various ideas: smallness, constitution, PHYSICAL WORLD, etc.

The concept of an atom, if atoms exist, -]points to/-] INSTANTIATES THE ‘FORM’ OF atoms AT THE LEVEL OF THE INTELLECT. If atoms do not exist, the concept points to -]nothing/-] POINTS TO THE NECESSARY STRUCTURE OF A POSSIBLE PHYSICAL WORLD. -]At any rate, there is a world’s difference between the concept and the thing/-]. JDaniel, you talk about the “objects of conceptualization”. And it is true that conceptions are necessarily conceptions OF, but they are not necessarily conceptions of some existing thing. -]I don’t imagine I’m saying anything controversial here/-].

If atoms are (conceptually) the smallest constituents of matter, then they (syntactically) carry the predicate of being constituents of matter.

If God is (conceptually) a necessary being, then God (syntactically) carries the predicate “existing”. But from the fact that a concept has certain predicates, you cannot jump to the conclusion that a person exists**, UNLESS THE ASCRIPTION OF THOSE CONCEPTS TO THAT PERSON IS GROUNDED IN THE CONDITIONS NECESSARY FOR CONCEIVING ITSELF TO BE POSSIBLE**.

 

[Betterave]

An afterthought: I don’t know what it means for some thing to be conceptually complex. Concepts apply to concepts. A thing necessarily does not possess any concepts.

…therefore ‘thing’ is not a concept? I would say something like: a thing is only constituted as such insofar as it has a concept proper to it. Therefore things necessarily instantiate concepts.

Now, a thing may “possess” properties. But I will take a nominalist approach to these properties, and claim that the person is in no way composed of his properties. You cannot take away my property of being nearsighted, because I *have *no such property (although I am nearsighted). If my vision were 20/20, I would no longer be nearsighted. That is all.

So what are properties? Not concepts? Do you take a nominalist approach to “possession” as well as to properties? How does that work?

 

[JDaniel]

I absolutely agree that premise 3 is controversial. It is, in many ways, very similar to the premise in the cosmological argument that says that: If there was not a first event, there would be no subsequent events. (Which forbids infinite regress.)

Is this so? I should think the reason that there cannot be an infinite regress is that there’s no such thing, in reality, of an actual infinity. Not with matter, in any event. (I suppose there could be an actual infinity of exigencies of an immaterial stuff of some sort.)

[SNIP]

The most interesting thing to me about the “atom” argument is that it seems to make atoms immaterial objects, since they are not complex.

In which case there could be an existing actual infinity, right?

God bless,
jd

 

[MindOverMatter2]

I used to think of the ontological argument as a semantic trick, but now I think Anselm’s intuition is ingenious. Spinoza put the argument in a neat way:

1. Inability to exist is impotence. (Premise)
2. Ability to exist is power. (Premise)
3. If there is no omnipotent being, then finite beings are more powerful than an omnipotent being. (From 1 and 2)
4. Finite beings are not more powerful than an omnipotent being. (Premise)
5. Therefore, an omnipotent being exists. (From 3 and 4)

Of course, the debate over whether existence can be considered a predicate has its implications. It seems obvious to me, at any rate, that something that has no power will not exist and that something that does not exist has no power.

As for Gaunilo’s Island and similar paradoxes, I agree with promethius and Betterave on this one. The concept of a perfect island, or of any perfect physical object, is incoherent. I won’t add to what has already been said, though.

I am not sure yet if this argument is correct, but i like it.

 

[JohnDamian]

I used to think of the ontological argument as a semantic trick, but now I think Anselm’s intuition is ingenious. Spinoza put the argument in a neat way:

1. Inability to exist is impotence. (Premise)
2. Ability to exist is power. (Premise)
3. If there is no omnipotent being, then finite beings are more powerful than an omnipotent being. (From 1 and 2)
4. Finite beings are not more powerful than an omnipotent being. (Premise)
5. Therefore, an omnipotent being exists. (From 3 and 4)

Not bad.

“Finite beings” is inserted as a suppositio personal; so is “omnipotent being”; and are inserted conceptually; so the premises 3 and 4 are equivocally fallacious; for though (through premise 2) an existence is a perfection; such a perfection is a numerical perfection (as such a perfection is instantiated in individuals) - and this cannot transcend the super-numerical distiction between finite and infinite entities; thus a perfected finite entity is still less perfect than an unperfected infinite entity. Even though a perfected finite entity has a potency great enough to elicit an act higher than that of an unperfected infinite entity; it is not it’s superior in quality; merely in existence and praxis.

What follows from such equivocal fallacies is the following;

1. Inability to exist is impotence. (Premise)
2. Ability to exist is power. (Premise)
3. If there is only one omnipotent being, then one infinite being is more powerful than two omnipotent beings.
4. One omnipotent being is not more powerful than two omnipotent beings (Premise)
5. Therefore, two omnipotent being exists. (From 3 and 4)

And so on etc.

The problem with the ontologial proofs is the presupposition of a numerical perfection as an ontological perfecter capable of transcending the super-numerical distinction between infinite and finite. This is not the case; thus only equivocations and absurdities follow.

 

[punkforchrist]

John, thanks for your thoughts. As MindOverMatter mentioned, I’m not sure if the argument is correct, either. However, I don’t think the issue is numerical, but a matter of potentia. An existing man would have more potentia than a non-existent God. It’s not that two is better than one or one is better than zero numerically, but that something non-existent can literally have no power (potential with respect to act) at all. Also, I don’t think the concept of two omnipotent beings is coherent, so I’m not sure the counter-argument is analogous to Spinoza’s version of the ontological argument.