Wednesday, September 6, 2017

The Ontological Argument for the Existence of God

I have previously discussed some of the classic arguments offered to “prove” the existence of God, including The Argument from Design, The Cosmological Argument, The Fine Tuned Universe and Pascal’s Wager, so I figured I should briefly touch on the so-called “Ontological” argument for the sake of completeness. I have avoided talking about this argument in the past because (a) as originally formulated the argument seems so laughably inadequate that it really doesn’t bear much discussion and (b) modern formulations of the argument add so much jargon and technical word-play that it can be very difficult to even understand what the argument actually is by the time you finish reading it. I will admit, however, that the original ontological argument was seen as significant enough in the past that numerous famous philosophers such as Kant, Hume and even Saint Thomas Aquinas took the time to object to it, so perhaps it’s not as laughably inadequate as it appears to me.
As originally formulated by theologian and philosopher Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), the ontological argument is as follows:
  1. It is a conceptual truth (or, so to speak, true by definition) that God is a being than which none greater can be imagined (that is, the greatest possible being that can be imagined).
  2. God exists as an idea in the mind.
  3. A being that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is, other things being equal, greater than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind.
  4. Thus, if God exists only as an idea in the mind, then we can imagine something that is greater than God (that is, a greatest possible being that does exist).
  5. But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God (for it is a contradiction to suppose that we can imagine a being greater than the greatest possible being that can be imagined.)
  6. Therefore, God exists.
He later restated this same argument slightly differently:
  1. By definition, God is a being than which none greater can be imagined.
  2. A being that necessarily exists in reality is greater than a being that does not necessarily exist.
  3. Thus, by definition, if God exists as an idea in the mind but does not necessarily exist in reality, then we can imagine something that is greater than God.
  4. But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God.
  5. Thus, if God exists in the mind as an idea, then God necessarily exists in reality.
  6. God exists in the mind as an idea.
  7. Therefore, God necessarily exists in reality.
As we all know (or should know by now) an argument is only as good as its premises, and a perfectly valid argument can be completely unsound if the premises are not actually true.

The first premise of the ontological argument is that, by definition, God is the greatest possible being that can be imagined. This sinks the entire argument right from the start, since it is defining God as “the greatest possible thing that can be imagined” without actually providing any empirical evidence that this is the case. It is also setting up a wholly circular argument by arbitrarily defining God as a being that embodies the very characteristic that will later be used to prove His existence. You might as well define “unicorns” as “the beings responsible for the color blue” and then claim that the existence of the color blue is therefore proof that unicorns exist. This is simply defining God into existence, since we don’t actually know what God is like even if He were to exist and it basically amounts to an argument that states, “God, by definition, exists; therefore He exists.”

The second premise that a being that exists (or “necessarily exists,” if you prefer) is more perfect than one that doesn’t exist is yet another assertion without any evidence to support it. How does one even define “perfect” in the first place? If I want to go all Platonic, should I start claiming that the “perfect” concept of a chair, to which all actual chairs are merely compared to in our mind, must somehow actually exist somewhere or else it can’t actually be “perfect”? Of course not. “Perfection” is, in many cases, an ideal that does not actually exist and there is no requirement to think that something must exist in order to be considered perfect. Just asserting that something that exists is “more perfect” than something that is only a concept doesn’t make it so.

Aside from the fact that this entire argument is nothing more than an attempt to define God into existence, however, this argument suffers from the same problem as many of the other arguments I mentioned above. To wit, at most all these arguments can possibly prove is that some sort of supreme being exists and not the actual “God” that is actually worshiped by those who would use these argument to prove their God’s existence. The God supposedly proved by these arguments is not the God that answers prayers, performs miracles, provides revelation, rewards the faithful, punishes sinners, gives us a set of objective morals, tells us the way to live our lives, etc. It is a nebulous description of God that could apply equally to the God worshiped by any religion, and therefore cannot be used to prove the existence of the God worshiped by any specific religion. It’s the ultimate bait and switch.

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