St. Anselm’s Ontological Argument for The Existence of God
With Some Counter-Arguments
by Michael Ryan
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St. Anselm, arguably the “father” of Scholasticism, emphasized as did Augustine, the methodological priority of faith over reason where truth must be achieved only through “fides quaerens intellectum” (“faith seeking understanding”). As the time was right for Scholastic inquiry into all parts of “divine” metaphysics, Anselm, Augustine and Aquinas would take great pains to argue that the reason of man could indeed be employed in critical inquiry even unto the very nature of God.
Anselm proposed his famous Ontological Argument, in which God is understood as “aliquid quod maius non cogitari potest” (“that than which nothing greater can be conceived”) in the Proslogion (Addition). It must be noted however that Anselm’s argument was actually not the “first” attempt at employing reason and argument to prove a priori that God necessarily exists as is sometimes believed. That honor belongs to Abu Ali Sina Balkhi or as he is known in the Latin world, Avicenna. Fact be known, Avicenna’s ontological argument based on necessary and contingent causes would be “borrowed” by St. Thomas Aquinas years later when he wrote the quinque viae or “5 Ways.”
Let’s look again at Anselm’s argument in the light of a more modern description:
1. God is something than which nothing greater can be thought.
2. God exists in the understanding.
3. It is greater to exist in reality and in the understanding than just in understanding.
4. Therefore, God exists in reality
Sounds good but there is something fishy here and even a fool can intuit the weakness in Anselm’s argument:
- Existence both in reality and in imagination is greater than existence solely in one’s imagination.
This is a very big inference. The claim that ideas in the mind cannot be more real than reality is part and parcel the problem. Stated another way: that that is thought of, must exist. Still another way: existence is necessary for perfection.
Gaunilo of Marmoutiers, in his most powerful objection to Anselm, invited his readers to conceive of the greatest, or most perfect, island. However unlikely in fact that no such island actually existed, his argument would then say that we are not thinking of the greatest conceivable island, because the greatest conceivable island would exist, as well as having all those other desirable properties. Similar objections as Gaunilo’s perfect island thought problem are sometimes known as “Overload Objections” in which they do not claim to show where or how the ontological argument goes wrong, but rather claim that if it is sound, then other arguments of this form would “overload” the world with an infinitely large number of necessarily-existing perfect islands, perfect lizards, perfect pencils and the like.
Perhaps the most “logical” objection to Anselm comes from Immanuel Kant who proceeds to target the argument within the framework of a propositional calculus. Kant defines the central distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments—i.e. in an analytic judgment, the predicate expresses something that is already contained within a concept and is therefore a tautology; in a synthetic judgment, the predicate links the concept to something outside it that is not already logically implied by it. So to say that “there is at least one thing x such that x is x” tell us nothing about x…in other words, merely “being” is not a predicate…and still in other words, existence [alone] is not a real predicate. The statement “God exists” is a synthetic judgment of existence that does not assert something contained in or implied by the concept of God and would require knowledge of God as an object of that concept. What the ontological argument does then, is it “begs the question” by assuming what it purports to prove by attempting to import into the concept of God, the synthetic assertion of the existence of God, thereby tautologously defining God as existing.
Reminds one of the dreaded Cartesian Circle that would “entertain” even later philosophers.
(YEAH WELL WHAT DO i KNOW ABOUT THE WAYS OF gOD!
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