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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2009
My Logic
By Tulse Luper
If it weren’t for my logic, if it weren’t for my critical thinking, my emotions would takeover. My emotions would destroy me. These emotions would cause me to be too human… they would cause me to be weak and diluted. So I destroyed my emotions in the interest of survival.
You see, without my critical thinking, without my skepticism, I would love unconditionally…I would except others without knowing; I think they call that faith or perhaps belief. I would except many things on faith had I not relied on reason and I would have become zealous in my pursuit of compassion and empathy. But I just knew that without my logic, my heart would bleed out and I would die. So I did not assent to the faith that required belief without reason. Thus I do not have faith in you.
(I think I laughed when I heard the sacred poem…and then I broke the poem… and I broke the poet. And the reason I laughed when I did this, is because the poem broke me…(I always laugh when I am in pain)). -Enceladus under the Earth.
My memoir is now at last complete. My thoughts are scrubbed clean of the mire I’ve created with my beliefs…with the help of my others. My recollections are pure and free of dis-ease and blame. It took a long bit of time and clever action; the magician’s slight of hand known as reason… that I may at last claim as my own, my part in the game of destruction and survival we call life.
And I know I cannot survive without my killing something that is not me or does not profess allegiance to me.
Without my logic, I would easily cling to others and ask of them that they help me. But I’ve learned in the hardest ways, that they cannot help: their faith and reason is designed by them, to navigate their own course. And most times, what they plot as their course, will run counter to my own.
So it will be my logic and reason, my cold assent to the things I know to be true, justified by my reason, that gave me the will and power I need to survive, that will that informs me. It is my map writ larger than the earth, that usurps all others’ maps in that Borgesian way, thus I will decide what is best…what will last. And I will not accept your fate as anything other than an obstacle to mine.
It is at last very clear: all things are reduced to this: You believe, I suspect!
Hail Reason!
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