(d) THE 'ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT' and its context in worship

-- brief notes only. For more detail, see notes on Anselm and on Descartes from History of Philosophy units. (Notes on Anselm in the library, includes a potted history of the argument from Anselm to the present day, as well as a rather more detailed exposition and critique.)

(A) The ‘Ontological’ Argument:

The 'Ontological Argument' is the name given since Kant to what are actually a number of related arguments originally invented by Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) and re-discovered by Descartes in the 17th Century.

In Anselm's Proslogion, it occurs in the midst of a prayer addressed to the very God whose existence he is supposedly proving. Anselm is engaged in a process of Fides Quaerens Intellectum, faith seeking understanding, striving to understand that which he believes and loves, including the existence and nature of God. But to understand for Anselm = to show the same thing by reason alone, so we can take it and treat it as a genuinely meant argument. See attached for original (in English translation from Latin).

In Descartes, the argument(s) occurs in the Fifth Meditation, to show that the existence of God, which he has already proved a posteriori in the Third Meditation, is at least as certain as the truths of mathematics. See attached for original (in English translation from French and Latin).

Anselm’s Argument

Anselm's argument in the Proslogion has three parts, followed by an appendix, the first two parts with a common pattern which pattern dominates the Proslogion as a whole:

God = that than which nothing greater can be conceived.
It is greater to be X rather than Y.
Therefore God is either X or something better, otherwise we would be involved in a contradiction, God by definition being something that which nothing greater can be conceived.

It is the repeated deployment of this same pattern of proof rather than individual bits of argument to which Anselm refers when he talks of his single independent proof that You (God) exist as we believe and that You are everything we believe you to be.

Proslogion Ch. II: God truly exists:

To exist both in reality and in the understanding is greater than merely to exist in the understanding.

Proslogion Ch. IIIa: God exists so truly that he cannot even be thought not to exist.

Something whose non-existence is inconceivable is greater than anything whose non-existence is conceivable.

Proslogion Ch. IIIb: You are this being O Lord our God:

You alone are something that which nothing greater can be conceived.

You alone exist most truly and thus most greatly of all.

Proslogion Ch. IV: Appendix: how come the fool can say in his heart what cannot even be consistently thought.

Descartes’ Argument

Descartes' argument is more direct, but comes to the same thing:

(1) God is a supremely perfect being.
Existence is a perfection.
Therefore God exists.

(2) God is a supremely perfect being.
Necessary existence is a perfection.
Therefore God necessarily exists.

(B) Three questions in respect of the argument:

. What's the point of it, why would anyone want to think of it as more than an interesting piece of logic, particularly if they already believe? What is its sitz in leben, so to speak?

. Does it work, have Anselm and/or Descartes done their logic well?

What kind of God does it point us towards?

(i)the life context of the argument:

It is fairly clearly that the context of the starting point is the experience of religious worship or adoration. What Anselm and Descartes have shown, if the argument works, is that the very notion of a God worthy of worship imposes on us the necessity of confessing, under pain of mental or verbal self-contradiction, both the existence and the necessary existence of such a God. God's existence and necessary existence is imposed by the very idea of God as worshipful being.

Less surely: the argument itself is probably a kind of adoration in its own right, the adoration of reason before God, human reason bowing down before the necessity of the Divine Mystery. There is some evidence for this in Anselm, trying to show God "by reason alone", "by necessary reasons", and especially in Descartes: "at least as certain...as the truths of mathematics".

It also works to take the life context as the First Commandment, to love the Lord our God with all the heart and all the soul and all ones strength and all ones mind? What could possibly be worthy of such love except the supremely perfect, than which nothing greater can be conceived… The argument itself could then be taken as one expression of such love. However, such love is itself worship and if worship is not such love it is not true worship, so we can take this together with the first.

This life context has the effect of legitimizing the notion of God being deployed in the argument. The worshipping theistic religions after all are the language games where 'God' and its equivalents (Allah, Yahweh/Elohim etc.) have their home, rather than philosophy itself.

(ii) the validity of the argument

This depends mostly on the middle step, the comparisons:

Proslogion II and Descartes (i):

Anselm: to exist in reality and in the understand is greater than just to exist in the understanding alone.

Descartes: existence is a 'perfection'.

but, say the critics (esp. Aquinas and Kant), what kind of comparison is that? Existence is not a kind of property that can be added to something, alongside whiteness or triangularity or goodness or beauty. It is not a perfection, a nice property or quality for something to have, because it is not a property or quality at all but that without the obtaining of which there are no properties or qualities.

The modern defenders of the argument, e.g. Charles Hartshorne, Norman Malcolm and some modal logicians, have accepted this criticism, but point out that it is possible to construct another argument relying on Proslogion IIIa rather than Proslogion II (and the equivalent in Descartes):

Anselm: inconceivability of non- existence is greater than non-inconceivability of non-existence;
Descartes: necessary existence is a perfection.

This latter version appears to be less problematic. But what exactly do we mean by 'necessary existence'...

(iii) what the argument directs us towards, if valid:

1) the necessary existence and therefore existence of something than which nothing greater can be conceived, a supremely perfect, not even conceivably surpassable being.

However, as Charles Hartshorne notes, this formula of Anselm is ambiguous between:

. not conceivably surpassable, even by itself at a later stage,

and

. not conceivably surpassable except possibly in certain respects by itself at a later stage.

That is to say, a not conceivably surpassable being, versus a not conceivably surpassable kind of being.

The first idea may well be incoherent, in so far as it excludes all sensitivity from the divine being, and many of the qualities we would regard as perfections, such as loving kindness, mercy, compassion, patience, would seem to imply such sensitivity. In any case, does worship demand any more than a not conceivably surpassable kind of being? a not conceivably surpassable person? Normally, by the latter we would mean a not conceivably surpassable kind of being.

2) also, this not conceivably surpassable God must exist necessarily, cannot just exist like the rest of us exist, cannot just happen to exist.

But, Hartshorne argues, does this mean that everything about God must be necessary? One trouble here is the content of God's knowledge would have to be necessary and this would seem to make everything necessary. More directly, the creating and what God had to create would also have to be necessary, following from the necessity of the Divine Nature. (Thus Spinoza, thus Hegel: at least they are consistent.)

Of course, neither Anselm nor Descartes would like to take away God's freedom to create. Hartshorne's own view is that while God's existence is necessary, how this existence is actualized is not. There has to be a God. But what kind of God there is we have to open our eyes and ears and hands and hearts and taste and see. How the Divine Existence is actualized depends on God's own decisions and to some extent on decisions within the created world. Similarly, God as supremely perfect being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, by necessity knows all things. But what S/he knows in actual fact depends on what there is to be known, which does not down to the last detail depend on God alone.

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