The Ontological Argument

I've been reading a really good book recently, called Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution. It was written by David Stove, an atheistic philosopher from Australia. He was an expert on David Hume, the 18th century philosopher known for his skepticism. David Stove applied this skepticism well in criticizing Darwin and all the neo-Darwinists. It can be very useful when arguing against atheists if you can quote another atheist.

I could go on for a while about this book, but that's not why I'm writing. A while back we were talking about the 'ontological argument' for the existence of God, and Chuck brought up the objection that it is not at all clear that 'existence' is a property of things. Well, while reading David Stove's book I ran across a passage in which he criticizes Richard Dawkins 'discovery' of something called 'memes'. (That subject deserves a discussion of it's own.) Stove called Dawkin's discovery a pseudo-discovery, then gave a couple of examples of other philosophical 'pseudo-discoveries'. One of them is Kant's 'discovery' that 'existence' is not a property. It goes like this:

"Any property that a real x had, an imaginary x could have, and any property that an imaginary x could have, a real x could have.

So,

Existence is not a property."

Stove doesn't elaborate any further, he just threw it out there as an example. There a probably several ways to object to Kant's idea here. The first thing that comes to my mind is that one reason some people are prone to dislike the the ontological argument is that it seems so simple and child-like that it can't possibly be true. And if evidence of God's existence is so simple, doesn't that trivialize faith a little bit? To the first objection I would say that a) we are supposed to be child-like as Christians, and b) it would be very ironic for serious, grown-ups to claim to have easily dismissed such a childish notion with such a childish notion of their own. To the second objection I would say that, a) in addition to the admirable quality of being child-like, we find in Romans 1 that reality shows us clearly that God exists, and that not to see this is to suppress what we should naturally understand, and the ontological argument is an example of that, and b) it is a misunderstanding of faith (a subject we've already covered before).

The truth is that both the ontological argument and the 'existence' objection are simple on one level, yet you can spend a lot of time thinking them through. Not all Christian thinkers agree with the ontological argument, for various reasons, but some of it stems from Kant. But many, such as the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, do think it is sound. And there is the old story of Bertrand Russell walking across the yard at Cambridge mumbling to himself, "Great God in boots, the ontological argument is valid!"

To me, the 'existence' objection reveals a certain, modernist, bias. Remember that I've said before that I'm more pre-modern than modern or post-modern. But Kant was a modernist, and there are a few things it would have been good for him to remember. Ancient philosophers, and this would have included the church fathers, understood that there were up to 12 different ways in which something can be said to exist. I don't know most of them, but Caleb and I are going to learn them next year in his logic class. But the two different senses of existence that stand out to me are to exist 'in the mind' or to exist 'independent of the mind'. Take the example of a child's imaginary friend. If a child comes into the house and says that their friend has just been hit by a car, it is appropriate to respond differently if this is a real friend who lives down the street, or if it is an imaginary friend. Both friends exist, but one only exists in the child's mind, whereas the real friend who lives down the street has an existence independent of the child's mind. Clearly, there is a sense in which one of the friends 'exists' and the other doesn't. The friend who lives down the street has a property that the other one doesn't.

There is an objection to the ontological argument that I think is a lot more powerful. In a deductive argument, if the premise(s) is true, and the conclusion follows from the premise(s), then the conclusion is true. It is a slam dunk. In this case the premise, "It is possible that a being greater than which no being could be exists," (or however you want to formulate it) is not going to be readily accepted by everyone. In simpler form it be simply, "It is possible that God exists" or "It is possible that a necessary being exists." I accept those premises, and it seems an agnostic would too, but some atheists won't.

This brings up another pre-modern idea. "I believe in order to understand." Ancient thinkers understood that we all do this. We see it in real life all the time. Someone who believes in global warming believes all the evidence points to the conclusion that man-made global warming is real. And the global warming skeptics do it as well. We all do. Evolutionists, creationists, whatever. It looks a little bit circular, doesn't it? The ironic thing here is that the ancients and medievals understood logic better than anyone, and to them this was ok. It doesn't mean that a circular argument by itself proves anything. But, for moderns a logical chain of thoughts was just that, a chain. One thought follows from another like links in a linear chain. But to the ancients it was more like chain mail armor. It isn't just a chain of links but a whole, 3-dimensional shirt. So, if we take the ontological arugment by itself, there is some room for doubt about that premise. But when we take into consideration everything else we know about reality, and all the other reasons that we have to believe that the existence of God is at least possible, the ontological argument become quite strong.