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You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Home About. Rowe March 16, God is, like, the greatest thing ever. The rap music told me so. Therefore: God exists. So what could it be? Well, I got the first solution by talking with my friend, Jeff. And one more thing.
I only mean to make one more quick point. Citation Philosophy: The Big Questions. YouTube to MP3 Says:. Finn Says:. Bryant Powell Says:. Floy Says:. Erma Says:. But this is not true of the concept of God as Anselm conceives it.
Properties like knowledge, power, and moral goodness, which comprise the concept of a maximally great being, do have intrinsic maximums. For example, perfect knowledge requires knowing all and only true propositions; it is conceptually impossible to know more than this.
Likewise, perfect power means being able to do everything that it is possible to do; it is conceptually impossible for a being to be able to do more than this. Broad puts this important point:. Now this will be meaningless verbiage unless there is some intrinsic maximum or upper limit to the possible intensity of every positive property which is capable of degrees. With some magnitudes this condition is fulfilled. It is, e. But it seems quite clear that there are other properties, such as length or temperature or pain, to which there is no intrinsic maximum or upper limit of degree.
While St. The problem with this criticism is that the ontological argument can be restated without defining God. Nevertheless, Aquinas had a second problem with the ontological argument. On this view, God is unlike any other reality known to us; while we can easily understand concepts of finite things, the concept of an infinitely great being dwarfs finite human understanding. If the concept is coherent, then even a minimal understanding of the concept is sufficient to make the argument.
Premise 3 thus entails that 1 existence is a property; and 2 instantiating existence makes a thing better, other things being equal, than it would have been otherwise.
Kant rejects premise 3 on the ground that, as a purely formal matter, existence does not function as a predicate. As Kant puts the point:. Being is evidently not a real predicate, that is, a conception of something which is added to the conception of some other thing. It is merely the positing of a thing, or of certain determinations in it.
Logically, it is merely the copula of a judgement. The proposition, God is omnipotent , contains two conceptions, which have a certain object or content; the word is , is no additional predicate-it merely indicates the relation of the predicate to the subject.
Now if I take the subject God with all its predicates omnipotence being one , and say, God is , or There is a God , I add no new predicate to the conception of God, I merely posit or affirm the existence of the subject with all its predicates — I posit the object in relation to my conception.
Accordingly, what goes wrong with the first version of the ontological argument is that the notion of existence is being treated as the wrong logical type. Concepts, as a logical matter, are defined entirely in terms of logical predicates.
Existence is not a property in, say, the way that being red is a property of an apple. Rather it is a precondition for the instantiation of properties in the following sense: it is not possible for a non-existent thing to instantiate any properties because there is nothing to which, so to speak, a property can stick.
Nothing has no qualities whatsoever. To say that x instantiates a property P is hence to presuppose that x exists. But even if we concede that existence is a property, it does not seem to be the sort of property that makes something better for having it.
Norman Malcolm expresses the argument as follows:. The doctrine that existence is a perfection is remarkably queer. It makes sense and is true to say that my future house will be a better one if it is insulated than if it is not insulated; but what could it mean to say that it will be a better house if it exists than if it does not? My future child will be a better man if he is honest than if he is not; but who would understand the saying that he will be a better man if he exists than if he does not?
Or who understands the saying that if God exists He is more perfect than if he does not exist? One might say, with some intelligibility, that it would be better for oneself or for mankind if God exists than if He does not-but that is a different matter. The idea here is that existence is very different from, say, the property of lovingness.
A being that is loving is, other things being equal, better or greater than a being that is not. As it turns out, there are two different versions of the ontological argument in the Prosologium. The second version does not rely on the highly problematic claim that existence is a property and hence avoids many of the objections to the classic version. Here is the second version of the ontological argument as Anselm states it:.
God is that, than which nothing greater can be conceived. For, it is possible to conceive of a being which cannot be conceived not to exist; and this is greater than one which can be conceived not to exist. Hence, if that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, can be conceived not to exist, it is not that, than which nothing greater can be conceived.
But this is an irreconcilable contradiction. There is, then, so truly a being than which nothing greater can be conceived to exist, that it cannot even be conceived not to exist; and this being thou art, O Lord, our God. This version of the argument relies on two important claims. As before, the argument includes a premise asserting that God is a being than which a greater cannot be conceived. But this version of the argument, unlike the first, does not rely on the claim that existence is a perfection; instead it relies on the claim that necessary existence is a perfection.
This latter claim asserts that a being whose existence is necessary is greater than a being whose existence is not necessary.
Otherwise put, then, the second key claim is that a being whose non-existence is logically impossible is greater than a being whose non-existence is logically possible. This second version appears to be less vulnerable to Kantian criticisms than the first. To begin with, necessary existence, unlike mere existence, seems clearly to be a property.
Notice, for example, that the claim that x necessarily exists entails a number of claims that attribute particular properties to x. For example, if x necessarily exists, then its existence does not depend on the existence of any being unlike contingent human beings whose existence depends, at the very least, on the existence of their parents.
And this seems to entail that x has the reason for its existence in its own nature. But these latter claims clearly attribute particular properties to x. And only a claim that attributes a particular property can entail claims that attribute particular properties. While the claim that x exists clearly entails that x has at least one property, this does not help.
We cannot soundly infer any claims that attribute particular properties to x from either the claim that x exists or the claim that x has at least one property; indeed, the claim that x has at least one property no more expresses a particular property than the claim that x exists. This distinguishes the claim that x exists from the claim that x necessarily exists and hence seems to imply that the latter, and only the latter, expresses a property.
Moreover, one can plausibly argue that necessary existence is a great-making property. To say that a being necessarily exists is to say that it exists eternally in every logically possible world; such a being is not just, so to speak, indestructible in this world, but indestructible in every logically possible world — and this does seem, at first blush, to be a great-making property. As Malcolm puts the point:. If a housewife has a set of extremely fragile dishes, then as dishes, they are inferior to those of another set like them in all respects except that they are not fragile.
Those of the first set are dependent for their continued existence on gentle handling; those of the second set are not.
There is a definite connection between the notions of dependency and inferiority, and independence and superiority. To say that something which was dependent on nothing whatever was superior to anything that was dependent on any way upon anything is quite in keeping with the everyday use of the terms superior and greater.
Nevertheless, the matter is not so clear as Malcolm believes. It might be the case that, other things being equal, a set of dishes that is indestructible in this world is greater than a set of dishes that is not indestructible in this world.
But it is very hard to see how transworld indestructibility adds anything to the greatness of a set of dishes that is indestructible in this world. From our perspective, there is simply nothing to be gained by adding transworld indestructibility to a set of dishes that is actually indestructible. Other arguments have been categorised as ontological, including those made by Islamic philosopher Mulla Sadra.
Since its proposal, few philosophical ideas have generated as much interest and discussion as the ontological argument. Nearly all of the great minds of Western philosophy have found the argument worthy of their attention and criticism. The general consensus is that the argument is erroneous. He used the analogy of a perfect island, suggesting that the ontological argument could be used to prove the existence of anything. This was the first of many parodies, all of which attempted to show that the argument has absurd consequences.
Also, David Hume offered an empirical objection, criticising its lack of evidential reasoning and rejecting the idea that anything can exist necessarily. Finally, philosophers including C.
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