L3 | ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

• ONTOLOGY

  • study of being, this argument, and others like it, are called ontological arguments.
• THEOLOGY

  • assuming that God exists
• PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

  • take nothing as given, everything needs an argument and evidence needs to be given.
• PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION IS NOT:

  • believing whatever your parents taught you.
  • study of the Bible.
  • religious anthropology, or religious sociology, or a psychological understanding of our reasons for religious belief.
• FAITH

  • definitionally unprovable, which makes it, from a philosophical perspective, not valuable.
• ANSELM

  • 11th century French monk Anselm of Canterbury. 
  • offered a deductive argument for the existence of God, based on what he understood to be the nature of God’s being, or the definition of God
• God is, by definition, the best possible thing we can imagine.  
• ANSELM: God is “that than which no greater can be conceived."
• ANSELM'S BELIEF

  2 WAYS IN WHICH SOMETHING CAN EXIST:

  1. Something can exist only in our minds and be strictly imaginary
  2. can exist in our minds but also in reality, something that we can imagine, but also real
• ANSELM

  • the only thing that could possibly be greater than him would be – a real version
  • Since we’re already imagining the greatest thing possible, there can’t be anything better
  • Therefore, God has to exist, both in my imagination and in reality!
• CRITICISMS FACED BY ANSELM

  • gaunilo's criticism
  • kant's criticism
  • john wisdom's criticism
• GAUNILO'S CRITICISM

  • suggested that we could run the same line of reasoning to prove the existence of literally anything we can imagine.
  • came up with an argument with the exact same formal structure as Anselm’s, to prove that a mythical Lost Island exists
• GAUNILO

  • "The best island I can imagine is one where I can swim and relax on a tropical beach and ski down snow-covered mountains all in one afternoon."
  • I can imagine it, so it must exist. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be the best island – there would be one better and that one would have to be real!
• ANSELM'S RESPONSE TO GAUNILO'S CRITICISM

  1. necessary being
  2. begging the question fallacy
• NECESSARY BEING

  • argument only works for necessary beings, of which there is only one – God
  • one that must exist, so Anselm’s response assumed the very point of contention to be true – that God exists!
• BEGGING THE QUESTION FALLACY

  • When you beg the question, you assume the very thing you’re trying to prove with your argument.
  • By adding this idea of “a necessary being” to his definition of God, Anselm makes God’s existence a part of the definition of God.
• KANT'S CRITICISM

  • “Existence is not a predicate”
  • Predicate
  • something that’s said of another object
  • add to the essence of their subjects, but they can’t be used to prove their existence.
• KANT'S CRITICISM

  • ANSELM’S MISTAKE:
  • existence is something that can be predicated upon a thing or be used as a defining characteristic
  • If God exists, then he must be the greatest being we can imagine – but that doesn’t mean that he does exist.
• JOHN WISDOM'S CRITICISM

  • “The Parable of the Invisible Gardener”
  • “What’s the difference between an invisible, intangible, unsmellable, entirely undetectable gardener and no gardener at all?”
• Both Gaunilo and Kant agreed with Anselm’s conclusion – they also believed in God’s existence. They just thought Anselm’s argument didn’t prove it.
• FORMAL STRUCTURE

  God is the greatest thing we can think of. Things can exist only in our imaginations, or they can also exist in reality. Things that exist in reality are always better than things that exist only in our imaginations. If God existed only in our imaginations, he wouldn’t be the greatest thing that we can think of, because God in reality would be better. Therefore, God must exist in reality.