PHIL/RS 335
God’s Existence Pt. 1: The Ontological Argument
The Ontological Argument
 The ontological argument was first articulated in
Chapter 2 of Anselm’s Proslogion.
 Archbishop of Canterbury, Doctor of the Church; born
in 1033 at Aosta a Burgundian town near Lombardy,
died 21 April, 1109.
 As significant a philosopher as he was a theologian,
Anselm’s work is dominated by the then emerging
question of the status of universals. A realist (as opposed
to a nominalist), Anselm’s arguments, though more
radical than would later become common, were
central to the debate that raged at the heart of
scholasticism.
 Prior to Anselm’s innovation, the dominant form of
proof advanced by theologians was the
cosmological argument.
An Obvious Distinction
Things That
Exist
Things That
Don’t Exist
Some Definitions
 Contingent Thing: a thing whose existence is not necessary
(can without logical contradiction be on either side of our
distinction).
 Impossible Thing: a thing whose existence is impossible
(limited to the right side).
 Necessary Thing: a thing whose existence is necessary (limited
to the left side).
 Possible Thing: a thing whose existence is either necessary or
contingent.
 Existence in the Understanding: anything whose existence
can be conceived.
 Existence in Reality: things which actually exist; anything on
the left side.
A Key (but not obvious)
Distinction
 Anselm employs the distinction between
existence in the understanding and existence in
reality to make a distinction that is central to his
ontological proof.
 We can conceive of a being “than which no
existing being is greater.”
 Though we might wonder if there is such a being.
 We can also have the thought of a being “than
which no conceivable being is greater.”
 We should read conceivable as possible here.
 This is Anselm’s definition of God.
What does Anselm mean by
“greatness”?
 In the text we read, Anselm talks about beings being
‘greater’ than another, but this concept isn’t explained.
 In an elided section of the text, Anselm specifies that not
all possible predicates are “great-making.”
 Size isn’t; wisdom is.
 For “greater,” Anselm sometimes substitutes “better than” or
“superior to” or “more worthy than.
 For Anselm, what makes a being “greater than” another
are wisdom, moral goodness and (importantly) existence.
 This is not an all or nothing thing (an unwise but just person is
greater than a wise but unjust one).
 However, for a thing whose existence is possible (for example),
if it existed it would be greater than if it didn’t.
The Argument (compressed)
 Given all that we’ve just rehearsed, we can
summarize Anselm’s argument in the following
form:
1.
God (as defined above) exists in the
understanding.
2.
God is a possible being.
3.
If something exists only in the understanding and
might also exist in reality, then it might have been
greater than it is.
__________________________
Conclusion: God exists.
The Argument (expanded)
 In the text, Anselm doesn’t proceed directly to the
conclusion but instead offers a type of argument known
as a Reductio ad Absurdum (pushing a claim to an
absurd conclusion and thus disproving it.
 Given statements 1-3:
4. Suppose God exists only in the understanding.
5. Then, God may have been greater than he is.
6. And, God is therefore a being than which a greater is
possible.
7. But, given the definition of God, 6 is a contradiction.
8. So, It is false that God exists only in the understanding.
_________________________
Conclusion: God exists in reality as well as in the understanding.
Evaluation
 The argument is valid, and thus, if the premises
are true, the conclusion must necessarily follow.
But are the premises true?
 Most of the suspicion about the argument from
the conviction that the logical analysis of a
concept can tell us nothing about its existence.
 This is the point that Descartes makes in the second
column of the inset on p. 43. Of course, Descartes
shares Anselm’s conviction that the concept of God
is unique.
 This conviction is definitely not shared by everyone.
Gaunilo and the Fool
 Gaunilo was an 11th century Benedictine monk who,
unconvinced of the move from concept to existence,
and taking the part of the Fool referenced by Anselm,
offered a response to the ontological argument that itself
took the form of a Reductio.
 Basically, Gaunilo attempted to show that the same pattern of
reasoning employed by Anselm could also ‘prove’ any number
of obvious absurdities.
 Consider:
1. The concept of the ‘perfect island’ exists in the understanding.
2. The ‘perfect island’ is a possible being.
3. If something exists only in the understanding and might also
exist in reality, then it might have been greater than it is.
_____________________
Conclusion: The ‘perfect island’ exists.
Evaluation
 Because both arguments share the same form, if
the form leads us to an obviously faulty
conclusion, the form must be bad.
 However, some defenders of the ontological
argument (like Descartes) have argued that the
problem is not with the form of the argument but
with Gaunilo’s second premise.
 Another similar response to the ontological
argument replaces not the concept, but the
predicate ‘greater’ with ‘worse,’ leading to a
similar absurd conclusion.
Kant and the Ontological
Argument
 Yet another form of criticism of the ontological
argument is offered by Immanuel Kant.
 He attacks Anselm’s third premise, insisting that as
“Being…is not a real predicate,” and thus the
claimed relationship between ‘greater’ and
existence is false.
 To understand the force of this objection, we need
to think about the predication relationship. What
are we doing when we say, “The ball is red.”?
 The question becomes, is existence a quality like
‘greater than.”?
Kant says, “No!”
 Asserting the existence of something doesn’t
expand the concept, but rather insists that there is
an object which corresponds to the concept.
 For Kant, the ontological argument rests on a
mistaken conflation between the assertion of a
predication relation with an existential claim.
 To the extent that we’d be tempted to include
existence in the predicate of a concept, any
attempt to argue for it’s existence would amount to
a tautology, and pretty clearly, the claim that God
exists is not a tautology.
 Rowe’s observation, that the ontological argument
begs the question, makes the same point.
Malcom to the Rescue?
 Norman Malcom tries to answer objections like
Kant’s by distinguishing two different ontological
arguments in Anselm, one that is essentially the
one we’ve been considering, and another that
refers to ‘necessary existence.’
 The idea is that while existence may not be a real
predicate, necessary existence is.
 Thus, if Malcolm is right, and Anselm (on
occasion) defines God as necessarily existing,
then the ontological argument isn’t vulnerable to
Kant’s objection.
Does it Work?
 While Malcom’s argument may address some of
Kant’s concerns, it’s not clear that it addresses
the concern about the tautologous/questionbegging implications of the argument.
 This is the point Plantinga makes on p. 53.
Basically, as Plantinga insists, it all still seems to
come down to the question of whether it makes
sense to assert the existence of a necessary
being in a world like ours.
 And, as that’s just the issue in question, we can’t
merely assert it, but have to prove it. Thus, the
ontological proof never gets off the ground.