2.Some objections to St. Anselm's Argument
St. Anselm’s argument does not carry conviction for everyone. One objection is that if something has to exist because it is perfect, we can prove the necessary existence of everything. Simon Blackburn [Blackburn], for example, has argued that we might as well say that the perfect lover must exist, after all she or he is perfect. By parity of reasoning Timothy Smiley [Kenny] has said that one might as well say that if we call St. Anselm’s argument the best argument for God’s existence, the argument has to be valid, since clearly a valid argument is better than an invalid one. As a parody this is very nice.
I do not think, however, that the objections Blackburn and Smiley have made are cogent. St Anselm says that existence is a necessary element of the concept of the most perfect being. The point is not, then, that God is the most perfect a or b, but that He is perfect, full stop.
Anselm also advances a modal argument. Of most concepts it is conceivable that there is nothing outside the mind that answers to them. Thus I might have an idea of Jane, who is the perfect lover, but it does not follow from this idea that she exists, for the perfection she has is that of being a lover and this perfection does not have existential import. The concept of God does have existential import, for He possesses all perfections. One does not have a grasp of the concept of God if one thinks that He might as well not exist. Since God has all perfections, and existence is a perfection, He must by definition exist.
Modern logic has led philosophers to question if this way of reasoning could be valid. Existence they say, is not a predicate, like ‘red’ or ‘horse’. It does not make sense, after all, to say that Jane is a blonde, has light blue eyes, a liking of the baroque violin, and that moreover, she exists. Rather to say that something exists, that is to say, that there is such and such a thing, is not to use a predicate, but to use a quantifier. To say there is a God, is to say that there exists an x such that x is God. To say that God has all perfections {A,B,C, D} is to say that there is an x such that (Ax&Bx&Cx&Dx), where to exist is not among the predicates. Existence, then, is not among the perfections (which are predicates), hence St. Anselm’s argument is not cogent. At most we can say that if God exists, then He has all the perfections, but whether He exists is not a matter of a priori reasoning. One will have to look at empirical reality to find out if God exists or not.
The strength of this objection is that it allows us to make sense of the pressing thought that we may have an idea of a perfect God but that there does not for that reason have to be such a being. Anselm would claim that this thought, however pressing it might be, is inconsistent, but Anselm’s conception of being is presumably logically defective.
One way of trying to refute this objection would be to argue against the concept of existence of predicate logic. Some very acute questions regarding this concept have been put forward by philosophers such as Heidegger, who point to the awkard fact that it is very hard to say, to put it mildly, what it means to say that something is or exists, or to be precise, what being means.
J.C.C. Smart produced the idea of an atemporal ‘is’, but that ploy merely defers the question what it means to say that something is.
Whether the questions Heidegger has put to modern philosophy undercut logic or not is not my concern here, though it seems to me that even Heidegger must argue logically if he wants to make sense, and this is indeed what we find in Sein und Zeit and Was ist Metaphysik?. It is hard to conceive in what way, if any, one could take one’s leave of logic without thereby falling into incoherence. Heidegger accordingly makes use of the very logic that he wants to question. At present, then, we should perhaps not be detained by the question whether the being of beings has diverted philosophy from its true task.
This is not to say however, that the notion of existence as bound to first-order quantification is the only one there could be, let alone the only one to do justice to our uses of ‘exist’ in both ordinary language and natural science.
Sometimes we do say that something exists. As J.R. Lucas has put it
We can best elucidate one aspect of the word `exists' if we view its negation as a conversation stopper. If I start telling you about the greatest prime number, which I have tracked down on my computer, and has many mystic features, you stop me short by saying that it doesn't exist. Unless I can rebut the claim of non-existence, it is pointless to go on talking about it. http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/ontolarg.html
In the same vein, according to Lucas, to say that a certain object does exist is a conversation starter, or resumer, as when mathematicians say that there exist prime numbers between 12 and 21. Having rebutted objections that there are no such things we can proceed in our discussion of their properties.
Even in first-order logic, as Lucas also says, one often has to establish a non-empty domain before quantifiers can be used. One might add to this that the notion of a domain simpliciter, whether empty or not, is itself already an ontological notion, which is to say, the concept of a sort of being, that wants an account. Even if we argue only with universal quantifiers, a sort of being is presupposed, namely the being of the empty domain itself. To say that the domain is not something there is independently of what is in it is no more than empty stipulation.
There are good reasons to say that existence is not simply a matter of quantification. It would be more true to say that the idea of quantification itself requires a logically prior idea of existence, even if only because quantifiers do not account for their own existence (is a quantifier within its own range? Does a model include itself?) (I should add here that I hold conceptual and linguistic items to exist and that I do not think that the distinction between meta- and object-languages holds. I won’t argue for the second thought in this piece whereas I think the former is self-evident.)
Lucas argues persuasively that the standard objection to Anselm’s argument is based on too narrow a view of the meaning of ‘exist’. But Lucas also argues that the Ontological Argument does not prove the existence of God. Rather what it proves is that Reality exists:
Does [the Ontological Argument] look like proving that Reality Exists? It looks better in Greek: to on esti; or in Latin, ens est. These look like tautologies, decidedly difficult to deny. Could Reality not exist? No; it would be a contradiction in terms. The Ontological Argument is valid: but it proves something different from what its advocates supposed. It proves the existence of Reality rather than a specification of what it was like. In the terminology of the Schoolmen it answers the question An sit? rather than Quale sit? Although in the key section of the Proslogion Anselm uses the neuter, later he lapses---if `lapse' be the right term---back into the personal mode of address, and takes it for granted that the Ultimate Reality he has proved to exist is the Christian God who created the world and raised Jesus from the dead. Provided we leave Reality undescribed, we can argue for its existence, but once we have specified the nature, or essence, of anything, whether the Perfect Being, or the traditional God of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, we cannot go on to define Him into existence.
What Anselm has demonstrated is that there exists something such that nothing greater could exist, a sort of ultimate reality or Reality, Lucas argues, that Anselm calls God. The Ontological Argument does not say anything about what this Reality or God is like. On this point Lucas seems to agree with Anthony Kenny [Kenny]. Kenny argues that the God ‘greater than which cannot be conceived’ is an ineffable God. It does not make sense to predicate anything of Him.
If Lucas and Kenny are right, Anselm has not proved the existence of the Christian God. Next I shall discuss Anthony Kenny’s arguments for the purported ineffability of God as well as John Lucas’s further arguments on the nature of reality.
[Blackburn] Simon Blackburn, Think - an Introduction to Philosophy, Oxford, 1998.
[Kenny] Anthony Kenny, “Anselm on the Conceivability of God” in The Unknown God – Agnostic Essays, London, 2004, pp.25-33.
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