1.3 Ontological Argument - scholars

Question 1

Aquinas claimed we do not have an agreed…

Answer 1

…definition of God

Question 2

Aquinas claimed argument reasoning to God must be derived from…

Answer 2

experience, from the effects of God’s actions in the world

Question 3

Aquinas: why we have to treat God’s existence as synthetically true (even though he did believe it analytically true)

Answer 3

as humans we do not and cannot know God’s nature - if we knew his nature we would know it includes existence, but we do not

Question 4

Heisenberg: problem of the ‘intrinsic uncertainty of the meaning of words’

Answer 4

‘definitions can be given only with the help of other concepts, and so one will finally have to rely on some concepts that are taken as they are, unanalysed an undefined’

Question 5

Heisenberg: problem with the idealisation and precise definition of concepts

Answer 5

lose the immediate connection with reality which they are supposed to represent

Question 6

Heisenberg: why ‘it will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth’

Answer 6

‘concepts and words formed … through interplay between the world and ourselves are not sharply defined with respect to their meaning … we practically never know precisely the limits of their applicability’

Question 7

Harriet Harris: ‘proof can be acquired only from…

Answer 7

…valid deductive reasoning’

Question 8

Harriet Harris: ‘usefulness of deductive reasoning is only…

Answer 8

…preliminary. Beyond this we must test our concepts and marshal the evidence’

Question 9

Harriet Harries: what is good evidence

Answer 9

evidence that connects with our experience, and draws analogies with known cases of the same pattern

Question 10

overview of Hume’s fork analogy

Answer 10

imagines a two pronged fork in which the two prongs never touch - represents Hume’s two types of knowledge, one prong being ‘matters of fact’ the other being ‘relations of ideas’

Question 11

Hume: matters of fact

Answer 11

knowledge established empirically via sense experience and evidence - the only type of knowledge useful in telling us things about the world

Question 12

Hume: relations of ideas

Answer 12

demonstrable knowledge established rationally as matters of certainty because its denial would be a self-contradiction

Question 13

Hume: ‘nothing is demonstrable, unless…

Answer 13

…the contrary is a contradiction’

Question 14

Hume: why there is no being whose existence is demonstrable

Answer 14

whatever we can conceive as existent we can also conceive as non-existent, therefore there is no being whose non-existence implies a contradiction

Question 15

Hume: ‘the mind can never have to suppose some object to remain always in existence in the same way in which…

Answer 15

…we always have to conceive twice two to be four’

Question 16

overview of Frege’s argument in ‘The Foundations of Arithmetic’

Answer 16

objects to existence as a predicate of God on a mathematical basis via analogy comparing numbers to existence

Question 17

Frege: first order predicates & example

Answer 17

specific to individual objects (eg ‘thoroughbred’ in his horses example applies specifically to the King’s horses, not all horses)

Question 18

Frege: second order predicates & example

Answer 18

general and apply to concepts, not the objects themselves (eg in his horses example, ‘four’ is an idea of how many horses there are, not a characteristic of the horses)

Question 19

Frege: ‘the King’s carriage is drawn by four horses’ vs ‘the King’s carriage is drawn by thoroughbred horses’

Answer 19

first statement gives no real information about the horses - no info about properties / characteristics
second statement does provide information about the horses - identifies properties / characteristics

Question 20

Frege: the error of Anselm and Descartes

Answer 20

treat existence as a first order predicate when it is at most a second order predicate

Question 21

Frege: paradox of treating existence as a first order predicate - ‘Venus has zero moons’ example

Answer 21

ascribing property ‘zero’ to non-existent object ‘moons’ - if numbers are predicates, objects can lack them, but in order to lack a quality the object must exist
in the same way, if existence is a predicate god can lack he would have to exist to lack it which is paradoxical

Question 22

Frege: problem of treating existence as a second order predicate

Answer 22

grants us no understanding of God whether he exists or not, just like saying there are four horses grants us no understanding of the horses. gives us no real information so can’t be used to prove god exists

Question 23

Russell: what we really mean when we say something exists

Answer 23

that the concept of it is instantiated - there are actual examples of instances of it in reality

Question 24

Hume: ‘however much our concept of an object may contain…

Answer 24

…we must go outside it to determine whether it exists’

Question 25

Malcom's development of Anselm's second argument

Answer 25

P1: god's existence is either necessary or impossible (if doesn't exist, can't come into existence, but if does exist, can't go out of existence as either way this means god dependent, limited, inferior) P2: God's existence is not impossible as it is not contradictory therefore God's existence is necessary

Question 26

Plantinga: ontological argument support via possible world theory

Answer 26

begins that nobody can deny the possibility of parallel worlds to this one P1: there is a possible world with a being with maximal greatness so therefore exists in all possible worlds P2: in any possible world, this being has maximal excellence P3: our world is a possible world therefore this being, God, exists in our world

Question 27

Findlay's paradox

Answer 27

- it is not possible for something to exist necessarily because the only things that can exist are things that can be thought of as not existing - a necessary being cannot be thought of as not existing, therefore a necessary being cannot exist - therefore god cannot exist necessarily

Question 28

Findlay's paradox as used to disprove God's existence

Answer 28

if god can be thought of as not existing, thus allowing the possibility of existing, surely his existence becomes impossible because anything that can be thought of as not existing cannot be thought of as god - therefore end up with god having necessary non-existence which is a paradox so argument for God's existence fails

Question 29

Alvin Plantinga's axiom s5 framework to show god's existence is possible logically

Answer 29

if there is a possibility of a necessary P, there has to be a necessary P for if something necessary is possible, it has to be

Question 30

limits / criticisms of Plantinga's argument

Answer 30

- could apply the same to the existence of a maximally evil being, which is undesirable - language can suggest things but does not create reality - shows god's existence could be logically possible, but not that god actually exists

Question 31

Feser: argument that traditional logical subtleties cannot be captured by possible world analysis

Answer 31

we need to know the essence of an object in order to derive properties of it. possible world analysis removes the object, therefore removing both the property and the essence, treating them as indistinguishable, as if the object were a bundle of properties rather than having an essence which logically must precede the properties which are derived from it

Question 32

Malcolm's response to Kant's criticism that necessary existence cannot be part of most superior being

Answer 32

removal of necessary existence ends up with a lesser than perfect being because if it's existence can be denied without contradiction it must depend on something else - no longer discussing god

Question 33

Malcolm's response to Findlay's paradox

Answer 33

misunderstands the point of the argument - Anselm is trying to show god exists in the greatest conceivable manner rather than the normal contingent way, not trying to force god into existence via playing with definitions - claiming necessity is paradoxical reduces the argument to a word game rather than an expression of the nature of god

Question 34

How Russell demonstrates the existence of God is implicitly assumed as an initial premise of the ontological argument

Answer 34

rephrases the argument consistently with the original as - the most perfect being has all perfections - existence is a perfection - therefore the most perfect being exists points out that to be meaningful, must begin with the premise 'there is one and only one entity which is most perfect; that one has all perfections' which is what the argument is trying to prove, so the argument does nothing

Question 35

Russell's rephrasing of the ontological argument into if/then form to explicitly not assume that god exists

Answer 35

- if the most perfect being exists then that being has all perfections - existence is a perfection the second step only qualifies the 'then' part of the statement, so the only conclusion which can be drawn must qualify the 'if' part: 'if the most perfect being exists, then the most perfect being exists'