Ontological and cosmological arguments
Three Arguments for the Existence of God ComparedOntological argumentTwo philosophers who famously presented and defended an ontological argument for the existence of God were St Anselm and Descartes. They both argue that we can deduce the existence of God from special properties about the idea of God. Here is St Anselm’s version:By definition, God is a being greater than which cannot be conceived. I can conceive of such a being. It is greater to exist than not to exist. Therefore, God must exist. Objection: A monk named Gaunilo objected that you could prove anything perfect must exist by this argument. I can conceive of the perfect island, greater than which cannot be conceived. And so such an island must exist, because it would be less great or less perfect if it didn’t.Reply: Anselm replied that the ontological argument only works for God, because of the relation between God and greatness or perfection. An island wouldn’t cease to be what it is – an island – if it wasn’t perfect; of course, it wouldn’t then be a perfect island. But islands aren’t perfect by definition.; perfection is something an island can have or not have. It is an ‘accidental’ not an ‘essential’ property of islands. God, however, must be perfect to be God. But to be the greatest conceivable being, God must exist. Notice that this conclusion is more than ‘God does exist’; it claims God must exist – God’s existence is necessary.Objection: Kant objected that Anselm is supposing that existence is a property, and that something that ‘has’ existence is greater than something that doesn’t. But this not true. When we list the essential properties of something, we are really describing our concept of that thing. For instance, a dog must be a mammal. All dogs have the property of being mammals. But now if I tell you that the dog asleep in the corner is a mammal and it exists, I seem to have said two very different sorts of things. To say that it exists is only to say that there is something real that corresponds to the concept ‘dog’. It is not to say anything about the dog. Existence, Kant says, is never a property, not even in the case of God. It could be that the greatest conceivable being doesn’t exist.Cosmological argumentThere are at least three different forms of the cosmological argument – from change (or cause), from continued existence, and from contingent being (Aquinas gives all three in his ‘Five Ways’). The easiest, and most popular, form of the argument observes how events are caused in time. When we go back through time, to the beginning of the universe, we can’t find any cause in the universe which caused the universe. In a nutshell, “What caused the Big Bang?” If we find some answer from physics, we can still ask, “Well, what caused that?” And so on. What we need is something that causes events, but isn’t caused itself: God.Objection: there is the alternative of an infinite regress of causes – the universe (or something) has always existed, with each event being caused by a previous one, forever. It is, however, difficult to imagine what infinity is; it is not, for instance, simply a ‘very long time’. It is very different from a ‘very long time’ – it means, quite literally, that there was no beginning, ever.Reply: this leaves us with just the same puzzle, though – there is no explanation for anything existing at all. This is very unsatisfactory (see discussion below).Objection: the argument doesn’t prove the existence of God, as we might normally think of God. For example, it doesn’t prove that there is only one cause of the universe; nor does it prove that that cause is omniscient, omnipotent, or cares about people.Reply: this is true. However, supposing that there is just one cause, and that cause is God, is probably the simplest, and the best, explanation (see discussion below).Teleological argumentThe classical teleological argument, most famously presented by William Paley and attacked by David Hume, argued that living organisms appeared designed and the only explanation of this was that they were designed. Therefore, there must be a designer. Hume objected that the analogy between something we know is designed, like a watch, and the universe, is weak: any object we encounter is not like the universe as a whole; our only experience of thought creating order is where matter is equally capable of influencing thought; we can’t generalise from a small part to a whole – “why select so minute, so weak, so bounded a principle as the reason and design of animals is found to be upon this planet?”even if we could infer the existence of a designer (or designers), we wouldn’t know this is God, as we usually think of God.The theory of evolution finally put pay to the classical argument, since it provides an excellent account of how this could come about without design. Millions of alterations randomly take place. Most disappear without a trace. But something that coincidentally helps an organism to survive and reproduce slowly spreads, and more and more organisms end up with it. So organisms appear to be designed when they are in fact the product of coincidence.The modern teleological argument, presented by F R Tennant and Richard Swinburne, appeals to scientific laws: the particular scientific laws that apply in the universe had to be very specific for life to be possible. That the ‘initial conditions’ were just exactly how they needed to be us to come into existence seems a huge coincidence. Science can’t explain scientific laws – where they come from or why they are the way they are, because all scientific explanations presuppose laws. Scientific laws are ‘brute’ – they have no explanation unless we can find some other kind of explanation for them. So either there is some other explanation of them, or the whole way the universe is, is complete coincidence.Swinburne argues there is another kind of explanation, which doesn’t use scientific laws: personal, teleological explanation. People intend things and bring them about. A person intended to produce the chairs you’re sitting on, I’m saying things I intend to say. This sort of explanation explains an object or an event in terms of a person and their purposes. The specific scientific laws that allow for evolution are the results of a person who intended to allow for evolution. That person is God.DiscussionSimilar objections can be made to the teleological argument as to the cosmological argument. This is because they both argue that the existence of God is the best explanation for the universe. The ideas that the universe never began or that the scientific laws we have are just a coincidence leaves the universe unexplained. But does invoking the existence of God really provide an explanation if we can’t explain God? And should we be trying to explain the universe ‘as a whole’?Bertrand Russell, in his radio debate with Frederick Coplestone, argued that we can’t ‘grasp the universe entire’ in order to explain it. The universe is just there, and that's all. And just as evolution undermined the classical teleological argument, some physicists have argued that we don’t need to explain the special conditions of this universe: there are or have been millions of universes. Each had different scientific laws, and most didn’t work at all. The laws didn’t allow the universe to continue to exist – as soon as it began, it ended. Others existed, but there was no life. It was inevitable, we might think, that given all the possible variations in scientific laws, one day a universe such as ours would exist, and therefore so would life. It doesn’t need any special explanation – it had to happen.Coplestone and Swinburne, using different arguments, both claim that we can provide an explanation for the universe as a whole. But is this God? and if we can’t explain God, is this any better than not being able to explain the universe?Swinburne claims that if we need a designer/creator, it is ‘simpler’ to think the creator has infinite power and knowledge, rather than ‘some’. So although the cosmological and teleological arguments don’t prove that God is perfect, assuming this is a better, because simpler, explanation.But it still seems that we have no explanation for the existence of God. At this point, Coplestone invokes the idea of necessary existence. If God’s existence is necessary, as the ontological argument supposes, then God’s existence doesn’t need an explanation – it explains itself. It’s like a rule of logic: why do 2 + 2 = 4? well, what else could they add up to?? God is such that God must exist. Of course, this still faces Kant’s objection that existence is not a property, so nothing can have it essentially.Three final points of comparisonThe ontological argument is a priori; it works from an analysis of concepts and what they mean. It does not draw upon any fact of experience to try to prove that God exists. The cosmological and teleological arguments are a posteriori. They try to show that the existence of God is the best explanation for the existence or nature of the universe.The ontological argument takes for granted the idea that God is perfect, the greatest conceivable being. The other two arguments claim this as an extra premise, viz. that God’s perfection forms part of the best explanation, because it is simpler than supposing there is more than one creator, or that the creator has some, but not unlimited, power.Only the ontological argument, if it works, proves that God necessarily exists. However, the cosmological and teleological arguments might invoke this in order to end the chain of explanation. ................
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