Ontological arguments (dealing with the nature of being) are the fourth part in this series about how we can know God exists.
Jamie Dew: Hey everybody, this is Jamie Dew.
Joe Fontenot: And this is Joe Fontenot.
Jamie Dew: Welcome back to the podcast Towel & the Basin.
Joe Fontenot: That's right. So this is part four of a series, can we know God exists? And so as you get me every time, we're looking at not arguments, but families of arguments broken up by episodes.
Jamie Dew: Very good, it's only three episodes.
Joe Fontenot: Three episodes and 18 practice rounds.
Jamie Dew: That's right.
Joe Fontenot: So we have the cosmological arguments, that was part one. We have teleological arguments. And then last episode, we did moral arguments. And so you had mentioned in the past this other form of arguments called... other family of arguments, called ontological arguments. So what are these? What does ontological mean? What are these kind of arguments?
Jamie Dew: Okay, yeah. So these for a long time were called Anselm's arguments. It wasn't until Immanuel Kant that we get the name or the official label, we're going to call them ontological arguments. Let me just explain a couple of things, first, and I'll give you a weird example of one and then we'll unpack it. Ontology is the study of being. So you're dealing broadly with the nature of things itself when you deal with ontology.
So here's an argument, that's an ontological argument. It's super simple, super simple. I tend to think that this is actually quite powerful. And yet when I first say it to those listening, unless you have already studied these in depth and you kind of understand the categories at play, you'll just think I'm crazy for saying this. But here is an example of an ontological argument that's super simple that I think is persuasive, everybody's going to think I'm crazy, here it is. Okay, premise one and there's only one premise, by the way, premise one, God possibly exists. [crosstalk 00:02:00] what were you going to say?
Joe Fontenot: Go on.
Jamie Dew: So premise one, God possibly exists. Conclusion, therefore God necessarily exists.
Joe Fontenot: Okay, so I'm just going to go ahead and count myself in the group that says, come on, break this out. You've got to sell me on this.
Jamie Dew: [inaudible 00:02:24] definitely exists, he has to exist. That is in a nutshell, the upshot of these arguments. These arguments can be rather rigorous philosophically and technical, but in short, what... So take away the other arguments. The other families of arguments words. They pick out some detail of the universe and argue for God's existence from him. What ontological arguments do is they start with the concept of God itself or God himself, and say that, look, if we get the concept clear in our heads, then that being has to exist. And that's essentially the argument right there. Start with the definition of God and then if we define that the right way, and by the way, here, this is a case where theists and atheists generally will agree that at least we define God the same way, right?
We may disagree with whether or not he exists, but we generally speaking all agree that we're defining the same object. And a lot of atheists would even say, look, I'm not interested in debating some lesser form of a God. I'm interested in debating the existence of the Judeo-Christian God here. If we're going to go for God, let's go for God, right?
Joe Fontenot: Yeah.
Jamie Dew: But essentially, when you understand God is the greatest conceivable being that could be then what some philosophers and theologists history of thought is that man, when you understand God that way, then it logically follows that he has to exist. Now you may be listening to that going, huh? No, what? Are you Crazy? Well, let me make it a little muddier first and then let me make it weird and then we'll see if you're with me. Okay, how about that?
Joe Fontenot: Fair enough.
Jamie Dew: All right. So it all starts with... I mean, roughly we attribute these to Anselm. There's actually some evidence in Augustine's writings in the city of God, of some hints of these arguments too. So there's actually been some precursors to this, but it's Anselm specifically that puts these arguments on the map and he does it in a little work called the Proslogion. It's about a 20, 25 page document. I highly encourage people to read it. It's beautiful for a couple of reasons, it's pactful or three reasons. One, the argument I'm about to give you comes from it. Two, it's chock full with rich philosophical theology about who God is, but most beautiful of all is it's actually not an argument, it's a prayer. The whole thing is a prayer to God. And whereas others have tried to start and try to get to God on neutral grounds, let's figure out from nature itself, if there's a basis for believing this, Anselm already believes.
He finds himself as one who already believes that God exists, all he's looking for is understanding that idea. And so this is actually a prayer to God that he writes, trying to make sense out of the very thing he already believes. And so it's kind of beautiful in that way. Essentially, he argues something like this in the Proslogion. Premise number one, that we can conceive of a being that's greater than any other being. And so in your mind right now consider the highest possible being that there is. And if you could think of another being that has all of that, but one other thing, then you got the wrong one the first time, right? Find in your mind that concept of the greatest conceivable being and what Anselm says is you and I can all conceive of that, okay. Premise two, he says, "Well, it's better or more perfect to exist than to not exist." That's clearly true, right?
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: Premise three is sort of a further clarification of that, which says, "Well, to exist outside the mind is greater than to exist in the mind only." So in other words, consider a $20 bill that exists in your mind only and consider one that exists outside your mind in my wallet. Which of those $20 bills do you want? Do you want the one outside your mind, the one that's in my wallet, right? And that premise three, to exist outside the mind is greater than to exist in the mind only. Now all that makes sense, every bit of that makes sense. And I think everybody would agree with that. We can conceive of the greatest conceivable being, it's clearly better to exist than not exist. And oh, by the way, even further, it's better to exist outside of our minds than just inside of our minds, right?
So in other words, truth is better than fiction. All that makes sense through those first three premises. Well, if that's true, Anselm says, well, then it logically follows that God exists. He says, "Therefore, to conceive of such a being of God logically entails that God exists because he's the greatest and that would mean actual existence. To say that God does not exist is contradictory, therefore to say that God exists is logically true." And that was Anselm's argument.
Now, Anselm is operating here on some hints of some philosophical categories that are frankly at this point in not just Christian history, but intellectual history, we had not really fully unearthed some concepts here that are at play but there hints out there. And so I'm going to introduce something in a minute that might help us make sense out of that a little bit more. Because right now, if you'll... I'll put my cards on the table, I am completely unpersuaded by that argument, completely unpersuaded by that argument, I mean, no way. And lots and lots of people throughout history, major, major philosophers have just really differed with this. But here's the thing, we philosophers, lots of us are not persuaded by that. And yet putting your finger on what's wrong with that argument logically, where does it go wrong, is notoriously difficult, if not impossible.
So there's a lot of us that find ourselves throughout history, not just me, but there's a lot of us throughout history that have said, man, that argument can't be right, but I don't know what's wrong with it. And so maybe the concept of God does do that, but I just know that argument itself doesn't persuade me. Now, there have been lots of versions of this since Anselm. Descartes has a version, Immanuel Kant entertains a version, Norman Malcolm entertains a version, Charles Hartshorne does a version, today Alvin Plantinga has lots of versions of this that are super interesting. Here's what's happened though in philosophical history, about 100 years ago, Western philosophy started uncovering and unearthing some concepts called modal terms. Now these arguments today are most often made as modal arguments. And modal arguments show up in all sorts of things in analytic philosophy today.
Okay, so to give you a new version of an argument that might be more persuasive, I first need to introduce a couple of modal terms kind of like in the last podcasts we did, we talked about different kinds of inference. Let me introduce some modal terms here, okay?
Joe Fontenot: Okay.
Jamie Dew: Three words that I'm going to introduce and they don't mean what we normally use these terms to mean, okay. A mode is simply a kind of existence, sort of the thing could have. My pencil exists, but it has a certain kind of existence. So there's three kinds of existence or three modes. There's what we would call impossible, something that has impossible existence would be like a stick with one end. You can make sense out of that sentence, but the moment you try to flesh that concept out in your mind, you immediately recognize a contradiction in the very concept, right?
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: There could never be that thing. That thing could never exist to be done, right? A square circle, right, is an example of this. Again, you can make sense out of it grammatically, but conceptually, the moment you try to flesh that out in your mind, you immediately recognize an impossibility. So here's the thing about impossible existence. It's not just that it doesn't exist, it's that it could never exist in this world or in any possible world. Okay, so now I've introduced another set of categories, possible worlds. And that is by the way, how philosophers illustrate the concept, modal concepts. Impossibility means it not only doesn't exist, it means it could never exist in any possible world because it itself is incoherent. And if it's incoherent it couldn't be in this world or any other world that it can be, so sticks with one end, square circles and such. Makes sense?
Joe Fontenot: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jamie Dew: All right. The opposite of impossible would be necessary. Something with necessary existence is the kind of thing that has to exist. And essentially, if it has to exist, then it would mean it has to be in this world. But again, it has to be in every possible world. All right, now the middle one is possible existence or what we sometimes call contingent existence, right? Now possible existence would be me or you or the pencil that I just talked about. It's something that exists here, sure but it doesn't have to exist, right? So it's not impossible because it shows up, but it's not necessary because surely that pencil is not in every single possible world, right? I'm not in every possible world. So something with possible existence or contingent existence is something that exists in some worlds, but not all worlds. There's our modal terms and we illustrate those model terms with possible worlds.
Something with necessary existence exists in every possible world because it's the kind of thing that has to be. Something with impossible existence exists in no worlds because it itself is contradictory and it could never be. And something with possible existence exists in some worlds, but not all worlds. Makes sense?
Joe Fontenot: Yes, I have a question. Can you give me an example? So I see you gave the example of impossible, impossible makes sense.
Jamie Dew: How about necessary?
Joe Fontenot: Yes, what's an example of necessary?
Jamie Dew: Well, per these arguments we're looking at right now, God. God would be the kind of thing that has to exist. If he exists, and this is where the philosopher come in, the theist and the non-theist generally will say, look, when we're talking about God, he'd be the greatest conceivable, if he exists, he'd be the greatest conceivable being. And if he's the greatest conceivable being, he couldn't have impossible existence and he couldn't have just possible existence existing in some worlds and not others because think about it. Imagine you say God only has possible existence, right? So that means he exists in 10 of the billion worlds that could be. Well, couldn't we imagine a God just like him that it shows up in 11 of the billion worlds that could be. Well, then you see. So for God to be God, the greatest conceivable, he'd have to have necessary existence.
Joe Fontenot: Yeah, okay.
Jamie Dew: So God, numbers might be another one. I mean, it seems inconceivable that you could have anything in reality without numbers. I mean, I illustrate this point in various ways, but one way you could do it is imagine that there's a little evil demon that tries to eliminate the number two. He hates the number two, don't psychoanalyze and don't get into why, but he just hates the number two. Okay, and he tries to get rid of it. Everywhere it's written he erases it, everywhere it's spoken he mutes it, everywhere where two things show up together like eyes and ears and stuff he takes one away or adds a third one, something like that. Okay, and let's just imagine that the demon does that everywhere in the universe, right? Well, it looks like he's eliminated the number two. But the question is does 10 still exist? Yes. Does five still exists? Yes. How many times does five go into 10? Two.
So to get rid of two, he has to get rid of 10 and five. And once you go down that rabbit hole, you have to get rid of every number. There is no such thing as number at all. And if that's the case, then there is no universe because there's one universe, there's 10 people in it, if you're [inaudible 00:14:21]. A by-product of that is you get rid of everything. So numbers seem to have necessary existence of some kind. Now, interestingly philosophers and theologians debate the relationship of God and numbers. That's totally for another day. And that's for a different [inaudible 00:14:35] pick up than me. But just give you an example of some necessary things that seem to have to exist. God, numbers, such. So you got these kinds of existence, you got impossible, possible and necessary.
All right, so here's an argument, now that we have those terms situated, here's an argument. Premise one, this comes from Peter van Inwagen. Peter van Inwagen argues number one, if God exists, he is a necessary being, right? And it seems as though everybody would agree with that, the theist and the atheist. If that being exist, he would have to be that kind of being. Premise one, if God exists he's a necessary being. Premise two, it is at least possible that God exists, which means he has to show up in at least some of the worlds because his existence is not impossible. Remember impossible things like sticks with one end, things like square circles, those concepts are fundamentally incoherent. Is there anything fundamentally incoherent in the concept of God? No, it's not. So it doesn't belong in the impossible category. So it's at least possible that God exists.
But now check this out. If God possibly exists, that means there's a world he shows up in. And if he shows up in that world, guess how he shows up. He shows up as a necessary being. And where do necessary beings exist? In every part of the world, that's right. So the conclusion is God exists necessarily in this world. And so this is a modal ontological argument. I got to be honest with you, man, I, for a long time thought these were really silly arguments. But along modal lines, these arguments have been quite persuasive to lots of people. And in the philosophical world, I will caution [inaudible 00:16:21], you're probably not going to drop this on somebody out in the market, in public square and boom, now there are theists. In the philosophical world these arguments are actually quite interesting and very much alive today.
Joe Fontenot: Interesting. I have just one little follow up question. You said you previously did not find this persuasive and you now do, why do you now... or find it more persuasive? Why is that?
Jamie Dew: Yeah, let me clarify. I do certainly find them much more interesting at least, if not convincing, but not convincing in an existential kind of way. Once again, as I've said before, when I put my head on the pillow at night, it's not these arguments that make me go, oh, [for God 00:17:09] now there's a God because of that argument. That's not how my faith works, it's just not. I'm much more persuaded by the realities in my own life. I have no way of explaining my life other than Jesus Christ. I mean, I'm not supposed to be here, man. And it's things like just the brute fact and the universe itself, it seems to fit far greater with Christian theism than any other picture I can come up with. It's things like that, that persuade me. But I do think that these arguments kind of work in a logical way. And I think it's just simply the more familiar I get and others get with these modal terms, the more we can see, oh, I see how that argument would work. And it makes more sense and I find it more persuasive.
Joe Fontenot: Yeah, totally. All right, well, thanks for walking us through these ontological family of arguments.
Jamie Dew: Yeah, you got it right. [crosstalk 00:17:57] this is good.
Joe Fontenot: This is great. All right, thanks Jamie.
Jamie Dew: Yeah, man.
Hey everybody, this is Jamie and Joe again.
Joe Fontenot: If you liked this podcast, would you leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts. That helps other people find it.
Jamie Dew: And if you have any questions, we'd love to hear about them. Just go to JamieDew.com/questions and send them in that way. And we'll take a look at the most frequently asked questions and give them a shot.