The Ontological Argument (Anselm of Canterbury)
The definition of God entails that God exists. This would be a fantastic result.
So what’s the definition of God?
The most perfect conceivable being or let’s say “the most powerful conceivable being” is a good way of putting it.
Anselm argues as follows:
Well suppose this most powerful or most perfect being did not exist, right? Then, he would lack the attribute of existence, but the attribute of existence is one of the perfections or one of the things which makes a being powerful, but since he is, by definition, the most perfect being, he must have the attribute of existence, therefore God exists.
Get the definition of God. How is God to be defined?
Let’s compare this with the unicorn. How is the unicorn to be defined?
A unicorn is a horse with a horn growing out the middle of its head. There’s nothing in that definition to imply that unicorns exist and unicorns don’t exist.
But let’s define God. An all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing being. These are some of the characteristics. And every will agree that’s the definition of God.
So one of the definitions is he’s the most perfect being. One of his attributes is unimprovable perfection.
Now Anselm argues, but if God didn’t exist, wouldn’t he be less perfect than a being just like him in all those ways except that THAT being existed? Cos to exist is to be more perfect than not to exist. God is as good as you can be, as superior as you can be, so he must exist. So we know, by definition, that God exists.
It’s a brilliant argument, but it’s wholly unconvincing to everyone who hears it. They think, “Something’s going wrong with that”.
What’s wrong with it?
Colin McGinn argues:
No one ever managed to pinpoint exactly what’s wrong with it.
I tell you what I THINK is wrong with it, though the issue is not by all means clear.
God’s the most perfect. Existence is one of the perfections.
It sounds superficially plausible, but what does it really mean?
I like to compare this to somebody who said, “Let’s take the most tasty meal conceivable…”
Does that mean anything, to say that?
It’s the most tasty meal I’ve ever had. But it’s not well-defined, the most tasty meal conceivable or the best football game CONCEIVABLE, not one I’ve ever SEEN.
What does it mean? It’s not a very clearly meaningful idea.
A Psychological Argument
People think, “Without God, life is meaningless.” Where is meaning? It’s just an empty charade of pointless and purposeless, valueless going from one thing to the next.
Well the first reply to make to that is: You don’t necessarily need to seek the meaning of life outside of life.
Without there being a being outside of human life, human life would have no meaning. So the meaning of human life must be conferred by another being.
Here’s my question – what gives the meaning to that being’s life? How does his life, God’s life, derive meaning?
Here’s the dilemma, right? Either God’s life has meaning intrinsically just by his existence, or not. But if it does, then it’s possible to have a meaningful life intrinsically. So why can’t OUR lives have intrinsic meaning? Their meaning doesn’t have to be conferred by another being.
Morality And God
One point is the idea that morality can only have a foundation if it’s based on God’s commands or God’s desires, God’s wishes.
A worrying question for many people is: they don’t see that morality can have any foundation, can have any absoluteness, unless there’s a God to certify it, to legitimate it.
It’s a point that was discussed by Plato long ago in the Euthyphro – Argument. Socrates makes a completely compelling refutation of that argument and it simply goes as follows:
Suppose you take, as a moral principle, “It’s wrong to steal.” People say, “Why is that wrong? Why is it wrong to steal?”
Answer – because God says it’s wrong to steal. God commanded that you should not steal. OK? The point that Socrates makes in that dialogue is to say – how can God give this moral rule a foundation? Either the moral rule is, itself, intrinsically a sound moral rule or it can’t be given soundness and legitimacy from an external command.
Suppose, for example, we had the rule, “It’s right to murder.” Somebody said, “That’s not right! Murder is wrong!” and somebody said in reply, “But God SAYS it’s right to murder.”
That doesn’t convince you it’s right. If God says that something is right which isn’t right, God’s wrong. He can’t make something right just by saying it’s right. What God has to do is reflect what’s right in his commandments so that’s what he really does. It IS wrong to steal and it IS wrong to murder. So God says that it’s wrong and he is right to say that. Why? Because it IS wrong in the two cases! He doesn’t MAKE it wrong by saying it. He can’t do that. If that was so, we’d have no reason to respect God’s morality. So we don’t need God to validate our moral beliefs. He couldn’t validate them. His validations only work in as much as they correspond to what IS morally right, what IS morally wrong. He can’t make something be morally right when it’s not.
Another way to put it is it can’t be a matter of God’s free decision or whim what’s right and wrong. People can see that morality is what it is. They know what they ought to do. But human beings are weak. We have weakness of the will. We don’t always do what we know very well we ought to do. And that, in most people, produces the phenomenon of guilt. Guilt is a powerful negative force in people’s minds. People hate guilt. Guilt is a bad feeling. So you need something to prevent guilt. You need something to make you do what you know is right. God gives you an extra motive to do what’s right, beyond morality itself. Morality gives you a motive, but it’s a motive which is rather fragile. Rather momentary, intermittent and easily broken. But if you got the idea of God there, it can sort of give it some more oomph, gives it more power and then you can do what you know is right more easily, more regularly, and that’s perfectly sensible. It’s reasonable or it’s not unreasonable, anyway, for an atheist to think that maybe we need God, or people need God, because without God they can’t do what they know is right. I don’t believe that myself. I think most people will do what’s right in normal conditions. They won’t always, but normally they will. They don’t need God. And I think people who sometimes have lived with God as their moral… support, their moral whatever it is they’re getting from it, when they cease to believe in God, they feel that it was not as difficult to be moral afterwards as they suspected it might be. In fact it was better, because there’s a corrupting part to that conception of God which is the idea that you’re doing something good because God will reward you and think well of you. And that’s a corrupting idea. It’s much better to do what’s good because it’s good and ONLY because it’s good. That’s your only reason for doing it. The idea you’ll get the warm fuzzy feeling of “God’s really pleased with me today. I did this”. That’s not what morality ought to be about.
Reason For Not Believing
Well, the classic argument against is the problem of evil. Even religious people find this one very uncomfortable. So the argument is simply, God is meant to be a being that is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good, so how come there is suffering and pain in the world? Why does God allow it?
God, if he’s all-good, thinks it’s bad that this should occur, would rather it didn’t occur, like any decent person, and yet he lets it occur. That would be OK if he didn’t have the power to change it, but he’s meant to be all-powerful and we’re told by religious people he intervenes all the time in various ways, so why doesn’t he intervene to prevent the death of a child or the torture of a prisoner? He doesn’t do it. So you don’t want to conclude from that that God is actually quite a bad person. That’s a conceivable conclusion you might draw. But you conclude that the combination of these two characteristics is inconsistent. He’s all-good and he’s all-powerful and you need all-knowing too, cos he has to know what’s going on, but it’s essentially the conflict between all-good and all-powerful and the existence of evil.
The standard reply the apologists of religion will give is, “God created human beings with free will.” Now, there’s a question, why did he do that, knowing the results were going to be horrific? That was a pretty wicked thing to do. But let’s put that one aside.
The problem with that argument is, not all the suffering in the world comes from the exercise of human will. Much of it comes from Not human, natural catastrophes, or disease, accidents… All sorts of things can cause tremendous suffering in humans. If somebody’s born with a genetic disease, no human being had any role whatsoever in creating that. That comes from nature – God’s creation of course, we’re told. So God created a world in which it was inevitable there’d be tremendous suffering on a part of completely innocent human beings.
We’ve got the innocent child with some terrible disease and God’s up there saying for himself, “I really need to test some people here.” “The obstacle course needs to be put here. Let me pick on this little 2 year old girl, put her through this terrible ordeal, and I’ll test the other people.”
I mean if any human being said to you that’s what they’d done, - suppose I decided, in my wisdom, “I need to test some people here. I need to improve their moral characters, so I’m going to do this terrible thing to their child.” – You’d think I was the wickedest person in the world to do that.
Why isn’t God? If that’s what God does, I have no respect for him. It’s a wicked thing to do. If God cares about human beings, he should not allow that to happen.
You can watch this part of "The Atheism Tapes" and others, if you follow the link below.
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=Atheism+tapes&sitesearch=
