The Argument
From Possibility
I was recently watching another
episode of the traveling atheist (‘Closer To Truth’ with Robert Lawrence Kuhn)
and the episode focused solely on the ‘Ontological Argument for God,’ or in
other words, the argument from existence. Meaning that some clearly obvious
facts about existence are taken and used as the axioms in a logical proof that
is intended to demonstrate that God’s existence is necessary.
Why everyone seems to zero in on
Anselm of Canterbury’s “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”
thought-experiment as the best representation of the Ontological Argument (or
synonymous with it, even), is beyond me. At least one person in the episode
(the series is presented through interviews with philosophers, scientists and
theologians) made the statement that to take Anselm’s pondering on ‘the
greatest conceivable being’ and to hold this up as a proof is to stretch it far
beyond what it’s intended to do, even by Anselm himself—and he placed the blame
on well-meaning but incorrect theologians in time past. What that interviewee
said was that Anselm simply suggested that whatever you conceive of a thing,
the actual thing itself is by definition going to be ‘greater’ than the
conception of the thing. That seems benign enough, and it’s a satisfactory
conclusion to me, who has wondered since first introduced why this is held up
as the best that Christian philosophy can do.
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| Wiki Commons image. Alvin Plantinga. |
The last interviewee of the
episode, Alvin Plantinga, also made a similar remark about Anselm, that as stated,
the argument doesn’t work. But he had apparently developed an improvement of
the argument, which he called “The Argument from Possible Worlds,” or something
similar. While I didn’t quite follow his construction of his proof, I
immediately understood the summary: he said that as constructed, the proof
leads someone to be totally committed to the reality of God’s existence as a
necessary fact, provided that he begin with the acknowledgement that it is
possible for God to exist. For anyone to believe that God does not exist, they
would have to claim that it is impossible
for God to exist.
* *
* * *
This immediately made sense to
me, because I’d constructed a similar logical proof before. I don’t believe
this is the same proof Plantinga’s developed, and I don’t seek to take credit
for his idea, but the thought process is similar, and he did remind me of it.
Without further ado, here’s the Argument
from Possibility.
The
Choice
Like Plantinga’s Possible Worlds, the proof does not
unilaterally demonstrate God’s existence. What it does instead is to show that
one must choose between the belief that God’s existence is either a fact, or
that it is impossible. To believe that it is possible and yet that it is not
actual, is to commit a logical contradiction. It is not possible for God’s
existence (1) to be possible, and (2) for God not to exist.
Defining
Possibility
