Charles Hartshorne
Twenty-five years ago a critic of my ontological argument reminded us that if the premises of the argument are tautological rather than factual, that is, if they are “true in all possible worlds, then. . . they are vacuously true, since they then tell us nothing particular about our world.”1 He failed to note that by “the existence of God” is not properly intended a “particular” feature of “our” or “the real world,” but only a purely general status of any world whatever; that if that world exists God created it; and if it does not but could exist, God could create it. Naturally, then, if “God exists” has consistent sense, it is true in any possible world; this is one of the many ways of putting Anselm’s point. The divine existence cannot stand or fall with that of a certain world, a certain contingent thing, for that would mean that the creator was a mere creature! God’s existence is not, in the proper sense, “particular” at all, though the divine actuality (as we shall see presently) is indeed so.
Professor Zabeeh is right in this: the essential question is whether the idea of God, or that of necessary, uncreated-yet-individual existence makes sense. Anselm frankly assumed that it did. Against the positivistic contention to the contrary a supplementary argument is needed, and here (for reasons we shall hint at presently) Anselm was in trouble. But, with a different philosophy, the supplementary argument can perhaps be provided. And in any case, the Anselmian proof does accomplish something; for it simplifies the question of the truth of theism by making this truth equivalent to the falsity of the positivistic contention that there is no logically possible idea of God. Atheism is at best a confusion; theism or positivism is the choice we have to make. This is a valuable simplification. The atheist discusses the word, not the idea, of “God.” Only positivists and theists address themselves to the real question. And the theists must not be pure empiricists; for the existence of deity as an empirical question has no logical standing.
Zabeeh’s willingness to beg the question he purported to discuss is breath-taking. Thus, leaning on Hume: “it is a brute fact that every object or impression which exists, could cease to exist.” Again, leaning on Ryle: “since things do happen to wear out, it is rational to expect them to wither away. . . . “ And so the weakness of the creatures is ohne weiteres attributable also to the creator! By what rule of logic? Surely it cannot be God who is here referred to!
Professor Zabeeh is right that the mere use of a word cannot establish a necessity. However, as Findlay (and others) has shown, it is the meaning not just of “God” but of the attitude of worship in the high religions that it refers to a not conceivably [by others] surpassable being.E6 Since no such being could be a contingently existing thing, i.e., a mere creature, either worship is self-contradictory (rather than merely mistaken), or its object exists necessarily.
We are told that “necessity” applies only to propositions. But (a) if the proposition, divinity exists, is admitted to be necessary, then Anselm’s chief point is granted; further, (b) unconditional necessity, which alone is here in question, cannot apply to a proposition unless it also applies to the thing asserted and vice versa; finally, (c) it is quite possible to define a necessity which is indifferently that of a thing or of a proposition. A necessary proposition, according to C. I. Lewis (whose logic at this point I am prepared to defend), is strictly implied or included in the full meaning of, any proposition, and analogously a necessary thing is one included in, constitutive of, any possible thing. So universal immanence in actuality and possibility, hence also in what any well-formed proposition according to an adequate logic implies, is a necessity at once logical and ontological.
The crucial difficulty with the Anselmian proof is, as Findlay lucidly puts it, how could one infer a concrete actuality from an abstract definition? Since the former is always richer in qualities, it could not be deducible from the latter. The less cannot logically contain the more!
The solution lies in seeing that while the existence of God, as not conceivably surpassable, requires that there be a concrete divine reality, it is not itself this reality. By analogy, while “my existence tomorrow” requires that tomorrow I be in some concrete state of thought, perception, etc., it does not imply in just what state. Anselm’s argument can be rescued from what I call the “Findlay paradox” only if it be conceded that while the bare necessary truth that divinity exists is exceedingly abstract (and only for this reason can it be necessary), the full truth about God is concrete and contingent. An essence exists if and only if it is actualized or concretized somehow, in some concrete form; but just how, in what concrete form is what I call the “actuality” of the existence (cf. Whitehead’s “actual entity”). The latter, the “how” of concrete realization, never follows from the essence, even when, as in the divine case, the bare existence, the “somehow” realized, does follow. I submit, for any logician to consider, that: (a) “somehow” is abstract or indefinite compared to a specific description of the how itself; (b) an essence does exist if it is concretized somehow, no matter how. Thus “humanity” exists if there are human beings no matter just which and in what states; and I exist if my identifying personality traits (gene structure, the property, firstborn son of—and—, or what you will) are somehow embodied in actual events, no matter which. Upon the legitimacy of applying an analogous distinction to the idea of God depends the possibility of an ontological proof. Most theists have not been in a position to make this application, or to acknowledge the distinction between divine existence and full divine actuality. Classical theism is indeed unable to acknowledge it, but “neoclassical theism” is in a different position. The central difficulty with the proof, the partly unconscious ground of opposition to it, and of the positivistic denial of the concept of God itself, is in the oversimplifications inherent in classical or neoplatonic theism.
I urge upon all philosophers that they give due heed to the manifest difference between existence, the mere abstract truth that an abstraction is somehow concretely embodied, and the actuality, the how, of the embodiment.The ignoring of this distinction in nearly all discussions of this matter is a marvelous instance of how seven centuries of prolonged controversy, involving almost an entire learned world, can still leave a fairly simple point unnoticed by anyone. It is this possibility of collective blindness which makes intellectual life exciting. There is always a chance of seeing clearly for the first time what implicitly all [or many] have been looking for.
Note
1. Farhang Zabeeh, “Ontological Argument (hereafter the OA) and How and Why Some Speak of God,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 22, 2 (1961), 206-215. My reply, here reprinted with almost no changes, appeared in the same journal, 23, 2 (Dec. 1962), 274-76.
For a century and a half after Kant’s celebrated refutation of the OA not much new light was thrown on the subject. I defended the argument in my unpublished dissertation, 1923; in Man’s Vision of God, 1941 (ch. 9); in an article in the Philosophical Review, May, 1944; The Logic of Perfection (hereafter LP), 1962; Anselm ‘s Discovery, 1965; Introduction to The Writings of Anselm, 1962; CS, 1970, chs. 245-260, 281-284; Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers, 1983, 93-103. In all cases my defence of Anselm was a qualified one. It had to be so since I rejected the form of theism that Anselm used the argument to support. Also I realized all along that, as Leibniz remarked, the argument has to assume that the idea of God makes coherent sense. In Mind, 1948, Findlay denied this but agreed with Anselm that religion does require that the divine existence be taken as necessary. In 1960 Norman Malcolm published his “Anselm’s Ontological Arguments” (Philosophical Review, 1960). As one of my students said to me, Malcolm’s distinction between the two arguments was one I had been making in classes (also in print). However it was Malcolm who really woke people up on the subject. I think history should record that Findlay, Malcolm, and I have initiated a new era in considering the modal status of theism. In my chapter in CS on “six theistic proofs” (I should have said arguments) I present a radically new way of formulating theistic arguments and hold that no one argument is nearly as cogent as a system of about half a dozen arguments.
In LP I offered a formalized version of the OA. It assumes a special form of the logic of modality. John Hick and others have claimed that the OA depends upon a confusion between modality de rem and modality de dictu. My reply is that there are definite connections between the two, as asserted by Aristotle, Peirce, and others. In any case the essential point of an OA, as I have often stated it informally, especially in CS, chs. 12 and 14, is not a mere technicality. It is that to suppose a possible alternative to a being conceived as supreme power is to suppose another and really supreme power that could produce it. We have no way to articulate the idea of contingent existence other than that of creativity. Freedom and possibility belong together. Epicurus believed in free atoms, but also that atoms exist by necessity, and eternally. Why? Because for him freedom was only in changes of location. Add the idea of qualitative freedom, then only supreme individual freedom will exist without alternative and eternally, this status being entailed by its supremacy. But in concrete qualities it will change—by increase in richness. Apart from modality, from both necessity and contingency, nothing makes sense. There must, theism holds, be one being whose range of potential states, compatible with its self-identity, is coextensive with possibility in general. Its possible change is the measure of all possible change, its actual change the measure of all actual change, its permanence the measure of all permanence. It, and not “man,” is “the measure of things.”
For what formalization is worth, see Billy Joe Lucas, “The Second Epistemic Way,” in International Journal of Philosophy, 18; 107-114 (1985). Lucas shows how the idea of a being that is cognitively unsurpassable entails the necessary existence of that being. In his dissertation at the University of Texas in Austin Lucas developed a system of modal logic suitable for such problems.
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, Wisdom as Moderation: A Philosophy of the Middle Way, pp. 78-81.