Excursus on Natural Theology (Part 23): Objections to the Ontological Argument

Objections to the Ontological Argument

Some of you might be thinking, “But doesn’t this lead to a kind of ontological overkill?” One of the most important strategies that detractors of the ontological argument adopt is to provide parodies of the ontological argument that would lead to all sorts of absurdities that nobody would think exists. These go back to Anselm’s fellow monk Guanilo. You remember Anselm was asking the question, “Why does the Scripture say ‘the fool hath said in his heart there is no God?’” Why does the Scripture call the atheist a fool? Anselm’s answer was that once you properly understand the concept or the word “God” you can see that God must exist. Therefore the fool is saying something incoherent in saying God does not exist. Guanilo, his fellow monk, wrote a treatise called On Behalf of the Fool in which he criticized Anselm’s argument. The way he did so was to construct parodies of the argument where you would try to construct parallel ontological arguments for absurd conclusions. For example, it has been suggested that you could prove that a most-perfect island exists in this way by saying a most-perfect island must have all of these great-making properties in every possible world, and that is possible, therefore that a most-perfect island actually exists. Or a necessarily existent lion – a lion that has the property of necessary existence would exist in every possible world, and therefore there must be a necessarily existent lion. Those seem to be coherent concepts, and yet they would lead to the postulation of entities which nobody would accept. In my debates on the existence of God, some of my opponents have suggested, for example, the idea of a necessarily existent pizza or a most-perfect pizza would be one that exists in every possible world. Therefore if the ontological argument is sound, we should believe in the existence of the most-perfect pizza or necessarily existent pizza.

What might the defender of the ontological argument say in response to these parodies? Quite a bit, I think. I think that the proponent of the ontological argument can plausibly claim that the concept of God differs from these supposedly parallel concepts like a most-perfect island or a necessarily existent lion or necessarily existent pizza.

1. The properties that go to make up maximal excellence that Plantinga talks about have intrinsic maximum values. For example, omniscience is the property of knowing only and all truths. You can’t get any more knowing than that! So there is an intrinsic inherent ceiling on the property of omniscience. Similarly for the other properties like moral perfection and omnipotence. But that is not the case with things like islands. Islands don’t have intrinsic maximal properties. As Plantinga says, there could always be more palm trees and native dancing girls to improve the island. It really is incoherent to talk about a most-perfect island in a way that it isn’t incoherent to talk about a maximally great being.

2. It is far from clear that there really are objective excellent-making properties of things like islands. Are there really objective properties that go to make up the excellence of islands? It seems not. That is a very subjective thing dependent upon your personal preference. Do you prefer a desert island or one that is crowded with the finest resort hotels? It depends on your tastes which one of these you think is the better island. So there really aren’t objective excellent-making properties that go into islands in the way that omniscience, omnipotence, and goodness seem to be objective great-making properties. With respect to the parody of the island, there are two problems – the lack of intrinsic maximum values and the lack of the objectivity of there even being excellent-making properties of islands.

As for the idea of something like a necessarily existent lion or a necessarily existent pizza, this also is incoherent. For as a necessary being, such an animal would have to exist in every possible world that we can conceive. But any animal which would exist in a possible world in which the universe is comprised of a single, infinitely dense, space-time singularity just is not a lion. That is not what you mean by a lion. Similarly, it is not a pizza either. By contrast, a maximally excellent being could be immaterial and therefore transcend the physical limitations of space and time and so could be necessarily existent. It could exist in a possible world in which the universe is a space-time singularity. Lest you think that a pizza, say, could be immaterial – though that wouldn’t be very satisfying, would it?-- a pizza is something that you can eat, and you can’t eat an immaterial object. Again, the idea of a necessarily existent pizza or necessarily existent lion upon closer reflection really does turn out to be incoherent and therefore doesn’t exist in other possible worlds.

Perhaps the greatest challenge to the appeal to our intuitions to justify premise (1) would be to say that it is intuitively coherent in exactly the same way to conceive of what we might call a quasi-maximally great being. That is to say, a being which is in every other respect maximally excellent except that in one of those excellent-making properties it is a little deficient. For example, imagine a being which is morally perfect and omnipotent, but it is not quite omniscient because it doesn’t know future contingents. It is, in fact, the God of open theism, who knows all past and present true propositions but doesn’t know the truth value of future tense propositions about contingent events. Why is the premise of the ontological argument more plausible than a parallel argument that says it is possible that a quasi-maximally great being exists? If we are warranted in thinking that a maximally great being exists, wouldn’t we be equally warranted in thinking that it is possible that a quasi-maximally great being exists? If you think that, then you’ve got to think that such a being does exist. It wouldn’t deny the existence of God per se, but it would mean that in addition to the maximally great being you are going to populate your world with all sorts of quasi-maximally great beings. That would surely be implausible and undesirable.

If the key premise of the ontological argument is true, isn’t it also true that it is possible that a quasi-maximally great being exists? I am not so sure. I think not because maximal greatness, I want to argue, is logically incompatible with quasi-maximal greatness. Think about it. A maximally great being is by definition an omnipotent being. It is all-powerful. That is part of what goes to make up maximal greatness. So no concrete object could exist independently of its creative power. As an omnipotent being, a maximally great being would have to have the power to freely refrain from creating anything at all. Therefore, there must be possible worlds in which nothing but the maximally great being exists. But that entails that if maximal greatness is possibly exemplified then quasi-maximal greatness is not. There might be quasi-excellent beings in many worlds – worlds in which the maximally great being has chosen to create quasi-excellent beings. Maybe they would be like angels that would be supernatural, superhuman, but not like God. But those beings would lack necessary existence. They would be created by the maximally great being, and therefore they would not be quasi-maximally great. They could be quasi-excellent, but they wouldn’t be quasi-maximally great because they wouldn’t exist in every possible world. So if maximal greatness is possibly exemplified, which I think is intuitive, that means that quasi-maximal greatness actually turns out to be impossible because a quasi-maximally great being would be a being that has necessary existence and therefore would exist in every possible world. He would be outside the omnipotent power of the maximally great being.

So our intuition that a maximally great being is possible is not undermined by the claim that a quasi-maximally great being is also intuitively possible because the latter intuition – the intuition that quasi-maximal greatness is exemplified – depends upon the assumption that a maximally great being cannot possibly exist. And that would beg the question. So long as maximal greatness is possible, then it would follow that quasi-maximal greatness is not.

Still, skeptics might insist that we don’t have any way of knowing in advance whether it is maximal greatness or quasi-maximal greatness which is possibly exemplified. The argument that I’ve just given shows that it can’t be both. You can’t have both a maximally great being and a quasi-maximally great being. They would be incompatible with each other because one would escape the omnipotence of the other. So you can’t have both. But the skeptic might say we don’t know if either one is possible. Our intuitions about modality are unreliable guides.

I think we can say here that the intuition that a maximally great being exists trumps any intuition that we might have that quasi-maximal greatness is possibly exemplified. You only arrive at the idea of quasi-maximal greatness by subtracting something from the concept of maximal greatness. In a sense it is parasitic on the concept of maximal greatness. If quasi-maximal greatness seems possible, all the more so maximal greatness would seem possible. That would give reason then for thinking that priority should be given to maximal greatness and not quasi-maximal greatness.

But could we say anything more in defense of the ontological argument’s key premise? Can we say something more than just modal intuitions – that it seems intuitive that this is a coherent concept? Plantinga, I think, provides a clue when he says that if we carefully ponder the key premise and the alleged objection to it, if we “consider its connections with other propositions we accept or reject and still find it compelling, we are within our rights in accepting it.” That is a far different story than the sort of a priori speculation that the skeptic denounces. Even if you cannot determine a priori (that is to say, in advance) whether or not maximal greatness is possibly exemplified, what Plantinga is suggesting is that we could come to believe that it is possible that a maximally great being exists on the basis of a posteriori considerations. That is to say on the basis of evidence and argument independent of our modal intuitions. What I want to do next time is to look at some of those considerations that might lend support to our modal intuitions that maximal greatness is indeed a coherent concept. If that is the case, then the basis for affirming premise (1) will not simply be our modal intuitions that this is a coherent concept, but that we also have some additional reasons for thinking that premise (1) is true.