Category: God

How Does a Direct Reference Theorist Deny the Existence of God?

First of all, how does an atheist deny the existence of God? Well, he might just assertively utter

1. God does not exist.

But suppose our atheist is also a direct reference theorist, one who holds that the reference of a name is not routed through sense or mediated by a Russellian definite description that gives the sense of the name. The direct reference theorist denies the   following tenet of (some) descriptivists:

The referent of a name N is whatever entity, if any, that satisfies or fits the descriptive content associated with N in the mind of the speaker of N.

For example, on the descriptivist approach there is associated with the name 'God' a certain concept in the mind of the person who uses the name, a concept which includes various subconcepts (immaterial, unchanging, omnibenevolent, etc.). The name has a referent only if this concept is instantiated. Further, nothing having a property inconsistent with this concept can be the referent of the name. Now if our atheist were a descriptivist, his denial of the existence of God could be expressed by an assertive utterance of

2. The concept of an immaterial, omniqualified, etc. being is not instantiated.

Clearly, if one's denial of the existence of God is to be true, the existence of God cannot be a presupposition of one's denial, as (1) seems to suggest; so (2) seems to be a well-nigh mandatory rewrite of (1) that avoids this well-known difficulty pertaining to negative existentials.  Whether or not God exists, the concept God exists, and is available to be the subject of judgments.  We cannot say of God that he does not exist without presupposing what we aim to deny; but we can say of the concept God that it is not instantiated. 

But our atheist is a direct reference theorist, and so cannot avail himself of (2). He cannot say that the nonexistence of God is the noninstantiation of a certain concept.  This is because the direct reference theory implies that the referent of a name can exist whether or not it instantiates any of the concepts associated with the use of the name.  The theory implies that 'Socrates' names Socrates even if it should turn out to be false that Socrates was the teacher of Plato, the wife of  the shrewish Xanthhippe, snubnosed, a stone-cutter by trade, etc.,  etc. 

On the direct reference theory, for 'God' to have a referent it suffices that (i) there be an initial baptism of some being as 'God,' (ii) there be an historical chain whereby this name gets passed down to the present user; (iii) each user in the chain have the intention of using the name with the same reference as the one from whom he received it. Thus it is not necessary that the referent of 'God' fit any concept of God that the end-user might have.

Now the direct reference theory has an advantage I have already noted.  It allows a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim to be referring to the same being when they utter sentences containing 'God' despite the fact that  their conceptions of God are quite different.

How then does the direct reference theorist deny the existence of God?  Since his denial cannot be about a concept of God, it must be about the transmission of word 'God'  anits equivalents in other languages.  He must deny that the name 'God' was ever introduced in an initial baptism; or he must deny that the historical chain is unbroken; or he must deny  that all the various users had the intention of using the name with the reference of the one from whom they received it.

But how can the nonexistence/existence of God hinge on such linguistic and historical facts? The nonexistence of God, if a fact, is an objective fact: it has nothing to do with the nonexistence of some initial baptism   ceremony, or some break in a link of name transmission, or some failure of intention on the part of the name-users.

More fundamentally, is it not just absurd to hold, as direct reference theorists seems to hold, that it is not necessary that the referent of  'God' fit ANY concept of God that the end-user might have? For that seems to imply that anything could be God. Could God be Abraham's fear during a lightning storm on a high mountain? Obviously not. Why not? Because 'God' used intelligently encapsulates a certain descriptive  content or sense that constrains what can count as God.

What am I failing to understand?

Gale on Baptizing God

Richard M. Gale, On the Nature and Existence of God (Cambridge UP, 1991), p. 11 :

     First, because God is a supernatural being, he seem to defy being
     indexically pinned down or baptized. There are no lapels to be
     grabbed hold of by a use of 'this.' Some would contend that we can
     ostensively pin down the name 'God' by saying 'this' when having or
     after just having a mystical or religious experience, in which
     'this' denotes the intentional accusative or content of the
     experience. This would seem to require that these experiences are
     cognitive and that their objective accusative is a common object of
     the experiences of different persons as well as of successive
     experiences of a single person.

Suppose Abraham or someone has an experience the intentional object of which he dubs 'God.' Suppose the experience is not 'cognitive,' i.e., not veridical: nothing in reality corresponds to the intentional object, the accusative, of the experience. Then there will not have been a successful reference to God. Successful reference is existence-entailing: If I succeed in referring to X, then X exists. Pace Meinong, one cannot refer to what does not exist. Reference is in every case to the existent. It therefore seems that Gale is right when he says that a successful baptizing of God requires the veridicality of mystical experience.

Andrew V. Jeffrey (Faith and Philosophy, January 1996, p. 94) responds to Gale as follows:

     . . . the religious language-game could be played as if theistic
     experiences were both veridical and cognitive even if they were
     not; i.e., people could play the referential game even with a
     radically misidentified referent.

It seems to me that this response misses the point. Suppose the referent has been radically misidentified: Abraham dubs his Freudian superego, or an overwhelming sense of anxiety, or what have you, as  'God.' Then no successful reference will have been achieved. Is a long disquisition necessary to explain that God cannot be a feeling of anxiety?

And if you say that all baptisms are successful in that, after all, something gets baptized, then I say that this shows the utter hopelessness of the causal theory of reference. For the question to be   answered is this: How in the utterance of a name does the speaker succeed in referring to an object? Under what conditions is successful reference achieved? A theory that implies that one always succeeds, that there are no conditions in which one fails to succeed, is worthless.

A Searle-y Objection to the Causal Theory of Names

Yesterday I argued that whether 'God' and equivalents as used by Jews, Christians, and Muslims refer to the same being depends on one's philosophy of language.  In particular, I suggested that only on a causal theory of names could one maintain that their respective references are to the same entity.  The causal theory of names, however, strikes me as not very plausible.  Here is one consideration.

The causal theory of names of Saul Kripke et al. requires that there be an initial baptism of the target of reference, a baptism at which the name is first introduced. This can come about by ostension:   Pointing to a newly acquired kitten, I bestow upon it the moniker, 'Mungojerrie.' Or it can come about by the use of a reference-fixing definite description: Let 'Neptune' denote the celestial object   responsible for the perturbation of the orbit of Uranus.  In the second case, it may be that the object whose name is being introduced is not itself present at the baptismal ceremony. What is present, or observable, are certain effects of the object hypothesized. (See Saul Kripke Naming and Necessity, Harvard 1980 p. 79, n. 33 and p. 96, n. 42.)

As I understand it, a necessary condition for successful reference on the causal theory is that a
speaker's use of a name be causally connected (perhaps indirectly) with the object referred to. We can refer to objects only if we stand in some causal relation to them (direct or indirect).  So my use of 'God' refers to God not because there is something that satisfies the definite description or disjunction of definite descriptions that unpack the sense of 'God' as I use it, but because my use of 'God' can be traced back though a long causal chain to an initial baptism, as it were, of God by, say, Moses on Mt. Sinai.

If this is what the  causal theory (or at least the Kripkean version thereof) requires, then the
theory rules out all reference to abstracta: Fregean propositions, numbers, sets, etc. But it also rules out reference to future events.

Suppose meteorologists predict a hurricane that has the power to wipe out New Orleans a second time. Conservatives to a man and a woman, they introduce the name 'Hillary' for this horrendous event, and they introduce it via some appropriately complex definite description. (They can't point to it since it doesn't yet exist.) The meteorologists continue with their work using 'Hillary' for the event in question. Since the event lies in the future, there is no question of its causing directly or indirectly any use of the name 'Hillary.'  Nor is there any question of the name's being introduced on the basis of effects of the event.

What we seem to have here is a legitimate use of a proper name that cannot be accounted for by the causal theory. For the causal theory rules out reference to a thing or event to which one does not stand in a causal relation. This suggests that there is something very wrong with the theory. (See John Searle, Intentionality, Cambridge 1983, p. 241.)

The God of Christianity and the God of Islam: Same God?

One morning an irate C-Span viewer called in to say that he prayed to the living God, not to the mythical being, Allah, to whom Muslims pray. The C-Span guest made a standard response, which is correct as far as it goes, namely, that Allah is Arabic for God, just as Gott is German for God. He suggested that adherents of the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) worship the same God under different names. No doubt this is a politically correct thing to say, but is it true?

Our question, then, is precisely this:  Does the normative Christian and the normative Muslim worship numerically the same God, or numerically different Gods?  (By 'normative Christian/Muslim' I mean an orthodox adherent of his faith who understands its content, without subtraction and without addition of private opinions.)  Islam and Christianity are both monotheistic.  So if Christian and Muslim worship different Gods, then one is worshipping  a nonexistent God, or, if you prefer, is failing to worship the true God.

1. Let's start with the obvious: 'Allah' is Arabic for God.  So if an Arabic-speaking Coptic Christian refers to God, he uses 'Allah.'   And if an Arabic-speaking Muslim refers to God, he too uses 'Allah.'  From the fact that both Copt and Muslim use 'Allah' it does not follow that they are referring to the same God, but it also does not follow that they are referring to numerically different Gods.  So we will not make any progress with our question if we remain at the level of words.  We must advance to concepts.

2. We need to distinguish between the word for God, the concept (conception) of God, and God.  God is not a concept, but there are concepts of God and, apart from mystical intuition, we have no access to God except via our concepts of God.  Now it is undeniable that the Christian and Muslim conceptions of God partially overlap.  The following is a partial list of what is common to both conceptions:

a. There is exactly one God.
b.  God is the creator of everything distinct from himself.
c.  God is transcendent: he is radically different from everthing distinct from himself.
d. God is good.

Now if the Christian and Muslim conceptions of God were identical, then we would have no reason to think that Christian and Muslim worship different Gods.  But of course the conceptions, despite partial overlap, are not identical. Christians believe in a triune God who became man in Jesus of Nazareth.  Or to put it precisely, they believe in a triune God the second person of which became man in Jesus of Nazareth.  This is the central and indeed crucial (from the Latin, crux, crucis, meaning cross) difference between the two faiths.  The crux of the matter is the cross. 

3. Now comes the hard part, which is to choose between two competing views:

V1: Christian and Muslim worship the same God, but one of them has a false belief about God, whether it be the belief that God is unitarian or the belief that God is trinitarian.

V2:  Christian and Muslim worship different Gods precisely because they have different conceptions of God.  So it is not that one of them has a false belief about the one God they both worship; it is rather that one of them does not worship the true God at all.

There is no easy way to decide rationally between these two views.  We have to delve into the philosophy of language and ask how reference is achieved.  How do linguistic expressions attach or apply to extralinguistic entities? How do words grab onto the (extralinguistic) world? In particular, how do nominal expressions work? What makes my utterance of 'Socrates' denote Socrates rather than someone or something else?  What makes my use of 'God' (i) have a referent at all and (ii) have the precise referent it has?

4.  It is reasonable to hold, with Frege, Russell, and many others, that reference is routed through, and determined by, sense: an expression picks out its object in virtue of the latter's satisfaction of a
description associated with the referring expression, a description that unpacks the expression's sense. If we think of reference in this way, then 'God' refers to whatever entity, if any, that satisfies the definite description encapsulated in 'God' as this term is used in a given linguistic community.

Given that God is not an actual or possible object of (sense) experience, this seems like a reasonable approach to take.  The idea is that 'God' is a definite description in disguise so that 'God' refers to whichever entity satisfies the description associated wth 'God.'    Now consider two candidate definite descriptions, the first corresponding to the Mulsim conception, the second corresponding to the Christian.

D1: 'the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo and is unitarian'

D2: 'the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo, and is triune.'

Suppose that reference is not direct, but routed through sense, or mediated by a description, in the manner explained above.   It is easy to see that no one entity can satisfy both (D1) and (D2).  So if reference is routed through sense, then Christian and Muslim cannot be referring to the same being.  Indeed, one of them is not succeeding in referring at all.  For if God is triune, nothing in reality answers tothe Muslim's conception of God.  And if God is unitarian, then nothing in reality answers to the Christian conception.

And so, contrary to what Miroslav Volf maintains, the four points of commonality in the Christian and Muslim conceptions listed above do NOT "establish the claim that in their worship of God, Muslims and Christians refer to the same object." (Allah: A Christian Response, HarperCollins 2011, p. 110.)  For if reference to God is mediated by a conception which includes the subconcept triune or unitarian, the reference cannot be to the same entity.

A mundane example (adapted from Kripke) will make this more clear.  Sally sees a handsome man at a party standing in the corner drinking a clear bubbly liquid from a cocktail glass.  She turns to her companion Nancy and says, "The man standing in the corner drinking champagne is handsome!"  Suppose the man is not drinking champagne, but sparkling water instead.  Has Sally succeeded in referring to the man or not?  Argumentative Nancy,  who knows that no alcohol is being served at the party, and who also finds the man handsome, says, "You are not referring to anything: there is no man in the corner drinking champagne.  The man is drinking sparkling water.  Nothing satisfies your definite description.  There is no one man we both admire.   Your handsome man does not exist, but mine does." 

Now in this example what we would intuitively say is that Sally did succeed in referring to someone using a definite description even though the object she succeeded in referring to does not satisfy the description.  Intuitively, we would say that Sally simply has a false belief about the object to which she is successfully referring, and that Sally and Nancy are referring to and admiring the very same man.

But note how this case differs from the God case.  Both women see the man in the corner.  But God is not an object of possible (sense) experience, of Kant's moegliche Erfarhung.  Hence the reference of 'God' cannot be nailed down perceptually.  And so it seems that what we succeed in referring to is whatever satisfies the definite description that unpacks our conception of God.

5.  My tentative conclusion, then, is that (i) if we accept a description theory of names, the Christian and Muslim do not refer to the same being when they use 'God' or 'Allah'  and (ii) that a description theory of names is what we must invoke given the nonperceivability of God.

If, on the other hand, 'God' is a logically proper name whose   meaning is exhausted by its reference, a Kripkean rigid designator,  rather than a Russellian definite description in disguise, then what would make 'God' or a particular use of 'God' refer to God?

A particular use is presumably caused by an earlier use. But eventually there must be an initial use. Imagine Moses on Mt. Sinai. He has a profound mystical experience of a being who conveys to his
mind such locutions as "I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have false gods before me." Moses applies 'God' or 'Yahweh' to the being. But what makes the name the name of the being? One may say: the fact that the being or an effect of the being causes the use of the name. 

But a certain indeterminacy seems to creep in if we think of the semantic relation of referring as explicable in terms of causation. For is it the (mystical) experience of God that causes the use of 'God'? Or is it God himself who causes the use of 'God'? If the former, then 'God' refers to an experience had by Moses and not to God. Surely God is not an experience. But how can God be the cause of Moses' use of 'God'? Causes are events, God is not an event, so God cannot be a cause.

If these difficulties could be ironed out and a causal theory of names is tenable, and if the causal chain extends from Moses down to Christians and (later)to Muslims, then a case could be made that Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all referring to the same God when they use 'God' and such equivalents as 'Yahweh' and 'Allah.'

So it looks like there is no easy answer to the opening question.  It depends on the resolution of intricate questions in the philosophy of language. 

The God of Philosophy and the God of Religion

Steven Nemes by e-mail:
 
In posts of months past you claimed there was no distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; they're the same thing, if God can be called a thing at all; you asked for an argument that they were [not the same], if I am not mistaken. Here is my attempt to satisfy that request.
 
The God of the philosophers is immutable, as a result of his simplicity; this implies that he cannot be affected and respond to the goings on of the natural order, including us. Whatever happens in the natural order, God is [not] changed or affected in response to it. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, however, does seem to be so affected, on any reasonable reading of the relevant religious texts: in Christianity, he enters into the world to provide a means of salvation from sin, which presupposes his consciousness of sin freely committed by created agents; in Judaism, I would guess, he talks to and responds to the prayers of prophets and great leaders, destroys civilizations because of their sins (which again is an instance of responding to occurrences in the natural order), etc. I won't talk about Islam because I don't know enough. 
 
In short: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob seems to be affected in various ways and acts in response to goings-on in the natural order, whereas the God of the philosophers, by his very nature as immutable, cannot be so affected. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob offers a way of salvation because of human sin, and promises judgment in the future for those who don't repent; the God of the philosophers, on the other hand, cannot be said to do anything in response to what goes on in the natural order.
 
[. . .]
 
Your argument is this:
 
1. The God of the philosophers is ontologically simple, and therefore immutable: he cannot change, and so cannot be affected by anything that occurs in the created realm.
2. The God of the monotheistic religions is not immutable: he affects and is affected by goings-on in the created realm.
3. If there is a property P such that x has P but y does not, then x is not identical to y. (Contrapositive of the Indiscernibility of Identicals)
Therefore
4. The God of the philosophers is not identical to the God of the monotheistic religions.
 
The argument is valid (correct in point of logical form) if 'God of the philosophers' means 'God as conceived by the philosophers' and 'God of the montheistic religions' means 'God as conceived within the monotheistic religions.'  And I do think that is what you mean by the phrases in question. (Correct me if I am wrong.) 
 
But whether or not the argument is valid, it is not probative because the first  premise is false and the second is dubious.
 
Ad (1).  Only some philosophers hold that God is ontologically simple; Alvin Plantinga is a prominent contemporary theist who does not.  One cannot therefore build ontological simplicity into the definition of 'God of the philosophers.'  As for immutability, some philosophers think of God as mutable, Charles Hartshorne, for example.  So one cannot pack immutability into the definition either.  And similarly for other attributes.  For some, there are broadly logical limits on divine power, for others there are no limits on divine power. There are different views about the omni-attributes.  There are different views about the divine modal status.  There are different views about how the causa prima is related to the realm of secondary causes, etc.
 
The point is that 'God of the philosophers' does not pick out some one definite conception of God.  There are many philosophical conceptions of God even within monotheism.  There is no God of the philosophers if the phrase means 'God as conceived by the philosophers.'  Premise (1) therefore rests on a false presupposition.
 
I read 'God of the philosophers' differently.  What the phrase refers to is an approach to the divine reality, the approach by way of discursive reason applied to the data of experience, the approach exemplified by Aquinas in the Five Ways, for instance.  Or the approach exemplified by Descartes in the theistic arguments of his Meditations on First Philosophy.  The God of the philosophers, then, is God approached by way of discursive reason.  It is essential to realize that what Aquinas, Descartes, and others were groping towards using their unaided discursive intellects was not a concept, an idea, an ens rationis, or anything merely immanent to their own thinking. It was nothing merely excogitated, or projected, or abtract, or merely immanent to their minds.  It was, instead, the real concrete God, transcendent of the mind and independent of all modes of approach thereto.
 
To think otherwise is to commit the mistake I expose in Pascal and Buber on the God of the Philosophers.
 
My claim is that what the philosopher seeks to know by discursive reason is the same as what the mystic seeks to know by direct, albeit nonsensible, experience, and is the same as what the religionist seeks to contact by way of belief on the basis of revelation.  They approach one and the same God, but in three different ways.  To employ a crude analogy: if there are three routes up K2, it does not follow  that there are three summits.  There is and can be only one summit.  Similarly, there is an can be only one God.  Reason, mystical intuition, and faith are three routes to the same 'summit.'
 
Ad (2).  It is certainly true that God is portrayed in many passages of the Bible as changing and thus as changeable.  But it doesn't follow straightaway that the God of religion is changeable.  For perhaps those passages can be taken in a merely figurative way and interpreted so as to be consistent with God's immutability.  Just as one must distinguish between philosophical conceptions of God and God, one must distinguish between Biblical portrayals of God and God.  The God of religion is God as approached via faith in revelation; but what exactly the content of revelation is is something to be worked out by hard theological work.  The Bible does not supply its own theology.  One cannot simply read it and know what it means.  One has toreason about what one reads.  But that is not to say that theology is philosophy.  Theology accepts revelation as data; philosophy does not.
 
Consider Genesis 3, 8:  "And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden."  Obviously, this passage cannot be taken literally, for if so taken, one would have to say that God, a purely spiritual being, has feet.  But if he was walking around on his feet, was he shod or not?  And what was his shoe size?  Were his toenails properly trimmed?  How many corns and calluses did he have, if any?  There must be answers to these questions and a thousand more  if God was literally walking through the garden and making noise as he did so.  And furthermore, he had to have physical eyes if Adam and Eve though they could hide from him behind trees.
 
Since we know that a purely spiritual being cannot have feet, and since we know that only a purely spiritual being could be the cause of the existence of the physical universe, we know that the passage in question cannot be taken literally.  So what exactly the content of revelation is in Genesis and elsewhere is not easy to discern.  But we can be sure that any portrayals of God that imply that he has physical attributes must be taken figuratively so as not to conflict with God's spiritual nature.  It may well be, though I am not prepared to argue it in detail, that portrayals of God as mutable must also be taken figuratively.  So I find your second premise doubtful.
 
So I persist in my view that the 'distinction' between the God of the philosophers and the God of the religionists is entirely bogus.  In fact my view strikes me as self-evident if one construes the relevant phrases in my way.  The God of the philosophers is the divine reality, if there is one, which is approached by discursive reason applied to the data of experience, with no use being made of the putative date of revelation.  The God of the religionists is the divine reality, if there is one, that is approached via faith on the basis of revelation.  Clearly, there can be only one divine reality.  For if there were two, neither would be divine given that only an absolute reality can be divine and given that the divine is that than which no greater can be conceived.  Since there can be only one divine reality, the God of the philosophers and the God of the religionists is the same.

God, Probability, and Noncontingent Propositions

Matt Hart comments:

. . . most of what we conceive is possible. So if we say that

1) In 80% of the cases, if 'Conceivably, p' then 'Possibly, p'
2) Conceivably, God exists
Ergo,
3) Pr(Possibly, God exists) = 80%
4) If 'Possibly, God exists' then 'necessarily, God exists'
Ergo,
5) Pr(Necessarily, God exists) = 80%,

we seem to get by.

I had made the point that conceivability does not entail possibility.  Hart agrees with that, but seems to think that conceivability is nondemonstrative evidence of possibility.  Accordingly, our ability to conceive (without contradiction) that p gives us good reason to believe that p is possible.

What is puzzling to me is how a noncontingent proposition can be assigned a probability less than 1.  A noncontingent proposition is one that is either necessary or impossible.  Now all of the following are noncontingent: 

God exists
Necessarily, God exists
Possibly, God exists
God does not exist
Necessarily, God does not exist
Possibly, God does not exist.

I am making the Anselmian assumption that God (the ens perfectissimum, that than which no greater can be conceived, etc.) is a noncontingent being.  I am also assuming that our modal logic is S5.  The characteristic S5 axiom states that Poss p –> Nec Poss p.  S5 includes S4, the characteristic axiom of which is Nec p –> Nec Nec p.  What these axioms say, taken together, is that what's possible and necessary does not vary from possible world to possible world. 

Now Possibly, God exists, if true, is necessarily true, and if false, necessarily false.  (By the characteristic S5 axiom.)  So what could it mean that the probability of Possibly, God exists is .8?  I would have thought that the probability is either 1 or 0.  the same goes for Necessarily, God exists. How  can this proposition have a probability of .8?  Must it not be either 1 or 0?

Now I am a fair and balanced guy, as everyone knows.  So I will deploy the same reasoning against the atheist who cites the evils of our world as nondemonstrative evidence of the nonexistence of God.  I don't know what it means to say that it is unlikely that God exists given the kinds and quantities of evil in our world.  Either God exists necessarily or he is impossible (necessarily nonexistent).  How can you raise the probability  of a necessary truth?  Suppose some hitherto unknown genocide comes to light, thereby adding to the catalog of known evils.  Would that strengthen the case against the existence of God?  How could it?

To see my point consider the noncontingent propositions of mathematics.  They are all of them necessarily true if true.  So *7 + 5 = 12* is necessarily true and *7 + 5 = 11* is necessarily false.  Empirical evidence is irrelevant here.  I cannot raise the probability of the first proposition by adding 7 knives and 5 forks to come up with 12 utensils.  I do not come to know the truth of the first proposition by induction from empirical cases of adding.  It would also be folly to attempt to disconfirm the second proposition by empirical means.

If I can't know that 7 + 5 = 12 by induction from empirical cases, how can I know that possibly, God exists by induction from empirical cases of conceiving?  The problem concerns not only induction, but how one can know by induction a necessary proposition.  Similarly, how can I know that God does not exist by induction from empirical cases of evil?

Of course, *God exists* is not a mathematical proposition.  But it is a noncontingent proposition, which is all I need for my argument.

Finally, consider this.  I can conceive the existence of God but I can also conceive the nonexistence of God.  So plug 'God does not exist' into Matt's argument above.  The result is that probability of the necessary nonexistence of God is .8!

My conclusion:  (a) Conceivability does not entail possibility; (b) in the case of noncontingent propositions, conceivability does not count as nondemonstrative evidence of possibility.

The Ought-to-Be and the Ought-to-Do and the Aporetics of “Be Ye Perfect”

Is there any justification for talk of the ought-to-be in cases where they are not cases of the ought-to-do?

Let's begin by noting that if I ought to do X (pay my debts, feed my kids, keep my hands off my neighbor's wife, etc.) then my doing X ought to be. For example, given that I ought to pay my debts, then my paying a certain debt on a certain date is a state of affairs that ought to be, ought to exist, ought to obtain. So it is not as if the ought-to-do and the ought-to-be form disjoint classes. For every act X that an agent A ought to do, there is a state of affairs, A's doing X, that ought to be, and a state of affairs, A's failing to do X, that ought not be. The ought-to-do, therefore, is a  case of the   ought-to-be.

My question, however, is whether there are states of affairs that ought to be even in situations in which there are no moral agents with power sufficient to bring them about, and states of affairs that ought not be even in situations in which there are no moral agents with power sufficient to prevent them. In other words, are there non-agential oughts? Does it make sense, and is it true, to say things like 'There ought to be fewer diseases than there are' or 'There ought to be no natural disasters' or 'There ought to be morally perfect people'? Or consider

1. I ought to be a better man that I am, indeed, I ought to be morally perfect.

(1) expresses an axiological requirement but (arguably) not a moral obligation because it is simply not in my power to perfect myself, nor is it in any finite person's power or any group of finite person's   power to perfect me. Now consider the following aporetic triad: 

1. I ought to be morally perfect or at least better than I am in ways over which I have no control.

2. I lack the power to be what I ought to be, and this impotence is due to no specific fault of my own. (My impotence is 'original,' part  and parcel of the 'fallen' human condition, not derived from any   particular act or act-omission of mine.)

3. 'Ought' implies 'Can': one can be obliged to do X only if one has an effective choice as to whether to do X.

The triad is inconsistent in that (1) & (3) entails ~(2). Indeed, any two limbs, taken together, entail the negation of the remaining one.  How can the inconsistency be removed?

 A. One solution is simply to deny (1) by claiming that there is no sense of 'ought' in which one ought to be morally perfect or better than one is in ways over which one has no control.  This strikes me as counterintuitive. For there does seems to me to be some sense in which I ought to be perfect. I feel the force of the NT verse, "Be ye perfect as your heavenly father is perfect." I have the strong intuition that I ought to be, if not perfect, at least better in respects where I simply lack the power to bring about the improvement.

B. A second solution is to distinguish between agential and non-agential oughts. We can then maintain (1) as true by maintaining that the 'ought' in (1) is non-agential and expresses an axiological   requirement as opposed to a moral obligation. So interpreted, (1) is  consistent with (2) and (3).

We can then transform the above triad into an argument:

4. (1)-(3) are all true.
5. (1)-(3) would not all be true if there were no distinction between agential and non-agential oughts.
   Therefore
6. There is a distinction between agential and non-agential oughts.

C. A third solution is to maintain the truth of (1)-(3) while also maintaining that all oughts are agential. But then how avoid inconsistency? One might maintain that, when restricted to my own resources, I lack the power to do what I ought to do; yet I am morally  obliged to perfect myself; and since 'ought' implies 'can,' the power  that I need must be supplied in part from a Source external to myself.  "And this all men call God."  So God exists!

In short, the inconsistency is avoided by bringing God into the picture as one who supplies individuals with the supplemental power to do what they are morally obliged to do when that power is insufficient from their own resources. This gives rise to an argument for the existence of an external source of moral assistance:

7. I am morally obliged (ought)  to do things that I cannot do on my own.
8. 'Ought' implies 'can'.
Therefore

9. I can do things that I cannot do on my own.
   Therefore
10. There is an external source of moral assistance that makes up the difference between what I can do on my own and what I cannot.

Summary

I have sketched two arguments which need closer scrutiny. The one based on the (B) response to the triad gives some, though not a  conclusive, reason for accepting a distinction between agential and   non-agential oughts.

Gratuitous Evil and Begging the Question: Does LAFE Beg the Question?

What is it for an argument to beg the question? I suggest that an argument begs the question if it is impossible to know one of the premises to be true without knowing that the conclusion is true. The simplest question-begging arguments are of the form

p
—
p.

Clearly, every argument of this form is valid, and some arguments of this form are sound. It follows that an argument can be sound and yet probatively worthless. In plain English, no argument of the above form proves its conclusion in the sense of giving a 'consumer' of the argument any reason to accept the conclusion; it rather presupposes its conclusion. One cannot know the premise to be true without knowing that the conclusion is true.

Now consider a richer example: (P1) We are creatures; (P2) There is no creature without a creator; therefore, (C) A creator exists. This argument begs the question in that it is impossible to know that (P1) is true without knowing that (C) is true. For only if I know that a creator exists can I know that I am a creature. The argument is not probative because it presupposes in (P1) what it needs to prove. (Of course, I am assuming that one is not equivocating on 'creature' and that one is using it in the sense in which it must be used for (P2) to be true; if one is equivocating, then naturally the argument is worthless for this reason.)

Does God Exist Because He Ought to Exist?

Steven, Peter, et al.:  This paper has been languishing  on my hard drive for some time.  Comments appreciated. 

Abstract.  Modal ontological arguments for the existence of God require a possibility premise to the effect that a maximally perfect being is possible. Admitting the possibility of such a being may appear to be a minimal concession, but it is not given that the admission, together with the uncontroversial premise that a necessary being is one whose possibility entails its actuality, straightaway entails the actual existence of a maximally perfect being. The suspicion thus arises that the modal ontological argument begs the question at its possibility premise. So various philosophers, including J. N. Findlay, A.C. Ewing, John Leslie and Carl Kordig have attempted to support the possibility premise by broadly deontic considerations concerning what ought-to-be, where this ought-to-be subsists independently of the powers of any agent. The basic idea is that God, conceived as a maximally perfect being, is possible because (i) he ought to exist, and (ii) whatever ought to exist is possible. The basic idea is that the non-agential oughtness or axiological requiredness of the divine existence certifies the possibility and in turn the actuality of the divine existence. The overall argument could be described as a broadly deontic God proof along modal ontological lines. This article sets forth and defends the argument before explaining why it is not ultimately compelling.

Continue reading “Does God Exist Because He Ought to Exist?”

More on Modes of Being with Two Applications

Clarity will be served if we distinguish the following four questions:  

 Q1. What is meant by 'mode of being'?
 Q2. Is the corresponding idea intelligible?
 Q3. Are there (two or more) modes of being?
 Q4. What are the modes of being?

So far in this series of posts I have been concerned only with the first two questions. Clearly, the first two questions are logically prior to the second two. It is possible to understand what is meant by 'mode of being' and grant that the notion is intelligible while denying that there are (two or more) modes of being. And if two philosophers agree that there are (two or more) modes of being they might yet disagree about what these modes are.

I assume that if talk of modes of being is intelligible, then there is no mistake such as Peter van Inwagen alleges, or fallacy such as  Reinhardt Grossmann alleges, that is committed by partisans of any modes-of-being doctrine.  Van Inwagen's claim, you will recall, is that such partisans illictly transfer what properly belongs to the nature of an F to the existence of the F.  And Grossmann's claim, you will also recall, is that one cannot validly infer from a dramatic difference in properties as between two kinds of thing (concreta and abstracta, for exsample) that the two kinds of thing differ in their mode of being.

An Application to Philosophical Theology

Suppose you have two philosophers. They agree that God exists and they agree as to the nature of God. But one claims that God exists necessarily while the other claims that he exists contingently. What are they disagreeing about? That there is a being having such-and-such divine properties is not in dispute. Nor is the nature of God in dispute. It is at least arguable that the disagreement centers on God's Seinsweise, or modus essendi, or way of being, or mode of being or however you care to phrase it.  The one philosopher says that God exists-necessarily while the other says that God exists-contingently.  This is not a difference in nature or in properties but in mode of being.

This suggests that with respect to anything, we can ask: (i) What is it?  (ii) Does it exist? (iii) How (in what way or mode) does it exist? This yields a tripartite distinction among quiddity (in a broad sense to include  essential and accidental, relational and nonrelational properties), existence, and mode of existence (mode of being).
 
My claim, at a bare minimum, is that, contra van Inwagen, Grossmann, Dallas Willard, and a host of others, the notion that there are modes of being is intelligible and defensible, and needn't involve the making of a mistake or the commission of a fallacy. Of course I want to go beyond that and claim that a sound metaphysics cannot get by without a modes-of-being doctrine.  But for now I am concerned merely to defend the minimal claim.  Minimal though it is, it puts me at loggerheads with the analytic establishment.  (But what did you expect for a maverick?)

A contemporary analytic philosopher who adheres to the thin conception of being according to which there are no modes of being will accommodate the difference between necessary and contingent beings by saying that a necessary being like God exists in all possible worlds whereas a contingent being like Socrates exists in some but not all possible worlds. So instead of saying that God exists in a different   way than Socrates, he will say that God and Socrates exist in the same way, which is the way that everything exists, but that God exists in all worlds whereas Socrates exists only in some.  But this involves quantification over possible worlds and raises difficult questions as to what possible worlds are.

(It is worth noting that a modes-of-being theorist can reap the benefits of possible worlds talk as a useful and graphic façon de parler without incurring the ontological costs.  You can talk the talk without walking the walk.)

Presumably no one here will embrace the mad-dog modal realism of David Lewis, according to which all worlds are on an ontological par. So one has to take some sort of abstractist line and construe worlds as  maximal abstracta of one sort or another, say, as maximal (Fregean not Russellian) propositions. But then difficult questions arise about what it is for an individual to exist in a world. What is it for   Socrates to exist in a possible world if worlds are maximal (Fregean)  propositions? It is to be represented as existing by that world. So Socrates exists in the actual world in that Socrates is represented as existing by the actual world which, on the abstractist aspproach, is the one true maximal proposition. (A proposition is maximal iff it entails every proposition with which it is consistent.) And God exists  in all possible worlds in that all maximal propositions represent him as exsiting: no matter which one of the maximal propositions is true, that proposition represents him as existing.

But veritas sequitur esse, truth follows being, so I am inclined to say that the abstractist approach has it precisely backwards: the necessity of God's existence is the ground of each maximal proposition's representing him as existing; the necessity of God's existence cannot be grounded in the logically posterior fact that every maximal proposition represents him as existing.
 
The ground of the divine necessity, I say, is God's unique mode of being which is not garden-variety metaphysical necessity but aseity.  God alone exists from himself and has his necessity from himself
unlike lesser necessary beings (numbers, etc) which have their  necessity from God. The divine aseity is in turn grounded in the  divine simplicity which latter I try to explain in my SEP article.

Summing up this difficult line of thought that I have just barely sketched: if we dig deep into the 'possible worlds' treatment of metaphysical necessity and contingency, we will be led back to an   ontology that invokes modes of being.

Application to the Idealism/Realism Controversy

Consider this thing on the desk in front of me. What is it? A coffee cup with such-and-such properties both essential and  accidental. For example, it is warm and full of coffee. These are accidental properties, properties the thing has now but might not have  had now, properties the possession of which is not necessary for its  existence. No doubt the coffee cup exists. But it is not so clear in what mode it exists. One philosopher, an idealist, says that its mode of being is purely intentional: it exists only as an intentional object, which means: it exists only relative to (transcendental)   consciousness. The other philosopher, a realist, does not deny that the cup is (sometimes) an intentional object, but denies that its  being is exhausted by its being an intentional object. He maintains that it exists mind-independently.

What I have just done in effect is introduce two further modes of being. We can call them esse intentionale and esse reale, purely intentional being and real being. It seems that without this   distinction between modes of being we will not be able to formulate the issue that divides the idealist and the realist. No one in his right mind denies the existence of coffee cups, rocks, trees, and   'external' items generally. Thus Berkeley and Husserl and other idealists do not deny that there exist trees and such; they are making a claim about their mode of existence.

Suppose you hold to a thin conception of being, one that rules out modes of existence. On the thin conception, an item either exists or it does not and one cannot distinguish among different ways, modes, kinds, or degrees of existence. How would an adherent of the thin conception formulate the idealism/realism controversy?  The idealist, again, does not deny the existence of rocks and trees.  And he doesn't differe with the realist as totheir nature.  Without talk of modes of being, then, no sense can be made of the idealism/realism controversy.

From the Mail: Bryan Magee on Kant and the Theistic Proofs

Dear Dr. Vallicella,

I am of the understanding that one of your post-graduate degrees focussed on Kant. With your knowledge of said philosopher I wonder if I might trouble you to answer a few questions for me?

These questions pertain to Kant's criticism's of the cosmological argument for God's existence. I know that this argument comes in three basic forms: Leibnizian, Thomistic, and Kalam. Did Kant direct criticism to all three versions? Brian Magee has stated, "The fact simply is that Kant has demolished the traditional 'proofs' of God." (Confessions of A Philosopher, p.198) Many other credentialed philosophers make similar claims. In your view, is Magee's strident assertion justified? Do any of Kant's criticism's of the cosmological argument still have force today, or are you of the opinion that the work of recent philosophers has blunted the arguments of the Prussian?

Of course, I don't expect you to provide any counter-arguments to Kant. I am merely curious as to your take on the questions I have asked and I am quite happy for your answer to be brief. Thank you for your time.

Regards,

Stephen Lewin

Dear Mr. Lewin,

Thank you for writing and for reminding me of that delightful book by Bryan Magee.  Unfortunately, the sentence you quote  I do not find on p. 198.  But on p. 156, we read that Kant's philosophy ". . . demolishes many of the most important religious and theological claims . . . ."  On the same page Magee bestows upon Kant the highest praise.  He is "the supreme understander of the problem of human experience," "the supreme clarifier," and "the supreme liberator." For Magee, Manny is the man!

A little farther down on the same page we find your quotation:  "The fact simply is that Kant has demolished the traditional 'proofs' of God."

You ask whether Magee's confident claim is justified.  No, but first a comment on 'demolishes' as it occurs in the above quotations.  Magee uses it in connection both with claims and with arguments.   But to demolish a claim is not the same as to demolish an argument.  Presumably, to demolish a claim such as the claim that God exists would be to show that it is obviously false because ruled out on broadly logical grounds, or else ruled out on the ground that it is inconsistent with some well-known empirical fact or set of empirical facts.  Clearly, Kant does not demolish the claim that God exists in this sense of 'demolish.'  Ditto for the claim that the soul is a simple substance.  Nor is it his intention to demolish these claims.  At most he shows them to be unknowable or unprovable.  And he thinks that is a salutary thing to have shown.  "I have found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith," Kant famously remarks in the preface to the 2nd edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Bxxx).  I suggest that Magee is being sloppy when he speaks of demolishing theological claims.  He may be confusing 'show to be false' with 'show to be unknowable or unprovable.'  I receommend a careful reading of the 1787 preface as a counterbalance to Magee's Kant interpretation as der Alles-Zermalmer, the all-pulverizer.

Now what would it be to demolish an argument?   To demolish an argument is to expose a clear mistake in it such as a formal fallacy or a plainly false premise. I believe that Kant demolished the ontological argument "from mere concepts" which is essentially Descartes' Meditation V ontological argument.  Kant did this by isolating a presupposition of the argument which is plainly false, namely, the proposition that  some concepts are such that, by sheer analysis of their content, one can show that they are instantiated. Surely Kant is right that no concept, not even the concept of God, includes existence.  Interestingly, Aquinas would agree with this. 

But there are modal versions of the ontological argument that are immune to the Kantian critique.  See my "Has the Ontological Argument Been Refuted?" Religious Studies 29 (1993), pp. 97-110.  As for the cosmological argument, Kant thinks that it depends on the ontological argument and collapses with it.  This is an intricate matter that I cannot go into now.  If you are interested, see my article, "Does the Cosmological Argument Depend on the Ontological?" Faith and Philosophy, vol. 17, no. 4 (October 2000), pp. 441-458. 

Another idea of Kant's is that there cannot be a First Cause because the category of causality has no cognitive employment beyond the realm of phenomena.  Schopenhauer borrows this notion and pushes it for all its worth.  Relevant here is my post, On the Very Idea of a Cause of Existence: Schopenhauer on the Cosmological Argument.  But it cannot be said that either Kant or Schopenhauer demolished the cosmological argument because their critiques rest on their own questionable metaphysical systems.

And as you suggest above,  there are Kalam and Thomist versions of the CA that Kant doesn't even consider.  Kant's knowledge of the history of philosophy was meager and the metaphysics he criticized was that of the Wolffian school which derives from Leibniz.

Finally, I refer you to my article, "From Facts to God: An Onto-Cosmological Argument,"  International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 48 (2000), pp. 157-181.

 

God and the ‘No Angry Unicorn’ Argument

This from an astute reader commenting on the Hell post:

'No angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon'

Does this not refer to doxastic uncertainty rather than a fatuous equation of God with something material? This is how I interpreted it when I read it. More in the vein of: why venerate something tenuous in lieu of a Lucretian reality? Not a profound solution by any means, but an almost noble one if lived humbly– not sensually. Although , I suppose this is an agnostic take on the phrase. ( I've been reading too much of Montaigne!)

Thanks for exposing me to Henryk Gorecki . Do you know of Arvo Part?

I love Arvo Part, and Montaigne too.  But onto the issue you raise. To quote Cactus Ed himself, "Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?"

Angry unicorn Now it would be foolish to try to discern in the scribblings of Ed Abbey anything very clear or precise or carefully thought-through.  But it seems clear to me that Abbey is likening God to an intramundane object much as Bertrand Russell likened him to a celestial teapot.  In so doing, both demonstrate a profound ignorance of what sophisticated theists mean by 'God.'  They are not talking about a being among beings, let alone a material being among beings. (Deus est ipsum esse subsistens, et cetera.)  But you focus on the epistemic side, with justification, as the quotation shows. 

Accordingly, Abbey is suggesting that, regardless of the nature of God, the evidence of his existence is no better than the evidence of the existence of an irate lunar unicorn, a lunicorn if you will.   

But please note that questions about the evidence for something are connected to questions about the nature of that something.  The existence of a lunicorn would be strongly disconfirmed were a a bunch of lunar modules to fail to detect the presence of any such critter.  But no number of space probes could disconfirm the existence of God.  Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was surely talking nonsense when he reported that he saw no God during his famous suborbital flight.  The empirical undetectability of God no more tells against his existence than the empirical undetectability of the square root of pi tells against its existence. 

So while Abbey's remarks do have an epistemological flavor, they cannot be divorced from their metaphysical import.

But there is also an axiological side to it, which may be even more important.  Abbey is implying that it doesn't much matter whether God exists or not.  He could have added 'Who cares?' after 'Who knows?' to his list of questions.  After all, it is of no great moment whether there are any lunicorns or celestial teapots out there.  My happiness cannot hang on that.  The meaning of life does not stand or fall with the existence or nonexistence of such things. 

Abbey's aphorism sums up the atheist attitude quite well.  Does God exist?  Who cares? Who cares whether there is some weird extra object in the ontological inventory?  And how would you know anyway?  "Bartender, another round!"

The Problem of Evil and the Argument from Evil

(A reader found the following post, from the old PowerBlogs site, useful.  So I repost it here with minor modifications and additions.)

It is important to distinguish between the problem of evil and the argument from evil. The first is the problem of reconciling the existence of God, as traditionally understood, with the existence of natural and moral evils.  As J. L. Mackie points out, this "is essentially a logical problem: it sets the theist the task of clarifying and if possible reconciling the several beliefs which he holds." (The Miracle of Theism, Oxford 1982, p. 150) Mackie goes on to point out that "the problem in this sense signally does not arise for those whose views of the world are markedly different from traditional theism." Thus the theist's problem of evil does not arise for an atheist. It might, however, be the case that some other problem of evil arises for the atheist, say, the problem of reconciling the existence of evil with life's being worth living.   But that is a separate matter.

The argument from evil, on the other hand, is an attempt to show the nonexistence of God from the fact of evil, where 'fact of evil' is elliptical for 'the existence of natural and moral evils.'

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE PROBLEM OF EVIL AND THE ARGUMENT FROM EVIL

The main difference between the problem of evil and the argument from evil is that the former is an ad hominem argument whereas the second is not. I am using ad hominem in the way Peter Geach uses it on pp. 26-27 of his Reason and Argument (Basil Blackwell 1976):

This Latin term indicates that these are arguments addressed to a particular man — in fact, the other fellow you are disputing with. You start from something he believes as a premise, and infer a conclusion he won't admit to be true. If you have not been cheating in your reasoning, you will have shown that your opponent's present body of beliefs is inconsistent and it's up to him to modify it somewhere.

As Geach points out, there is nothing fallacious about such an argumentative  procedure. If A succeeds in showing B that his doxastic system harbors a contradiction, then not everything that B believes can be true. Now can an atheist prove the nonexistence of God in this way? No he cannot: at the very most he can prove (with the aid of various auxiliary premises that he and his interlocutor both accept) that God exists and Evil exists cannot both be true. But it does not follow therefrom that God exists is not true. For the atheist to transform the ad hominem problem of evil into a non-ad hominem argument from evil, he would have to establish, or at least assert, that evil exists, and not merely that the theist believes that evil exists. To see my point consider the following conditional, where P is the conjunction of auxiliary premises:

C. If evil exists & P, then God does not exist.

The atheist who raises the problem of evil for the theist asserts (C), or rather a proposition of that form. But to assert a conditional is not to assert its antecedent, or its consequent for that matter; it is to assert a entailment connection between the two. Now although it is the case that for each argument there is a corresponding conditional, and vice versa, arguments must not be confused with conditionals.

Transforming (C) into an argument from evil yields:

Evil Exists

P

Therefore

God does not exist.

Clearly, an atheist who gives this argument, or rather an argument of this form, must assert both premises. Doing so, he ceases his ad hominem examination of the consistency of another person's beliefs, beliefs he either rejects or takes no stand on, and 'comes clean' with his own beliefs.

THE ARGUER FROM EVIL NEEDS TO AFFIRM OBJECTIVE EVIL

If the atheist's aim is merely to poke holes in the logical consistency of the theist's belief-set, then it doesn't matter whether he thinks of evil as objective or subjective. Indeed, he needn't believe in evil in any sense. He could hold that it is an illusion. But if the atheist's goal is to support his own belief that God does not exist with an argument from evil, then he needs to maintain that evil is objective or objectively real.

Consider all the enslavement of humans by humans that has taken place in the history of the world. Suppose it is agreed that slavery is morally wrong. What makes this true? Define a moral subjectivist as one who agrees that the claim in question is true, but holds that the truth-maker of this moral truth, and of others like it, is an individual's being in a psychological state, say, the state of being repulsed by slavery. For the moral subjectivist, then, sentences like 'Slavery is wrong' are elliptical for sentences like 'Slavery is wrong-for-X,' where X is a person or any being capable of being in psychological states. Furthermore, the moral subjectivist grants that moral claims have truth-makers, indeed objective truth-makers; it is just that these truth-makers involve psychological states that vary from person to person.

Now if our atheist subscribes to a theory of evil along those lines, then, although there will be objective facts of the matter regarding what various individuals feel about the practice or the institution of slavery, there will be no objective fact of the matter regarding the wrongness or moral evil of slavery.

If so, the fact of evil subjectively construed will have no bearing on the existence of God, a fact, if it a fact, that is objective.

Suppose a torturer tortures his victim to death solely for the satisfaction it gives him. And suppose that moral subjectivism is true. Then the torturing, though evil for the tortured, is good for the torturer, with the upshot that the torturing is neither good nor evil objectively. Now if I were on the scene and had the power to stop the torturing, but did not, would my noninterference detract from my moral goodness? Not at all. (The same goes a fortiori for God.) For nothing objectively evil is transpiring: all that is going on is that one person is securing his pleasure at the expense of another's pain. If you insist that something evil is going on, then that shows that you reject moral subjectivism. But if you accept moral subjectivism, then nothing evil is going on; the torturing is evil only in the mind of the victim and in the minds of any others who sympathize with him. If you accept moral subjectivism and continue to insist that the torturing is evil, then you would also have to insist that it is good, since it is good from the perspective of the torturer. But if it is both good and evil, then it is (objectively) neither.

What I am claiming, then, is that the atheist arguer from evil must construe evil objectively. This will result in trouble for the atheist if it can be shown that objective evil cannot exist unless God exists. For then the atheist arguer from evil will end up presupposing the very being whose existence he is out to deny. No doubt this is a big 'if.' But it is worth exploring.  The problem for the atheist is to explain how there can be objective good and evil in a Godless universe. 

And another line worth exploring is a theistic argument to God from the fact of objective good and evil.  No such argument could PROVE the existence of God, but it could very well have the power of cancelling out the argument from evil.

A Modal Ontological Argument and an Argument from Evil Compared

After leaving the polling place this morning, I headed out on a sunrise hike over the local hills whereupon the muse of philosophy bestowed upon me some good thoughts.  Suppose we compare a modal ontological argument with an argument from evil in respect of the question of evidential support for the key premise in each.  This post continues our ruminations on the topic of contingent support for noncontingent propositions.

A Modal Ontological Argument

'GCB' will abbreviate 'greatest conceivable being,' which is a rendering of Anselm of Canterbury's "that than which no greater can be conceived."  'World' abbreviates 'broadly logically possible world.'

1. The concept of the GCB is either instantiated in every  world or it is instantiated in no world.

2. The concept of the GCB is instantiated in some world.  Therefore:

3. The concept of the GCB is instantiated.

This is a valid argument: it is correct in point of logical form.  Nor does it commit any informal fallacy such as petitio principii, as I argue in Religious Studies 29 (1993), pp. 97-110.  Note also that this version of the OA does not require the controversial assumption that existence is a first-level property, an assumption that Frege famously rejects and that many read back (with some justification) into Kant.  (Frege held that the OA falls with that assumption; he was wrong: the above version is immune to the Kant-Frege objection.)

(1) expresses what I will call Anselm's Insight.  He appreciated, presumably for the first time in the history of thought, that a divine being, one worthy of worship, must be noncontingent, i.e., either necessary or impossible.  I consider (1) nonnegotiable.  If your god is contingent, then your god is not God. There is no god but God.  End of discussion.  It is premise (2) — the key premise — that ought to raise eyebrows.  What it says — translating out of the patois of possible worlds — is that it it possible that the GCB exists.

Whereas conceptual analysis of 'greatest conceivable being' suffices in support of (1), how do we support (2)?  Why should we accept it?  Some will say that the conceivability of the GCB entails its possibility.  But I deny that conceivability entails possibility.  I won't argue that now, though I do say something about conceivability here.  Suppose you grant me that conceivability does not entail BL-possibility.  You might retreat to this claim:  It may not entail it, but it is evidence for it:  the fact that we can conceive of a state of affairs S is defeasible evidence of S's possibility.

Please note that Possibly the GCB exists — which is logically equivalent to (2) — is necessarily true if true.  This is a consequence of the characteristic S5 axiom of modal propositional logic:  Poss p –> Nec Poss p. ('Characteristic' in the sense that it  is what distinguishes S5 from S4 which is included in S5.)  So if the only support for (2) is probabilistic or evidential, then we have the puzzle we encountered earlier: how can there be probabilistic support for a noncontingent proposition?  But now the same problem arises on the atheist side.

An Argument From Evil

4. If the concept of the GCB is instantiated, then there are no gratuitous evils.

5. There are some gratuitous evils. Therefore:

6. The concept of the GCB is not instantiated.

This too is a deductive argument, and it is valid.  It falls afoul of no informal fallacy.  (4), like (1), is nonnegotiable.  Deny it, and I show you the door.  The key premise, then, the one on which the soundness of the argument rides, is (5).  (5) is not obviously true.  Even if it is obviously true that there are evils, it is not obviously true that there are gratuitous evils. 

In fact, one might argue that the argument begs the question against the theist at line (5).  For if there are any gratuitous evils, then by definition of 'gratuitous' God cannot exist.  But I won't push this in light of the fact that in print I have resisted the claim that the modal OA begs the question at its key premise, (2) above.

So how do we know that (5) is true?  Not by conceptual analysis. If we assume, uncontroversially, that there are some evils, then the following logical equivalence holds:

7. Necessarily, there are some gratuitous evils iff the GCB does not exist.

Left-to-right is obvious: if there are gratuitous evils, ones for which there is no justification, then a being having the standard omni-attributes cannot exist.  Right-to-left:  if there is no GCB and there are some evils, then there are some gratuitous evils.  (On second thought, R-to-L may not hold, but I don't need it anyway.)

Now the RHS, if true, is necessarily true, which implies that the LHS — There are some gratuitious evils — is necessarily true if true. 

Can we argue for the LHS =(5)?  Perhaps one could argue like this (as one commenter suggested in an earlier thread):  If the evils are nongratuitous, then probably we would have conceived of justifying reasons for them.  But we cannot conceive of justifying reasons.  Therefore, probably there are gratuitous evils.

But now we face our old puzzle: How can the probability of there being gratuitous evils show that there are gratuitous evils given that There are gratuitous evils, if true, is necessarily true?

Conclusion

We face the same problem with both arguments, the modal OA for the existence of the GCB, and the argument from evil for the nonexistence of the GCB.  The key premises in both arguments — (2) and (5) — are necessarily true if true.  The only support for them is evidential from contingent facts.  But then we are back with our old puzzle:  How can contingent evidence support noncontingent propositions? 

Neither argument is probative and they appear to cancel each other out.  Sextus Empiricus would be proud of me.