13 Years Ago Yesterday: An ontological argument for the non-existence of god

A mid-17th century
engraving of Anselmn

By Moristotle

[Originally published, without an image, on December 6, 2007. Dawkins’ reference to the “ironic ‘proof’ ” he announces understates the pleasure it afforded me when I read it again this year.]

In the year 1078, St. Anselm of Canterbury (England) proposed an “ontological argument” for the existence of God:

Why is there something rather than nothing?

The question, Why is there something rather than nothing?, has long haunted me, as it has haunted many if not most people. Could the answer be quite simply that the eternal truths of logic, whose nonexistence is impossible, require "something" to exist for them to be about, and "something's" existence as inexorably requires that it inter-react and reform itself, even becoming, over the course of millions and billions of years, creatures capable of being haunted by such questions?
    I'm reminded of my favorite short poem, by Howard Nemerov:

The world's just mad enough to have been made
By the being whose beings into being prayed.

Whether it's relevant or not, it nevertheless evokes a similar feeling in me. Awe at the weirdness of things. The mystery of being.
    Could the story by which to exult, to dance, be written as paeans to the mystery, like some weird novel by Flann O'Brien—say, The Third Policeman, which was written between 1939 and 1940 and published posthumously. In the book's frontispiece, O'Brien "quotes" his fictional philosopher De Selby:

Human existence being an hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucinations of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known as death.

As a teenage philosopher, I found The Gospel of John more appealing than the other Gospels. The very first verse of John suggests that existence derived from those eternal logical truths: "In the beginning was the Word...." As Wikipedia says, "The Gospel of John identifies the Logos, through which all things are made, as divine (theos), and further identifies Jesus as the incarnation of the Logos." While most of the Jesus myth simply borrows from the various pagan and other religious mythologies of the period [something I didn't realize as a teenager], logos is borrowed from Greek philosophy. Heraclitus (ca. 535–475 BC) used the term for the principle of order and knowledge in the universe.

Want borderline metaphysical assistance?

We live in Mebane now, but my wife and I are members emeritus of the "block" we used to live on over in Chapel Hill, and I attended its annual party last night. It was nice to see that no one else had moved away yet, although a couple of our old neighbors couldn't make it to the party.
    And I'm glad to have met the one new neighbor, who rents a house up for sale on the block. Turns out, she told us, that she's an author, of books that are "borderline metaphysical." And she has a website. Her profile on another website reveals that she

is a natural born mystic, 3rd generation clairvoyant, and gifted medium. She is an award-winning author; her books include Cards of Destiny—Daily Divination Guide, and Love and Destiny—Discover the Secret Language of Relationships. [She] is available via phone or in person for readings.

Sounds like maybe the source for those seeking borderline metaphsical assistance.

An ontological argument for the non-existence of god

In the year 1078, St. Anselm of Canterbury (England) proposed an "ontological argument" for the existence of God:

It is possible to conceive, Anselm said, of a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. Even an atheist can conceive of such a superlative being, though he would deny its existence in the real world. But, goes the argument, a being that doesn't exist in the real world is, by that very fact, less than perfect. Therefore we have a contradiction and, hey presto, God exists! [courtesy Richard Dawkins, p. 80, The God Delusion]

A contemporary of Anselm, one Gaunilo had, reports Dawkins, "suggested a similar reductio." And a contemporary of Dawkins, "the [philosopher] Australian Douglas Gasking, made the point with his ironic 'proof' that God does not exist:

1. The creation of the world is the most marvellous achievement imaginable.
2. The merit of an achievement is the product of (a) its intrinsic quality, and (b) the ability of its creator.
3. The greater the disability (or handicap) of the creator, the more impressive the achievement.
4. The most formidable handicap for a creator would be non-existence.
5. Therefore if we suppose that the universe is the product of an existent creator we can conceive a greater being—namely, one who created everything while not existing.
6. An existing God therefore would not be a being greater than which a greater cannot be conceived because an even more formidable and incredible creator would be a God which did not exist.
   Ergo:
7. God does not exist."

[p. 83, The God Delusion]

...but I did read the book

On Saturday, in my post about high school biology, I failed to mention that even though I dropped out of the course, I did read Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in high school. I'm now wondering whether I read it after dropping out of biology (perhaps as some sort of atonement), or before and the book prompted me to sign up for the course? If the latter, then it appears that I must have found the actual task of acquiring the vocabulary of biology less exciting than reading the story of Darwin's discovery.

I have, in fact, always seriously doubted that I had a working scientist's temperament. Scientist after scientist has reported that doing science is mostly very hard work. The discovery of the structure of DNA (or of evolution by natural selection) comes to few scientists.

If only I hadn't dropped out of high school biology

I'm finding it a bittersweet experience to read Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene. It's sweet because I trust that I can look forward to reading Dawkins's other books, and books he cites, and be continually rewarded with the intellectual thrill of evolutionary biology. But such reading is also bitter, in that if only way in which people can indulge when looking back on their lives.

I've been thinking about how I dropped out of high school biology after a week or two, mainly, I think, because I didn't want to work hard enough to learn all of its technical terms. I switched to physics, which turned out to be taught by an evangelical Christian who, though he let me write a paper on the relationship between religion and science instead of doing a standard science project, took the opportunity to put in a plug for God's divine plan or something. Mr. Wilson. I didn't realize until now that I remembered his name, and I can still see him—tall, blond, and boyish, and probably fifteen years younger than my children are now.

In dropping out of the biology course (of whose teacher I have no recollection, but I'm confident he or she was excellent), I effectively closed the door on what might have been an exciting life as an evolution theorist. Unfortunately, during those teenage years I came across no book like Dawkins's brilliant, creative work. (At the time I was dropping out of biology, he had just entered college.)

But I did in those years come across books on metaphysics—books that attempted to answer the questions, What is man? and Why? And they, at that time, I found no less thrilling than I find Dawkins now.

But now there's the bittersweetness that comes from reading this on page 1 of The Selfish Gene:

Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is Man? After posing the last of these questions, the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: "The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely."

That was the year Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species.

The consolation of religion and philosophy

A young Bertrand Russell (twenty-seven in 1899) wrote in the essay, "Seems, Madam? Nay, It Is":

It is true that Christianity, and all previous optimisms, have represented the world as eternally ruled by a beneficent Providence, and thus metaphysically good. But this has been, at bottom, only a device by which to prove the future excellence of the world—to prove, for example, that good men would be happy after death. It has always been this deduction—illegitimately made of course—which has given comfort. "He's a good fellow, and 't will all be well."
      It may be said, indeed that there is comfort in the mere abstract doctrine that Reality is good. I do not myself accept the proof of this doctrine, but even if true, I cannot see why it should be comforting. For the essence of my contention is that Reality, as constructed by metaphysics, bears no sort of relation to the world of experience. It is an empty abstraction, from which no single inference can be validly made as to the world of appearance, in which world, nevertheless, all our interests lie....
      There are, of course, several senses in which it would be absurd to deny that philosophy may give us comfort. We may find philosophizing a pleasant way of passing our mornings—in this sense, the comfort derived may even, in extreme cases, be comparable to that of drinking as a way of passing our evenings(!)....[emphasis and exclamation mark mine; pp. 78-80 in Why I Am Not a Christian, edited by Paul Edwards and published in 1957]

I of course do not know whether Bob Dylan or either of the two surviving members of the Beatles finds such consolation in philosophy, and I don't think that Jesus Christ drank in the sense Russell had in mind.

The Middle Way

Yesterday my wife and I had brunch on our back porch with a lovely couple half our age who are both committed to helping people and making the world a better place. Each has a master's degree in social work. He also has a master's degree in divinity (and is an ordained minister) and she plans to pursue a doctorate in women's studies after completing her final year of law school.

After we'd eaten all of the pastries and drunk all of the coffee, the girls went to sit on the glider with Wally and we boys remained at the table and talked about what he was doing as a social worker in children's protective services. The cases he described were harrowing to me, young children who have already been so sexually damaged either from abuse directly suffered or from just being in a depraved environment that their prospects for ever attaining a more or less normal life seem bleak indeed.

I can't quite remember, alas, how we sequed onto religion, but I guess, given our backgrounds, that it was inevitable. I summarized for him my metaphysical principle that the seminal contradiction at the heart of the cosmos (God's freedom) makes all things possible, in particular miracles that contravene the laws of nature. And I recounted the walk on which my learned poet friend had stated that he "believed all things but held onto none." We agreed in endorsing "believing all things" as a necessary expression of what we might call religious humility. We don't know whether or not what we take on faith is so, nor do we know that what others take on faith is not so. Therefore, neither should we hold onto our articles of faith, nor should they hold onto theirs—"hold onto" in the sense that we or they combine forces and go into politics in order to force beliefs and practices onto anyone else.

Of course, that holding onto is happening to a very great extent in the world today. We've got the fundamentalist Christians in America banding together to help put an abomination like George W. Bush in the White House and Tricky Dick Deuce (as Maureen Dowd calls Dick Cheenie today in The New York Times) in the chair of the President of the United States Senate. We've got so-called Islamic jihadists blowing up things, including not only Americans who believe they're trying to help but also mosques and members of other Muslim sects. We've got imams provoked yet again by Salman Rushdie—this time by his being knighted—to call for reprisals against those associated with his knighting. Holding on, holding on. And believing nothing but that they and they alone are right.

You know already (if you've been reading me) that I don't agree with Christopher Hitchens that "religion poisons everything." But if any one thing does poison everything, I submit that it's that unwarranted holding onto things that we only believe but do not know. Hitchens attacks religion as being the primary repository of such beliefs. He may be right in that, but it's the holding onto (the trying to foist onto others) that is the problem, not the beliefs per se.

I told my young friend that I was reminded by this of Jesus's advice to "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's." In other words, keep your religious beliefs and practices out of politics. Yes, said my young friend. "For me, Jesus stands for a balance of the spiritual and the physical." He explained that the fundamentalist "hangers onto" are just one end of the spectrum.

At the other end of the spectrum are the mystically oriented individuals who jump off into the spirit world and maybe even believe that they are "one with the universe." My friend knows about that, for he tried to swim out there for a couple of years himself. He said it's a dangerous place. The universe includes the food chain, "Nature red in tooth and claw" (Tennyson), and the death of suns and of any life on the planets in their orbit.

Pursuing the spiritual alone, he said, is like wading into quicksand. You'll be lost if you persist in going it alone. You need at least one friend (he recommends no fewer than five^*) to keep you from going under. He now takes the middle way. As a social worker, he's helping individuals in dire need, recognizing that such victims will be produced in perpetuity unless there be a radical reformation of the cultural, educational, social, political system that now produces them.

I told him I doubted that such a reformation would ever happen. He reminded me, I said, of Loren Eiseley's "star thrower"—the man who rescued individual starfish stranded on the beach by throwing them back into the ocean. A scoffer told the man that there are millions of stranded starfish in the world and throwing one back into the ocean isn't going to make a difference. The man said it made a difference to the one starfish he threw back.
___________________
* Five may have been the minimum support group number recommended also by Paul Goodman in that 1960's debate I've described between Goodman and the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr. at Yale. [June 25, 2025: I can find no mention of Goodman’s debate with Coffin anywhere on this blog.]

Two Things

Two things about yesterday's post. First, I ought never to say "more about this later" and certainly never "more tomorrow." I'm not sure I'm ready to deliver! And, second, when I re-read the post last night, I could see that I probably hadn't explained anything, certainly not made it simpler. In fact, freedom may not be what I originally identified as the "seminal contradiction"; I think I got to freedom from something else. But I haven't gone back to read the thread of my own thought. Also, to explain this would require me to go over Russell's demonstration that the existence of a contradiction in a logical system enables you to prove anything whatsoever. And I would need to demonstrate that the principle can be extended to metaphysics—something I don't think Russell ever claimed. Let's set this aside for now.

And let me try now (late in the evening as I try to revise today's post) to deliver the "more" about my new way of interpreting writing about "God." I have the sense, as I start to read self-proclaimed atheist Hitchens, that I can confidently distinguish between his supportable criticisms of various religious practices and his unsupportable overall conclusion (obviously false) that "religion poisons everything" (from the subtitle of his book). I even wonder whether he really believes that, or is trying to sell more books. While I think it is undeniable that adherents of probably every religion, while thinking they acted at the religion's behest, have committed crimes against humanity, I no longer think that that justifies the conclusion that "faith must end" (to paraphrase Sam Harris's title), that religion is no good, or that God, therefore, does not exist.

It seemed to me yesterday that I got to this "new way of interpreting" from the fact that the point of view (POV) of every "God book" author is limited (including the authors of books of scripture, if I am right about their being the works of humans—see below for a late-breaking epiphany). Each author's POV is limited precisely because of the principle that "all things are possible" and they have necessarily taken a particular POV in writing their book. Readers have more freedom; they can always step back to gain a larger POV from which to see possibilities beyond those the author considered. (You're probably already looking beyond me, in fact...aren't you?) To take that larger POV, "all" we have to do is to "pretend to be God," so to speak. (I know, I know, we can't take God's POV, but we can move in that direction, the same as we can move in the direction of loving our enemies, even though we may not be able fully to imitate Jesus Christ's example.)

Ha! [The epiphany:] writing the last third of that paragraph suggested a sort of proof that the various scriptures cannot be "The Word of God." Just read them. Their POVs are extremely limited. If "God" wrote them, "he" was either fooling mankind or parodying "himself" (or doing something else, anyway, besides really telling us what's what).

This brief statement of my "new way of interpreting books about 'God'" is somewhat provisional. But everything I write is provisional—a work in progress on the road to discovery. I don't seem destined to any "final discovery," except in the sense that it will be the last thing I discover before I die.

Maybe I'm not the only one for whom this is true.