The Ontological Argument: Why CosmicSkeptic and The Psuedo-Intellectual are Wrong

I have written about the ontological argument for the existence of God before in this blog but recently my interest in this topic has been rekindled by some clips I have seen by some bright young philosophy students on Youtube. I'm thinking here about CosmicSkeptic, Maximally Great Philosophy, and The Pseudo–Intellectual. All discuss Anselm's ontological argument and two of the three find the ontological argument unconvincing and set out their reasons why. I do not believe that the ontological argument, specifically Anselm's version of it (the version I intend to discuss) is convincing myself, but nor do I think that the arguments put forward against it by CosmicSkeptic and The Pseudo-Intellectual are the right arguments to refute it. All of these young philosophers miss the obvious error Anselm makes. I confess, by the way, that the title of this post is click-bait – I hope that followers of CosmicSkeptic and the other two Youtubers might feel enticed to peruse this post, and I would love it if Alex O'Conner himself were to stumble upon it while searching the Internet for mentions of his name (although I think this is most unlikely). In this post, I will quote Anselm's argument and discuss the counterarguments proposed by CosmicSkeptic and The Pseudo-Intellectual before presenting my own argument for why Anselm's supposed proof is incorrect. I will not discuss the clip by Maximally Great Philosophy much because it seems to me that he is more interested in criticising CosmicSkeptic's argument than producing his own critique of the cosmological argument.

I'll start by cutting and pasting an accurate summation of Anselm's argument, an argument he first presented in the eleventh century, from Wikipedia.

"1. It is a conceptual truth (or, so to speak, true by definition) that God is a being than which none greater can be imagined (that is, the greatest possible being that can be imagined).

"2. God exists as an idea in the mind.

"3. A being that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is, other things being equal, greater than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind.

"4. Thus, if God exists only as an idea in the mind, then we can imagine something that is greater than God (that is, a greatest possible being that does exist).

"5. But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God (for it is a contradiction to suppose that we can imagine a being greater than the greatest possible being that can be imagined.)

"6. Therefore, God exists."

The first issue raised by Anselm's argument is the idea of maximal greatness. In Descartes's formulation of the ontological argument, he used the term perfections rather than maximal greatness, and the Youtube clip about the ontological argument that CosmicSkeptic criticises also uses the idea of perfections. God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent, all perfect traits. CosmicSkeptic claims that these traits are logically incoherent. For instance, whether or not God can create a stone so heavy He cannot lift it, there must be a limit on His power, either way. Also, if God knows the future, there must be restrictions on what He can do in that it must be impossibe for Him to act in ways He has not foreseen. Does God Himself have free will? (I know that this seems a peculiar question to ask but such questions inevitably arise when we try to describe the qualities a divine creator must have.) Maximally Great Philosophy points out that Anselm's argument does not depend on God being perfect, that it suffices for God 'simply' to be greater than anything else that can be imagined. God, perhaps, could have the power to do anything except that which is logically impossible. If this is so, the criticisms that CosmicSkeptic levels at the ontological argument in the first part of his video are no longer relevant to Anselm's argument. 

Because it may interest readers, I would like to put forward a small argument of my own devising in a similar vein to the ones CosmicSkeptic proposes. If the ontological argument can be used to prove the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good being, it can also be used to prove the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing and perfectly evil being. This raises the prospect of two omnipotent beings with exactly opposed agendas acting on the world, another logical incoherence. However such arguments, arguments that attempt to show that the concept of a perfectly powerful, knowing and benevolent God results in logical paradoxes, do not seem to me to get to the heart of Anselm's ostensible proof and the reason that it is wrong. It is possible to leave the idea of maximal greatness vague except as it relates to existence and still find fault with Anselm's argument. It is at this point in the essay that I wish to turn to CosmicSkeptic's key argument that he pitches towards the end of his video.

CosmicSkeptic summarises the ontological argument in the following way:

P1. God has all perfections.
P2. Necessary existence is a perfection.
P3. If God has necessary existence, he exists.
C: Therefore God exists.

CosmicSkeptic points out an apparent problem with this argument – it seems to assume God exists in the first place. Alex suggests we amend the first premise so that it becomes:

P1. If God exists, God has all perfections.

If we do this, Alex offers up the following as a fair translation of the argument into simpler language:

P1. If God exists, he exists.
P2: If God exists, he exists.
C: Therefore God exists.

Alex's argument seems, at first, a damning refutation of the ontological argument. Either the argument assumes the existence of God in its first premise, the proposition it is trying to prove, or, if we amend it to make the first premise more palatable, it is asserting a trivial analytic truth that does not entail the conclusion.  But there are serious problems with Alex's critique. First, and most evidently, CosmicSkeptic's version is far removed from Anselm's original argument – there is no mention of the mind or imagination in it at all. A second problem, as is pointed out by both Maximally Great Philosophy and The Pseudo-Intellectual, is that the first premise, "God has all perfections," rightly concerns a concept rather than an entity existing in reality. And this concept, they argue, certainly does exist. This is why it is called the ontological argument – because it attempts to move from the concept of God, a concept it seems many people can understand and imagine, to its necessary instantiation. The first premise should be "The concept of God has all perfections." If this change is made, the original version of the argument Alex presents does seem (and the word 'seem' is operative here) to be saying something novel, something non-tautological and nontrivial. 

I could spend more time discussing CosmicSkeptic's version of the ontological argument but because my primary focus is on Anselm's original argument I shall instead move to the criticism proffered by The Pseudo-Intellectual, a criticism that appears to apply both to Anselm's original 'proof' and to CosmicSkeptic's reformulation. Ollie Norton concludes, after discussing Kant's case against the ontological argument and Frege's idea that existence is a second-order predicate, that existence is not a "defining predicate", that you cannot use existence (or non-existence) as a defining characteristic of a concept. This is why, in Ollie's opinion, Anselm's argument is wrong. I am not as familiar with Frege's work as I should be but it seems to me, uninformed as I am, that perhaps Ollie should have chosen the term "property" rather than "predicate". I wish to argue, in opposition to Ollie, that "existence" and "non-existence" (say "fictionality") can indeed be defining characteristics. Although Frege and later Russell thought it was false or meaningless to talk about non-existent things, there is a tradition, going back at least as far Alexius Meinong, of proposing that existence is a property that objects can either have or not have. Consider the word "fairy". In the Oxford English Dictionary, the primary definition for this word is "a small imaginary being of human form that has magical powers, especially a female one". Simply put, my dictionary includes the fact that fairies exist only in the mind and not in reality as part of the word's definition. If I say, "Fairies don't exist in the real world," I am stating an analytic truth, something which is true by virtue of the meaning of the word "fairy". If my friend tells me, "I saw a fairy at the bottom of my garden!" I can either dismiss this apparent observation as analytically false or redefine the term "fairy" in my mind by deleting the term "imaginary" from my mental definition. Of course, the dictionary does not always spell out explicitly that fictional beings are fictional – in the case of the word "leprechaun", for instance, it does so indirectly by prefacing the definition with the clause "(in Irish folklore)". Nor does the dictionary spell out that existent objects are real because this is the default assumption about every word in the dictionary. If something is generally considered to be unreal or fictional, the dictionary does however usually at least indirectly imply this. (Meinongianism, by the way, is a theoretical position that is very important to my thinking and if the reader is interested, you can find out more about it in the posts "Analytic a Posteriori truths" and "Fictional Objects".)

So the two critiques by CosmicSkeptic and The Pseudo-Intellectual both fail. Alex's attempted refutation fails because he does not directly address Anselm's original argument and because he does not recognise that the whole point of the ontological argument is that it goes from concept to reality. Ollie's attempted refutation fails because (as I have argued elsewhere) existence is indeed a property that objects can either have or not have. Yet Anselm's ontological argument is obviously wrong – most people, even many Christians (such as, back in the day, Saint Augustine) sense that it must be wrong when they first encounter it but have difficulty expressing exactly why. What I wish to do now is lay out my own attempted refutation, a refutation that I of course believe is the correct one.

Let us go back to Anselm's actual argument, the argument that I copied from Wikipedia. It is possible to quibble with the first three premises or steps but I shall not do so here. Rather let us accept them as true, if only provisionally. The major error occurs, I believe, in the fourth. I shall quote this step again.

"4. Thus, if God exists only as an idea in the mind, then we can imagine something that is greater than God (that is, a greatest possible being that does exist)."

This sentence begins with the word "Thus" which implies that this step follows logically from the previous ones. However, this is not the case. In fact, this statement is introducing new premises to the argument. It is possible to break down this fourth step into two sub-premises: 

4a. It is possible to imagine a being, call it God, which is maximally great in all respects except that He does not exist.

4b. It is possible to imagine a being, call it God+, which is maximally great in all respects including the respect that He exists.

Step 5 is "But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God (for it is a contradiction to suppose that we can imagine a being greater than the greatest possible being that can be imagined.)" I would, for clarity, like to rephrase this step in the following way: "If God+ exists in the mind, we are forced to redraw our mental picture of God by affirming that He has the property of existence, because otherwise God+ would be greater." (I am aware that I am subtly revising Anselm's argument but certainly not to the extent that CosmicSkeptic does in his video.) If we accept all these steps supposedly the conclusion "Therefore God exists" follows logically. But does it?

First, we should note that 4a and 4b seem plausible. I can imagine lots of things that I know do not exist. I can, for instance, imagine fairies, even though I know that they do not exist, or leprechauns, even though I know that they do not exist. I can imagine Frodo Baggins even though I know he is a fictional character in a series of books by JRR Tolkien. I can also imagine real things. I can imagine Mark Zuckerberg while also knowing that he is a real person in the world. I can imagine Boris Johnson while also affirming the possibility that I could go to London and shake his hand. However, it is possible to believe that something or someone exists – and be wrong. This is the error at the heart of Anselm's argument. There are lots of people who believe Bigfoot exists even though the vast majority of people know that Bigfoot is apocryphal, legendary. My friend who saw a fairy at the bottom of the garden might start believing that fairies are real even though it was probably an hallucination. I can entertain in my mind the possibility that Bigfoot and fairies are real, can make existence a defining predicate of these concepts, but be mistaken. Therefore the concepts of God and God+ say nothing about the real world.

This reasoning can be illustrated in the following way. I would like to offer now a watered down version of Anselm's argument, an argument that I call Anselm's Ontological Argument Lite. It runs as follows:

1. I can imagine an object, x, which is maximally great in the respect that (in my imagination) it exists in the real world.

2. If it did not exist in the real world, the imagined concept would lack this particular maximal greatness.

3. Therefore x exists in the real world.

Obviously this argument is completely bogus. It confuses the existence of a concept with the existence of a real object, a referent; it says that if something exists in the imagination, with the predicate of existence, it must also exist in reality. Step 1 is legitimate but step 2 is not. Anselm's Ontological Argument Lite can be summed up in one sentence: "If I can imagine that x exists in the real world, x exists in the real world". 

What is surprising, and requires explanation, is why this simple error at the heart of Anselm's argument went unobserved by the three bright young philosophy students who felt moved to opine about it on Youtube and moved me to write this post. I believe that their inability to see this simple mistake results from an error in the philosophical tradition that might go back as far as Plato, that was codified when Kant proposed that existence isn't a predicate, and is at the heart of analytic philosophy as it was pioneered by Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. Predicate calculus is a system of greatly seductive beauty but it might be misleading in that it might not truly capture the way people actually think or make sense of the world. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins tells a story about Russell, reporting that, although a lifelong agnostic, Russell briefly believed that the ontological argument was valid and found this sudden revelation momentarily thrilling. It might be controversial for me to suggest this but the fact that Russell could entertain the idea that the ontological argument is valid, if only briefly, might point to a flaw in his reasoning generally, a flaw that potentially lies at the heart of modern anglophone philosophy. The reason these philosophy students missed this error might be because they are steeped in analytic philosophy. The argument proposed by CosmicSkeptic is reminiscent of Russell's theorising about definite descriptions, and The Pseudo-Intellectual explicitly cites Frege. The ontological argument might be one way of prying apart the faulty assumptions of analytic philosophy. In the next post, I intend to discuss the modal ontological argument for God, show why it is wrong, and in this way pry apart the faulty assumptions of modal logic.

I'll finish this post by endorsing the three Youtubers I have discussed in this blog. If the reader wants to watch the clips I have discussed, you can find them on Youtube. The CosmicSkeptic video is titled 'I Think, Therefore God Exists' | The Ontological Argument (AFG #5) and was first uploaded on June 1 2017. The Maximally Great Philosophy video is titled Why COSMICSKEPTIC is WRONG about the ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT and was first uploaded August 17 2020 . The video by The Pseudo-Intellectual is titled CosmicSkeptic Rebuked; The Ontological Argument [A LEVEL RS SUITABLE] and was uploaded August 9 2021. All of these videos are well worth watching.

[Note: I do not often go back to posts and add to them after they are published but I was thinking about the argument I proposed last night in bed and realised that I had made a mistake. In the above essay, I say that it is possible to accept the first three steps in Anselm's argument and that the problem occurs in the fourth. This is incorrect. It is possible to accept all of the first five steps and assert that the sixth step, the conclusion, does not follow from them. This might seem a damning alteration but, in fact, it does not really affect the argument at all. I include this note for the sake of thoroughness.]

The Weak Anthropic Principle

On Youtube, videos can be found of a lively debate between religious people (usually Christians) and atheists about philosophical questions. What is interesting about these disputes is the degree of civility among the participants – the Christians, in particular, seem quite willing to engage with the atheists without taking offence. You would think that, feeling that their core beliefs are under attack, the Christians would become upset, defensive, but it seems that their faith is not so fragile that it can be damaged, undone, by an onslaught of materialist rationality. The atheists (and here I'm thinking of the Four Horseman – Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens) seem more intolerant than their religiously minded interlocutors and more intent on conversion. The Christians never imply that their adversaries are stupid but the atheists often do. In tonight's post I wish to describe and comment on a particular back-and-forth debate that I have seen played out on Youtube between the theists and the atheists. The Christians propose that the universe is so finely tuned for life (and hence for intelligent moral life) that it must have been designed by an intelligent creator; the atheists counter this argument by saying that the appearance of fine-tuning is unsurprising given 'the weak anthropic principle'. To this, the Christians respond with a wonderful argument (an argument that I had never heard until this week) analogising our finding ourselves in a world that seems so suited to intelligent life to the situation of a person who survives unscathed being fired on by a firing squad. The Christians conclude that the weak anthropic principle explains nothing, is a kind of abdication of rationality. In tonight's post, I wish to describe these three arguments in more detail and say something about them. Being a sort of agnostic, I don't have a horse in this race. I hope, though, that in writing this post, I can clarify my own thoughts about these ideas.

We begin with the 'fine-tuning argument'. Physicists have shown that the universe, physical reality, depends on certain physical constants, such as the speed of light in a vacuum, the charge-to-mass ratio of electrons, and Planck's constant. It is proposed that if any of these constants were only slightly different, the universe as we know it wouldn't exist, and therefore we wouldn't be around to determine the values of all these constants. Three possible explanations are put forward to account for this puzzling fact. The first is that, for reasons we currently do not understand, the constants could not have taken any values other than the ones they do. The second is that these constants have the values they do because of pure, blind chance. The third is that an intelligent designer picked these constants because He (or She) knew that eventually the universe would bring forth sentient, moral agents who would sing His (or Her) praises in church every Sunday. The atheists waver between the first two explanations while the Christians, unsurprisingly, opt for the third. To me, it seems that the first two explanations could be regarded as equivalent. Consider pi. Euler and others have shown that pi could not take any value other than the one it does, at least in our universe. But we can imagine a simulation inhabited by 'organisms' the are born, move around, reproduce and die that takes the form of a curved two-dimensional surface. These organisms would measure the value of pi differently than those of us who live in flat space-time. It seems to me that both explanations beg the question: why? Why are the laws of physics in our universe such that they can support intelligent life? The Christians, with an unmistakable air of triumph, assert that the extraordinarily unlikelihood of the constants all being such that our universe can support sentient beings is evidence of an intelligent Creator. (Although this begs the question: Why a Creator? Why anything at all?)

The atheists respond to this rather robust challenge by citing the 'anthropic principle'. There are two versions of the anthropic principle, the strong principle and the weak principle. The strong principle states that somehow the universe is compelled to produce intelligent life. The strong version of the principle smells like religion to me and may well smell like religion to atheists because they seldom endorse the strong principle, picking the weak principle instead. To put it simply, the weak anthropic principle states, "The universe is the way it is because otherwise we would not be here to observe it." The weak anthropic principle can be understood most readily if we suppose a multiverse. If we postulate that there are an infinite number of universes all with different values of the various constants, it is no longer surprising that we find ourselves in a universe capable of supporting intelligent life. At least one of them had to and we were just lucky enough to find ourselves in one of them that does. But I don't think we need to postulate a multiverse to entertain the idea of the anthropic principle. Consider the following analogy. Suppose, dear reader, you go out today and buy a lottery ticket with a one in a million chance of winning a million dollars and you know that ten million others have also bought a ticket. You might tell yourself, "Well, someone has to win. Why not me?" (I'm sure all prospective lottery winners rationalise their purchase in the same way.) Perhaps you will, therefore, be unsurprised if you do win. But now suppose that you were the only one to buy a ticket – and you win. You might be very surprised indeed. But, in either case, the probability of you in particular winning was the same, one in a million. This suggests that the idea of a multiverse is unnecessary when considering the anthropic principle.

The anthropic principle is popular among atheists as a way of criticising the fine-tuning argument. In The God Delusion, for instance, Richard Dawkins employs this argument in much the same way as I did in the previous paragraph. Enter, playing for the Christian team, John A. Leslie (although, to be accurate, Leslie is a Pantheist rather than a Christian.) Leslie offers the following parable, which I shall quote from the site Hyperphysics. "In this parable, an individual faces a firing squad, and fifty expert marksmen aim their rifles to carry out the deed. The order is given, the shots ring out, and yet somehow all the bullets miss and the condemned individual walks away unscathed." It seems that the individual should be surprised to be still alive. The individual herself, and any disinterested observers, would be forced to ask themselves a question: Which is more plausible, that all the marksmen missed by accident, in a random fluke, or that they all missed on purpose, by design? This argument is so strong that even Dawkins has admitted as much, that it is a compelling argument, in an interview post publication of The God Delusion.

Suppose however that the individual is a fan of the anthropic principle. She might say to the puzzled observers, "Of course they all missed! Otherwise I wouldn't be here to notice the fact!" But this strikes me, as I said in the introduction, to be an abdication of scientific responsibility, the responsibility to try to explain puzzling phenomena. Atheists often berate religious people for espousing the god-of-the-gaps fallacy, the idea that anything we don't understand about the world can be explained by a divine being who designed, for instance, the flagella of amoeba, that such gaps in scientific knowledge in fact prove the existence of God. It seems to me though that saying that anything we don't understand is the result of blind chance is a similar type of fallacy. Charles Darwin, famously, found the plumage of peacocks physically nauseating. This historical detail is mentioned by Michele Hewitson (I think) in a recent column in The Listener – Hewitson states that Darwin found the tails of peacocks nauseating because it went against his theory of 'survival of the fittest'. I have read elsewhere that the reason Darwin offered for the plumage of peacocks is sexual selection and that the reason he found peacock tails nauseating was a kind of puritanical disgust, was because they reminded him of the depraved licentiousness of all living beings. The meaning of life, according to evolutionists, is only survival and reproduction, and it was this 'truth' that Darwin had discovered that made him ill. Nevertheless, despite Darwin's promotion of the idea of 'sexual selection', peacocks' tails have proved notoriously difficult for evolutionary biologists to adequately explain. Religious people might say, "The reason peacocks have such beautiful feathers is that this is way God designed them." The atheists might respond, "The reason peacocks have such beautiful feathers is blind chance, an extremely unlikely fluke of nature." If an atheist has the anthropic principle in mind, she might say, "Of course, male peacocks have beautiful feathers. If they didn't, they wouldn't be here for us to see." None of these putative explanations explain anything. The plumage of peacocks demands explanation, either through applying evolutionary theory or postulating an alternative theory. Unusual events, and even usual events, require explanation, and this is the role of science and scientists. A second problem with the anthropic principle, it seems to me, is that it puts the effect before the cause. "The reason the universe is the way it is is because eventually it would bring forth intelligent beings who would study it." However, to explain something about the universe, we need to either go back in time to prior causes or discover something more fundamental about the universe, something which explains both the values of the constants and the eventual appearance of sentient life. For these reasons, I find the weak anthropic principle unsatisfactory – although I do not have the foggiest idea of what a better explanation would look like.

This has been a shorter post than many I have written recently. I do not think I have expressed my thoughts about the weak anthropic principle as clearly as it deserves but I hope that this post has stimulated my readers to think about the issues that arise from it themselves and to come to their own conclusions. I wish to point my readers to some other posts I have written, the two posts about quantum physics ("Probability and Schrondinger's Cat, Part 1" and "Probability and Schrondinger's Cat Part 2") – I think these two posts are probably the most profound I have published in this blog. Before I say adios for tonight, I wish to say something about the previous post. Although it was very critical of the psychologist I saw in 2014, I believe it was a very important post, an important statement, because, although anecdotal, it may speak to a deeper truth, that many other patients of Mental Health Services here and overseas have been grossly mistreated by those whose jobs are to help. I have noticed the blog has had fewer hits than it usually receives over the last week and hope that it hasn't somehow been blocked. If I have regular readers, I hope that you are still interested. Thanks, anyway, to those taking an interest.