Reality Maximization - Anselm’s ontological argument for God
In days of yore people knew how to talk about Being with a capital B. Existence had gradations, modulations and all manner of expressions, some greater, some lesser. This was common sense to the people of the time, the natural way of thinking about Being.
But as time passed the reductionist way of thinking began to dominate. In our quest for knowledge, humanity carved reality into smaller pieces easier for the intellect to digest. Talking about something as abstract and holistic as Being became a foreign conceptual language.
Talking about Being itself was viewed as a quaint folk theory of the nature of reality. A theory which preceded the scientific view of the world where we drilled down into the specifics of its parts. Over time Being lost its subtle hues and became binary. Existence was something you either had or you didn’t. Reality became something you could stand outside of and view as a detached observer.
But in the days of St Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) people took a more holistic view. Anselm was part of the Platonic tradition which viewed reality in shades. Existence was something we participated in, a network in which we’re immersed at every moment. Everything participates in Being to a greater or lesser extent.
This is what Aristotle called the science of being. In Book 4 of The Metaphysics he says,
“There is a science which investigates being as being and the attributes which belong to this in virtue of its own nature. Now this is not the same as any of the so-called special sciences; for none of these others deals generally with being as being. They cut off a part of being and investigate the attributes of this part.”
Aristotle was concerned with investigating being in itself. Where the special sciences study things which exist, they presuppose those things exist and then give an account of some type, like a biological being or a physical being. But according to Aristotle, the task of metaphysics is to give an account of being qua being. Being as being.
This is a foreign idea to the modern mind. We think of existence as binary, white and black. For something to exist is merely for it to be instantiated in concrete form within space and time. But the fact of existence itself is presupposed, as if the question isn’t meaningful or demands an answer.
To understand why the binary view isn’t as common sense as it appears to us, we can approach the question from that point of view and see where it leads.
If we want to find out which things exist in any particular category a logical way to start is to write a list. I could list all the things which exist in my fridge. Or taking a wider view we might take a census of all the people in a country and their characteristics. Or wider still, biologists write lists of the various living beings and catalog them by genus and species.
But what if we wanted to take the widest possible view of reality and make a list of everything which exists in its most fundamental and general characteristics? When we take this widest possible view and begin to write our list we run into problems.
We should obviously include apples on the list, but what about their different properties? Does the redness and sweetness of the apple also exist? What about a green sour apple? The apple exists independently of the properties, but the existence of the properties are contingent on the existence of the apple. If existence is binary, the apple and its sweetness exist in the same sense and to the same degree.
The problem of the binary view is magnified when we consider privations, things which should exist but don’t. It’s a simple matter to add Bob’s hair to the list, but what about Tom’s baldness? The binary view is counter-intuitive. While hair is a thing we can add to the list, baldness is the absence of a thing which is difficult to accommodate in the binary view.
What about holes or darkness? If I fall into a hole while stumbling around in the dark and sprain my ankle it’s difficult to leave holes or darkness off the list because they exert casual effects. But if existence is binary, we’re adding things to our list which don’t exist, they’re only the absence of existing things.
Maybe we can tolerate that omission, but the problem becomes more pronounced when we consider negative existential claims. If I say unicorns don’t exist, for that to be meaningful, the word unicorn must pick out something in reality. But I’m also saying something true about the world. We’re faced with a puzzle of how negative existence claims can be both meaningful and true.
If we think of existence in gradations, with some things participating in existence more fully than others, a unicorn exists, but to a lesser degree than the mind its existence depends on. A hole exists but not as fully as the substance which surrounds it.
Once we understand why people might have thought of existence as a scale rather than binary, we can enter their conceptual framework. Which gives us the perspective we need to appreciate Anselm’s ontological argument and what it can illuminate about the significance of the word God.
It’s often said Anselm’s argument is an audacious attempt to prove the existence of God from concepts alone. But this is paradoxical when we consider the context of the argument. It appears in a work called Proslogium (discourse) which is a petitionary to God. We might wonder why in a work glorifying God, Anselm would intend to prove he exists.
The Proslogium is an extended prayer from Anselm that God might make himself known. Rather than seeing Anselm’s focus in his Proslogium as an attempt to prove God exists, we can see it as an attempt to understand God.
Which makes Anselm’s discourse still useful to us today, when so many have forgotten the vast dimensions of the word God and its logical implications.
Anselm’s argument
We can summarize Anselm’s discourse into an argument. He starts with the meaning of the word God…
God is the greatest conceivable being. We can’t conceive of anything greater than God.
Anselm’s next premise is that….
God exists as an idea in the mind.
We have an idea or understanding of the word God. The theist says God exists, and the atheist says God doesn’t exist. So, everyone must have an idea of what the word God means.
After noting that God does exist as an idea, Anselm continues…
God might have existed in reality.
Which means it’s possible God exists not only as an idea, but also in reality. God is a possible being.
This next step is where the context of gradations of existence is important. Anselm says…
If something exists only as an idea, and might have existed in reality, then it might have been greater than it is.
For something to exist only as an idea means its existence depends on the mind, so it’s possible it could be greater and participate more fully in existence.
This is the first part of the argument. Anselm has completed his setup for one of the philosopher’s favorite tricks, a reductio ad absurdum (reduce to absurdity).
If we accept all these premises, we can’t deny God does exist without encountering a logical contradiction. Anselm continues…
Let us suppose God exists only as an idea.
Anselm assumes atheism is true for sake of argument. He says suppose it’s true God only exists as an idea, but not in reality. But that means...
God might have been greater than he is.
Because it’s greater to exist in reality than only as an idea.
And we encounter a logical contradiction. It can’t be true God exists only as an idea and be the greatest conceivable being.
How can the atheist avoid the contradiction?
Suppose the atheist wasn’t paying attention and complacently agreed to all the premises because they sounded plausible. But now they realize they need to backtrack. What can they do to deny Anselm’s conclusion?
They could deny the first premise that God is the greatest conceivable being. But this is difficult because it’s what most theists understand the word to mean, an unlimited being.
It’s also difficult to deny the next premise that God exists as an idea because this removes the foundation of their atheism. Whatever they mean when they say God doesn’t exist, it must exist as an idea for them to deny it exists in reality.
They could deny God is a possible being, but that would involve showing a contradiction in the concept of God.
The easiest target is what is known as the great making assumption — it is greater to exist in reality.
Parody arguments and Gaunilo’s perfect island
To challenge that assumption, a contemporary of Anselm, the monk Gaunilo created a parody argument. He replaced God in the argument with a perfect island. Gaunilo asks us to imagine a perfect island and then uses the same logic as Anselm to prove the existence of the island.
But notice how the parody fails if we’re thinking in terms of being as being. To be an island is to be a land mass surrounded by water. But there is nothing about existing in the mind that makes it less of a land mass surrounded by water, less of what it means to be an island.
This is in contrast to the conception of God as the greatest conceivable being. God is perfect in an absolute sense, not in some limited dimension or property. In this absolute sense we must include existence within our conception.
This helps us understand why God is a necessary being as shown by the conclusion of the cosmological argument. God can’t not exist. This is why the conception of God as maximally great and unlimited has a capital G to distinguish God from gods which are beings within the world.
Illuminating the full significance of the word God
God occupies a logical and metaphysical space that is unique. A logical space where existence is part of his essence, his nature. There is no sense in which God cannot be.
This isn’t an increased quantity of being, but a maximizing totality of being. The scale of existence rises to a grand crescendo in God. Rather than God being a powerful being at the apex of the scale, Anselm illuminates God as being itself.
God has Being absolutely and unconditionally. He is the ground of existence in which all beings participate. He isn’t a participant dependent for his being on things outside himself, but is the totality of Being.
Everything partakes in existence by God’s grace, an outpouring from the source. God is the necessary condition for anything at all to exist.
