The Ontological Argument for God is Stupid

I won't even quote it myself. Read it on Wikipedia. I will, however summarise. This version (there are, sadly, others) stems from a Mediaeval thinker called Anselm, and apparently right-wing fucktards are pimping it out again. It's an argument for the existence of God based not on any observations of the external world but just a priori reasoning, and as such it's sophistic wankery of the most pathetically worthless calibre. It's the sort of thing that really fills me with contempt for the whole practice of philosophy as it mangles and misuses the logical tools of real fields of study like maths.

The argument goes something like this:

1. Define God to be a maximally great thing, something so great that nothing greater can exist.
   
2. Even a foolish unbeliever must acknowledge that this idea of God can exist in our imaginations, since we just imagined it.
   
3. Suppose God does not exist in reality, but only in our imaginations.
   
4. Things that exist in reality are certainly greater than things that exist only in the imagination.
   
5. But then we can conceive of something greater than God, as a maximally great thing that actually exists in reality.
   
6. Contradiction! We supposed God was maximally great, yet now we've imagined something greater.
   
7. Therefore, God must actually exist in reality.
   

The gaping flaws in this argument are overwhelming. Apparently philosophers are, by and large, unconvinced by it, yet there is a widespread view that, while it's easy to see that the argument must be wrong somehow, it is not easy to pinpoint exactly how it is wrong. This strikes me as silly. It's very easy indeed to see why this argument is wrong.

It's because the argument doesn't bother to define its terms.

(A mistake, by the way, which even the lamest of mathematicians knows to avoid...)

Can we conceive of a maximally great being? Well, that depends on what greatness is supposed to mean. Physical size? Of course not, that would be silly, you might say. Goodness? Well, what does goodness entail? Benevolence? Well, how do we quantify benevolence in order to conceive of a maximally benevolent being? You see of course what the problem here is. It isn't the logic, it's the terms. Terms like greatness are vague and unspecific, and hence meaningless in the context of a formal logical argument. In order to really grapple with greatness we'd need to give it a solid definition, and then for the argument to work we'd have to prove that, by our definition of greatness, real things were greater than purely imaginary things with the same putative qualities.

There's another problem too, of course. Our imaginations are limited and fallible. We can only handle so much detail. When you hold the idea of a cup in your mind, you aren't grasping its cupness right down to the atomic level. Similarly, even if we can define greatness and even if we can quantify it sufficiently that the concept of a maximally great being even has content, the fact that we could try to imagine a maximally great being does not actually mean we'll end up imagining a maximally great being complete in every detail. Anything we imagine, we can improve upon. So there's really no contradiction at all.

So Anselm can pretty much go vacuum my balls.

Posted by aloysius at October 18, 2007 11:16 AM |