Symmetry lost: A modal ontological argument for atheism?

Modal logic, its semantics and its metaphysics have received intense philosophical scrutiny since the early 1960s. One by-product of this work has been the rehabilitation of "ontological" arguments for God's existence. Though such arguments were long rejected out of hand, many philosophers now concede that when their modal subtleties are grasped, at least some ontological arguments are valid and philosophically interesting. Cosmological arguments for God's existence so far have not enjoyed similar good fortune. This essay will explore one use of theses of modal logic and common principles governing the acceptability of modal beliefs in constructing a cosmological argument. It will suggest that a cosmological argument trading on these is valid and avoids a number of problems which beset nonmodal cosmological arguments and modal ontological arguments. Our argument will conclude that there exists an unchangeable thing which at least partially explains the existence of changeable things. This abstract affirmation is a far cry from the claim that God exists. But the conclusions of standard cosmological arguments for the existence of an unmoved mover, a first cause or a necessary being are equally abstract, and despite this, some thinkers consider them relevant to the question of God's existence. We will explore our argument's relevance to this question in the last section below.

Collin (2022) attempts to break the symmetry between the modal ontological argument for the existence of God and the reverse modal ontological argument against the existence of God by drawing on some Kripkean lessons about a posteriori necessity. He argues that there is an undercutting defeater for taking God’s non-existence to be possible. In this paper, I reply that taking the Kripkean considerations about a posteriori necessity into account does not help break the symmetry. For we can argue in a similar way that there is an undercutting defeater for taking God’s existence to be possible.

ZUSAMMENFASSUNG In der christlichen Theologie hat das ontologische Argument – sofern man es überhaupt als Vernunftbeweis der wirklichen oder notwendigen Existenz Gottes deutete – von wenigen Ausnahmen abgesehen zuletzt keine positive Rolle gespielt. Gleichwohl stand es in der Geschichte der westlichen Religionsphilosophie lange in hohem Ansehen. In der Philosophie erfreut es sich seit seiner Wiederbelebung in der zweiten Hälfte des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts großer Aufmerksamkeit und wird keineswegs einmütig abgelehnt. Dieser Aufsatz unternimmt eine Neubewertung anhand einer Diskussion von vier prominenten Versionen des ontologischen Beweises: den Argumenten Anselms im Proslogion, dem Beweis von Descartes sowie dem von Hartshorne und Plantinga aufgegriffenen modalen Argument von Leibniz. War es die Absicht Anselms, die Existenz Gottes zu beweisen, und wie verhalten sich seine Argumente zu ihren modernen Gegenstücken? Ein großer Teil des Aufsatzes dient der Untersuchung geläufiger Einwände gegen den ontologischen Beweis in seiner nicht-modalen und modalen Form; dabei liegt ein besonderes Augenmerk auf den in der jüngeren Theologie verbreiteten Einwänden. Keine dieser Kritiken erscheint durchschlagend. Die einzige einigermaßen aussichtsreiche Strategie zur Widerlegung des Beweises dürfte darin bestehen, bereits die logische Möglichkeit eines höchst vollkommenen Wesens zu bestreiten. Im Ergebnis erweisen sich die Aussichten auf eine Widerlegung des ontologischen Beweises als weitaus schlechter als in der gegenwärtigen Theologie zumeist angenommen. SUMMARY Christian theology, with very few exceptions, has recently been rather dismissive of the ontological proof, or has suggested that it should not be regarded as a proof of the existence of God at all. Yet the argument has been held in high esteem during western intellectual history; philosophers have for the most part treated it with respect since its revival in the second half of the twentieth century. This essay takes a fresh look at four prominent versions of the ontological proof: Anselm's Proslogion arguments, the argument put forward by Descartes, and the modal argument of Leibniz defended by Hartshorne and Plantinga. Did Anselm intend to prove the existence of God, and how do his arguments relate to their modern counterparts? The core of this essay is an examination, with an eye on contemporary theology, of the most frequently raised objections against non-modal and modal ontological arguments. While none of these objections appears to be successful, the most promising one, perhaps, is to deny the logical possibility of a most perfect being altogether. The upshot, however, is that the prospects for a refutation of either the non-modal or the modal ontological argument are much less bright than prevailing sentiment in theology has it.

The Modal Ontological Argument— A Reply to Kane and Morris Get access P. J. McGRATH P. J. McGRATH University CollegeCork Eire Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Mind, Volume XCV, Issue 379, July 1986, Pages 373–376, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/XCV.379.373 Published: 01 July 1986

Modal ontological arguments argue from the possible existence of a perfect being to the actual (necessary) existence of a perfect being. But modal ontological arguments have a problem of symmetry; they can be run in both directions. Reverse ontological arguments argue from the possible nonexistence of a perfect being to the actual (necessary) nonexistence of a perfect being. Some familiar points about the necessary a posteriori, however, show that the symmetry can be broken in favour of the ontological argument.

This article shows that the modal ontological argument as proposed by Gottrieb Leibniz was very much anticipated in its logical articulation by John Duns Scotus in his work De Primo Principio. To this end, the author analyzes some of the various versions of the argument present in the philosophical thought of authors such as Scotus, Leibniz, Malcom and Plattinga, and demonstrates that those versions are based on the hidden premise of the possibility of the idea of God. In this respect, the Spanish philosopher Gustavo Bueno defends what he calls an “inverted ontological argument” which, if viable, would prove not so much the non-existence of God but that the idea of God does not exist itself.

We know more today about the second, or so-called 'modal', version of St. Anselm's ontological argument than we did when Charles Hartshorne and Norman Malcolm brought it to the attention of philosophers some years ago. 1 But there is still much to be learned. Criticisms of the modal ontological argument focus on its premises, namely (i) the claim that perfection, or maximal greatness, implies necessary existence, and (ii) the claim that the existence of a perfect being is logically possible. Less attention has been given by the critics of the argument to the modal principles that allow one to get from these premises to the conclusion that a perfect being exists. The modal ontological argument is valid in some standard systems of alethic modal logic, e.g., S5 (which is assumed by advocates of the argument like Hartshorne and Plantinga), and in at least one weaker system. But it is not valid in all. For example, it is not valid in T (Von Wright's M) or any Lewis system weaker than S5, including S4. What should all this mean for our assessment of the argument? Is choosing a modal system in theological contexts as innocent as choosing hors d'oeuvres? Can it be so with a proof for the existence of God at stake? Reflecting on these questions leads to two important, though often neglected, objections to the modal ontological argument (hereafter the 'modal OA'). The narrower aim of this paper is to explore these two objections; the wider aim, continuous with the narrower one, is to describe the present status quaestionis concerning the argument. As I see it, there are three central, as yet unresolved, problems that stand in the way of accepting the modal OA. Two of these problems are associated with the two objections just mentioned. The third problem will be mentioned here, but not discussed at length, because it is better understood than the two problems I shall discuss and has been widely discussed in the literature. I am not myself sure how to respond to all of these

Reviewed by: Anselm’s Other Argument by A. D. Smith Sandra L. Visser A. D. Smith. Anselm’s Other Argument. Cambridge-London: Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. xi + 244. Cloth, $49.95. Reading Smith’s Anselm’s Other Argument can be puzzling if one neglects to first read the introduction in which Smith explains that this book arose from work he was doing on a different book on Spinoza. Understanding that helps one understand why it might be that most of the chapters begin where contemporary scholars might rarely choose to begin, with Norman Malcolm and Charles Hartshorne, and why it takes a long, but inadequate and incomplete (at least for those who are conversant with the current literature), detour into considerations of omnipotence, while it examines the relevant passages of Anselm’s Proslogion arguments, before ending with the defense of a different argument that Anselm makes explicit in his Reply to Gaunilo. Despite this at times unhelpful approach to Anselm’s work, at each step of the way, Smith’s scholarship is careful, fair, and very good. Most of the discussions are highly illuminating and typically convincing. The criticisms of Malcolm, Hartshorne, and Katherin Rogers, the one contemporary Anselm scholar Smith treats at length, are nuanced and persuasive. Yet the route that Smith takes in his research, and that appears duplicated in his book, is probably not the one others would find most profitable when considering Anselm’s arguments for the existence of something greater than which cannot be conceived. One of the two central arguments of Smith’s work is that there is no modal ontological argument in Anselm’s Proslogion. Smith closely analyzes the most commonly referenced arguments offered as candidates, namely, those found in Proslogion 3 and Anselm’s Reply to Gaunilo. In each case, Smith argues that the arguments are not properly understood as modal ontological arguments. Smith’s arguments in this section of the book rest on three key premises, which he defends throughout the course of the book. My presentation does not do the subtlety of his arguments justice, but I believe these are fair statements of them. First, conceivability is not possibility. It is important for Anselm that inconceivability entails impossibility; however, one cannot conceive anything that contradicts reason. Second, because conceivability is not possibility, Anselm’s arguments require substantive metaphysical claims. The most important of these metaphysical claims is that “a thing that does not exist is able not to exist is true . . . because and only because there is something that actually exists that has a power over the thing’s existence” (112). It is because nothing has power over something than which nothing greater can be conceived that it is not conceivable for that thing not to exist. Third, modal ontological arguments do not require such substantive metaphysical claims in order for their inferences to go through. Smith concludes that Anselm’s arguments are not modal arguments at all. Smith convincingly argues that Anselm’s arguments cannot be easily translated into an argument that relies on a system of modal logic without loss of information. The care that Smith takes on this point requires some rather technical discussions of contemporary modal systems including S5 and B. The sometimes dense discussion helps the reader appreciate in what ways Anselm’s modal concepts do not map onto our own. But Smith’s argument [End Page 781] might also lead the reader to believe that there is a bigger gap between Anselm’s arguments and ours. That is misleading. There is some very heavy metaphysical work going on in the premise necessary for a contemporary modal argument that it is possible that God exists. In fact, in order to defend that premise, many of Anselm’s arguments and premises from his own arguments might be philosophically helpful. What of Anselm’s other argument and the second central piece of Smith’s work? The argument Smith examines is an interesting one Anselm offers in the Replies. Anselm uses the argument to clarify or further unpack why it is that Anselm believes that something than which a greater cannot be conceived exists. It is an argument that starts from the claim that such a being...

We define "absolute truth", like "absolutely a priori truth" of H. Putnam, as a proposition (statement) which is true in every epistemically possible world, namely, true no matter how the world turns out (epistemically) to be.We have yet to know whether there are such absolute truth(s) or not. In this paper, we try to propose, only as a program of course, an argument for the existence of the absolute truth.Our argument utilizes the logical structure of "the modal ontological argument" for the existence of God. Using this logical structure, we can enable what cannot have been done by any types of so called "refutation of relativism": to deduce the necessity (or actuality) of the existence of the absolute truth from the possibility of the existence of the absolute truth.

Philosophical discussion of arguments for the existence of God appeared to have become extinct during the heyday of logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy. However, since the mid-1960s, there has been a resurgence of interest in these arguments. Much of the discussion has focused on Kant’s “big three” arguments: ontological arguments, cosmological arguments, and teleological arguments. Discussion of ontological arguments has been primarily concerned with (a) Anselm’s ontological argument; (b) modal ontological arguments, particularly as developed by Alvin Plantinga; and (c) higher-order ontological arguments, particularly Gödel’s ontological argument. Each of these kinds of arguments has found supporters, although few regard these as the strongest arguments that can be given for the existence of God. Discussion of cosmological arguments has been focused on (a) kalām cosmological arguments (defended, in particular, by William Lane Craig); (b) cosmological arguments from sufficient reason (defended, in particular, by Richard Gale and Alexander Pruss); and (c) cosmological arguments from contingency (defended, in particular, by Robert Koons and Timothy O’Connor). Discussion of teleological arguments has, in recent times, been partly driven by the emergence of the intelligent design movement in the United States. On the one hand, there has been a huge revival of enthusiasm for Paley’s biological argument for design. On the other hand, there has also been the development of fine-tuning teleological arguments driven primarily by results from very recent cosmological investigation of our universe. Moreover, new kinds of teleological arguments have also emerged—for example, Alvin Plantinga’s arguments for the incompatibility of metaphysical naturalism with evolutionary theory and Michael Rea’s arguments for the incompatibility of the rejection of intelligent design with materialism, realism about material objects, and realism about other minds. Other (“minor”) arguments for the existence of God that have received serious discussion in recent times include moral arguments, arguments from religious experience, arguments from miracles, arguments from consciousness, arguments from reason, and aesthetic arguments. Of course, there is also a host of “lesser” arguments that are mainly viewed as fodder for undergraduate dissection. Further topics that are germane to any discussion of arguments for the existence of God include (a) the appropriate goals at which these arguments should aim and the standards that they should meet, (b) the prospects for “cumulative” arguments (e.g., of the kind developed by Richard Swinburne), and (c) the prospects for prudential arguments that appeal to our desires rather than to our beliefs (e.g., Pascal’s wager).

Pruss (2010) argues that consideration of the motivational centrality of Theistic belief in flourishing and intellectually sophisticated lives of significant length provides reason for thinking that Theistic belief is at least possibly true. But Theistic belief is belief in a necessarily existent God. So, according to Pruss, consideration of the motivational centrality of Theistic belief in flourishing and intellectually sophisticated lives of significant length provides reason for thinking that there is a necessarily existent God. Pruss’s gambit is the most interesting original move in the recent literature on modal ontological arguments and, on that account, deserves detailed analysis. In this paper, I aim to provide just such an analysis. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I argue for the conclusion that Pruss’s gambit should be declined.

One of the classical arguments for the existence of God is the ontological argument. In the second half of the twentieth century, this argument was updated, and triggered new philosophical discussions under the title of “modal ontological argument.” These discussions have expanded with the emergence of the modal versions of the cosmological argument. However, despite the intense interest in arguments for the existence of God, the contemporary scholarship in the philosophy of religion largely overlooks the problem as to whether God is unique or not. In this paper, I aim to update Taftazānī’s argument for the uniqueness of God by means of the conceptual tools of the possible world semantics. Taftazānī’s argument is known as burhān al-tamānu in the Islamic kalām, and aims to show that postulating two omnipotent gods will result in contradictions due to a possible conflict between the two divine wills. The term tamānu refers to the conflict between these wills. So, I argue that this argument, supplemented by the conclusion of the modal ontological or cosmological argument, shows that there is only one God. I call this extended argument “A Modal Argument for the Uniqueness of God.”

Reviewed by: Stoic Theology: Proofs for the Existence of the Cosmic God and of the Traditional Gods Michael Papazian P. A. Meijer . Stoic Theology: Proofs for the Existence of the Cosmic God and of the Traditional Gods. Delft: Elburon, 2007. Pp. xii + 256. Paper, $39.90. Meijer's book, a comprehensive study of Stoic theological arguments, defends the thesis that the Stoics were not narrowly interested in proving the existence of a god. The theology of the Stoa began with its founder, Zeno of Citium, presenting arguments that the cosmos is an intelligent being, though Zeno himself seems not to have explicitly identified that intelligent being as god. A clear statement equating the cosmos with god had to wait until the rise of the third head of the school, Chrysippus, though Meijer acknowledges that there is no reason to think that Zeno or Cleanthes, the second head, would have opposed the proposition that the cosmos, or at least the rational fire that pervades it, is god. Confusion about the true intent of Zeno's arguments is due to their distortion in the sources, for example, by Sextus Empiricus, who, Meijer contends, presents several of Zeno's arguments for the rationality of the cosmos as if they were intended as arguments to establish the existence of god. As a result, Sextus is an unreliable witness for determining the point of these arguments. Further confusing matters is the existence of a set of arguments attributed to Zeno that aim to establish the existence of the traditional gods. Meijer insists that a clear distinction be drawn between these two types of Stoic arguments, a distinction that the sources and later scholars have often not observed. Arguments that conclude that the gods exist because they may be reasonably honored or because otherwise virtues like piety or practices such as prophecy would be discredited served a different purpose than the arguments for the intelligence of the cosmos. The former arguments were advanced, according to Meijer, as a defense against the charge that the theistic naturalism of the Stoics was impious. To acquit themselves, the Stoics presented these arguments for the existence of the Greek pantheon. This need not imply any insincerity, since Cleanthes, whose hymn to Zeus is carefully analyzed by Meijer in an appendix, seems to have been a rather earnest believer, even to the point of charging Aristarchus with heresy for his heliocentrism. Under the pressure of the attacks of the Academic Skeptics and others, Stoic theology became more sophisticated. Meijer devotes a chapter to the parabolai or parodies of the dialectician Alexinus, whose pithy variations of the Stoic arguments were rhetorically effective, though met by the able replies of later Stoics such as Diogenes of Babylon. Of particular interest among the counterarguments are the "soritical arguments" of Carneades against the existence of gods. Meijer's chapter on these is especially strong and provides an interesting contrast of the two sources for this class of argument, Cicero and Sextus. Along with the appendix on Cleanthes' hymn, the book closes with two shorter appendices on the question of the place of the cosmos in the void and on Alexinus's parodies. Meijer's book is a helpful contribution to the scholarship on Stoic theology. But while Meijer provides a salutary counterbalance to the scholarship on Stoic theology that has [End Page 467] tended not to be as attentive to the distinct purposes to which these arguments were first put, Meijer may have gone too far in the other direction. One may wonder whether some of these distinctions were even observed by the Stoics themselves. For example, the Zenonian argument that the traditional gods exist because they are worthy of honor was rescued from Alexinus's parody by Diogenes' proof that the gods are of such a nature as to exist. A plausible reading of being of such a nature as to exist is to understand it as some kind of necessary or essential existence. This has led some commentators to see shades of an ontological argument in Diogenes' response to Alexinus. But while it may make sense to attribute necessary existence to the cosmic god, it is dubious in the case of the traditional...

Reviewed by: Hegel on the Proofs and Personhood of God: Studies in Hegel's Logic and Philosophy of Religion by Robert R. Williams Kevin J. Harrelson Robert R. Williams. Hegel on the Proofs and Personhood of God: Studies in Hegel's Logic and Philosophy of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 319. Cloth, $95.00. Hegel endorsed proofs of the existence of God, and also believed God to be a person. Some of his interpreters ignore these apparently retrograde tendencies, shunning them in favor of the philosopher's more forward-looking contributions. Others embrace Hegel's religious thought, but attempt to recast his views as less reactionary than they appear to be. Robert Williams's latest monograph belongs to a third category: he argues that Hegel's positions in philosophical theology are central to his philosophy writ large. The book is diligently researched, and marshals an impressive amount of textual evidence concerning Hegel's view of the proofs, his theory of personhood, and his views on religious community. Many of Williams's sources are lectures from the 1820s, when Hegel gave more detailed presentations of his philosophy of spirit. This material has long belonged to the received corpus of Hegel, but it is only due to recent critical editions that we have a sense of how Hegel modified his approach during his final decade. There are thus plenty of unanswered questions, and Williams poses some of the right ones. What is the relationship, for instance, between Hegel's many texts on logic and his later lectures on the ontological argument? How should we understand 'personhood' such that it captures the famous chapters on recognition from the Phenomenology, the theory of positive freedom from the Philosophy of Right, and the comments about divine personhood from Hegel's final lectures on religion? The former question is the topic of part 1: Hegel on the Proofs of God. Williams demonstrates convincingly enough that Hegel's endorsement of the proofs is rooted in his view of logic. Hegel allows, with the Kantians, that the traditional forms of these arguments are invalid. Knowing this much, one might expect Hegel to reformulate them. This has been the source of disappointment for many readers: revised arguments are not to be found in Hegel's lectures in the form of well-defined premises and conclusions. Williams makes clear that Hegel's view is rather that traditional logic was not suitable for arguments about this subject matter; and he explains how Hegel saw the proofs as insufficient attempts to "elevate the mind to God" (45–46). The cosmological argument, for instance, is supposed to show that the world depends on God. But in its classical form—since there are contingent entities there must be a necessary one—our knowledge of this relation is inverted. If contingent things depend on God, Hegel reasons, then they are not contingent. A more adequate approach requires that we unlearn, so to speak, the sense of contingency asserted in the premise. Syllogistic argument cannot bring about such unlearning. Hegel purported, and Williams exhaustively documents the fact, to have done a better job in his Science of Logic when he argued that the category of 'contingency' collapses into necessity. Readers may wonder about Williams's argumentative purposes in this part of the book. He succeeds in showing that the Hegel of the Berlin lectures believed himself to have secured, in his earlier work, an adequate basis for theology. Did Hegel's logic, however, commit him to his later theological views? Revisionist Hegelians hedge on this, and Williams offers little to persuade them to his side. Should we view Hegel's positions on these topics as mounting a good defense of cosmological or ontological proofs? Williams seems to think so, but he does little to persuade anyone who is not already versed in Hegel's theory of logic. Part 2, Hegel on the Personhood of God, is more successful. Williams defends a version of recognition theory, and he argues that Hegel's understanding of self-consciousness commits him also to a defense of divine personhood. Williams is more at home with this material, having written previously several books on it. He explains Hegel's...

BOOK REVIEWS 721 The Five Ways. St. Thoma8 Aquina8' Proofs of God's Existence. By ANTHONY KENNY. Studies in Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion. General Editor, D. E. Phillips. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969. Pp. 139. The Cosmological Argument. A Rea8sessment. By BRUCE R. REICHENBACH . Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas, 197~. Pp. 164. $8.75. With the renewal of interest in natural theology prompted by the publication of Flew and Mcintyre's Neu> Essays in Philosophical Theology (1955), attention has been directed once again to rational arguments for God's existence. The ontological argument was the first to benefit from this resurgence of interest, but in the two books under review cosmological argumentation and its various formulations come in for their share of attention. Kenny's work, which shows more the negative influence of Flew, stresses the difficulty involved in separating Aquinas's five ways from the medieval cosmology in which he sees them as imbedded. Reichenbach's work is more positive in spirit, the author's major concern being to reformulate St. Thomas's first three ways so as to meet the objections of Hume and Kant and contemporary critics in the analytical tradition. Both works merit a brief exposition and critique, if only because they consider much the same subject matter and yet come to contrary conclusions. After a brief introduction wherein he allows that " the criticisms of Kant are certainly still the most effective obstacle any rational theism has to meet" (p. 3), Kenny devotes a chapter each to the five proofs for God's existence offered by Aquinas in Summa Theologiae, I, q. ~.a. 3. In the case of each via he attempts a rather complete exegesis of the text, supplementing this with St. Thomas's arguments in parallel places and with elucidations supplied by commentators, mainly recent, including Roberto Masi, Joseph Owens, and Peter Geach. In each instance Kenny raises objections drawn from modern science and from Humean, Kantian, and more recent philosophies to show not only that the ipsa verba of St. Thomas are unacceptable to the modern mind but also that " scholastic modernizations " must share the same fate (cf. p. 4). With regards to the prima via Kenny experiences special difficulty with the principle "omne quod movetur ab alio movetur," and so sides with Suarez's evaluation of the proof that it is impotent " to prove that there is anything immaterial in reality, let alone that there is a first and uncreated substance " (p. 33) . The chapter has some interesting material on the chains of movers involved in inertial and gravitational motion, particularly when the author attempts to explain these in terms of Newtonian and Einsteinian mechanics, but unfortunately his discussion here comes to no conclusive results. Kenny's examination of the secunda via focuses on the principle of efficient causation, which he formulates in mathematical logic BOOK REVIEWS following Salamucha and others. His difficulty here is with essentially subordinated series of causes, which he sees as intelligible in terms of medieval astrology, as thus based on an "archaic fiction" (p. 44), and hence unacceptable in the light of modern science. The discussion of the tertia via, admittedly one of the most difficult proofs to make sense of, permits Kenny to range through contemporary discussions of possiblity, necessity, and contingency. His evaluation is that the proof concludes as well to the "everlasting existence of matter with a natural indestructibility" (p. 69) as it does to God's eternal existence. In analyzing the quarta via the author dwells at some length on Platonic Forms, predicates, and existence, using Geach as a foil for much of the discussion; his own conclusion, predictably, is that " the notion of lpsum Esse Subsistens, ... so far from being a profound metaphysical analysis of the divine nature, turns out to be the Platonic Idea of a predicate which is at best uninformative and at worst unintelligible" (p. 95). His critique of the quinta via, finally, allows Kenny to discourse on contemporary problems relating to teleological explanation and the philosophy of mind, again coming to the negative result that the argument from design has no more claim to validity than the other theistic arguments. Kenny's book is clear and well...