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Tallis in Wonderland

Revisiting the Ontological Argument

Raymond Tallis contends that a definition of God cannot necessitate God’s existence.

Regular readers of this column will know that Tallis is a secular humanist, and that his Wonderland is a godless place. He explained why he was an atheist nearly a hundred wanders-in-Wonderland ago (‘Why I am an Atheist’, Issue 73), at a comparatively happy time (2009 CE) when few of us had heard of Donald Trump or Covid. So why is God popping up yet again, only a short while after he discussed the ‘God of Limited Power’ (‘Excusing God’, Issue 168)? Has he had a revelation, or encountered an argument that has changed his mind on this the most important of issues?

There has been no such event. Instead, I stumbled upon a characteristically brilliant episode of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, wonderfully facilitated by Melvyn Bragg. Originally broadcast over a decade ago, it was devoted to the Ontological Argument for the existence of God. I mention the programme because I suspect that by spreading the word about In Our Time, I might thereby contribute to enlightening readers (even?) more than simply by means of my reports from Wonderland.

The Ontological Argument is not, of course, a stranger to this journal. For instance, in Issue 152, Peter Mullen beautifully summarised Anselm’s famous version of the argument, the arguments against his argument, and the counter-arguments mobilised in its defence. So why, apart from the accidental encounter with In Our Time, do I think it is worthwhile re-visiting this issue? Because it is, as Mullen said, “in and of itself a paradigm of philosophy. The Ontological Argument – whichever side you find yourself on – is an example of what, at its best, philosophy is.” I want to support this claim by looking at places the argument might take us to, irrespective of whether or not it delivers what it says on the tin.

Anselm’s Ontological Argument can be put briefly as follows:

a) God is by definition the most perfect being.

b) Any being would be more perfect if it actually existed than if it did not.

c) The most perfect being must therefore actually exist.

d) Therefore God exists.

In the almost 950 years since Anselm published the argument in his 1078 CE tome Proslogion (literally, Discourse), an extraordinary range of big hitters in Western philosophy has engaged with it, including thinkers as disparate as Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Frege, and Gödel. But the most influential response was that of Kant, who argued in The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) that existence is not a property of an entity, analogous to features that are picked out by predicates: asserting that ‘Tigers exist’ is not for instance comparable to asserting that ‘Tigers have stripes’. We can see that difference when we reflect that tigers can exist without having stripes but cannot have stripes without existing.

Existence, then, is a necessary pre-condition of having properties – so that God cannot qualify as ‘the most perfect being’ without first existing. That requirement applies equally to any candidate for being the ‘most perfect’ being. We could imagine a non-divine entity that happens to be the most perfect entity in the world: it still would have to exist to qualify for the accolade. Anslem’s argument does not therefore support the claim that the most perfect being is God, or necessarily has the abilities traditionally ascribed to God, such as the capacity to create the universe.

The Logic of Being

But behind this hierarchy of existence and properties is an issue that goes deeper and wider than Anselm’s argument. To see this, it helps to reflect on Gottlob Frege’s development of Kant’s argument in On Concept and Object (1892), which is usefully discussed by J. William Forgie in ‘Kant and Frege: Existence as a Second-Level Property’ (Kant-Studien 91, 2000). Frege contrasts existence, which he rather oddly describes as a ‘second-level’ property, with ‘first-level’ properties, such as having certain qualities or belonging to a certain class. It was this distinction that gave birth to the notion of the ‘existential quantifier’ in logic. This marks the separation between the fact of something’s existence and its having certain properties. The existential quantifier is flagged up in propositions such as ‘There is an x, such that x is a cat and the cat is black’.

The existential quantifier was a key player in the philosophical logic that occupied such a dominant position in Anglophone philosophy in the first half of the last century. Separating the existence of something from any predicates that may be ascribed to it enabled philosophers to cope with certain brain teasers. Consider the statement ‘The present King of France is bald’, made when there is no King of France (as is presently true). The present King of France is not classified either under real things that are bald, or under real things that are not bald. So neither the statement nor its contrary is true.

How can we make sense of this? Answer: separate the implicitly existential from the explicitly predicative aspect of the proposition by unpacking it as two propositions: a) ‘There is a present King of France’; and b) ‘He is bald’. The opening existential claim is demonstrably false. There is no present King of France to carry the property of baldness or its opposite (ask Louis XVI). It is not possible, therefore, to infer from the properties of a thing that it must exist, because it needs existence to have properties at all.

By now you may be starting to yawn, as I used to do by the time I reached page two of any primer on philosophical logic – or did until it occurred to me how extraordinary the existential quantifier is and how it illuminates the nature of human consciousness. We may imagine a non-human animal experiencing a black cat, but cannot imagine it separating the existence of the cat from the cat itself, so that existence can then be ascribed to the cat and, once ascribed, enable the cat to be connected with its properties, and accommodate predicates that refer to them.

The existential quantifier is, of course, generated within language – the same language that enables us to separate the properties of entities from those entities and then re-attach them as predicates. It is this capacity to generate propositions that allows us to inhabit a shared world of facts rather than just a world of material objects. I have called this realm of facts the ‘thatosphere’.

This is a vast topic, and I have devoted (too?) many pages to discussing it. My most recent exploration – Circling Round Explicitness: The Heart of the Mystery of Human Being (Agenda, 2025) – is out this month, and I’m sure I will have more to say about the topic in future reports from Wonderland. But that’s enough of pushing the Tallis merchandise for the present, not least because I want loop back towards the place where we began.

The Lord Answering Job from the Whirlwind by William Blake c.1803

A Perfect Circle

Anselm’s argument reminds us of one of the most mysterious features of human beings: our capacity to envisage, articulate, and share possibilities, such that we can postulate entities that may or may not exist. Existence becomes an add-on. On the basis of this capacity, Anselm imagines that we can argue an entity into existence by considering its properties. This is the platform of the argument that, if we propose an entity that is more perfect than anything else, that entity must exist because its lack of existence would be a relative (and indeed absolute) imperfection. But once we recognize that existence is a necessary prior condition of having any properties, we can see that it’s not valid to read back from properties ascribed to something – such as being more perfect than anything else – to the actual existence of that thing.

True, if God is the most perfect being, then He cannot have any imperfection, including the fundamental imperfection of not existing. But this does not prove that His non-existence is impossible. The impossibility of his non-existence would be demonstrated only if He were already able to have properties, such as perfection. This would presuppose his existence in the first place. In short, God could be protected from non-existence by Anselm’s argument only if He were already attributed the existence necessary to host the properties ascribed to Him.

This circularity seems so obvious that it one might wonder why anyone would be inclined to give the Ontological Argument the time of day. Quite simply, it’s because it’s not easy to have a clear idea of the nature of objects that are either non-existent or only possibly existent.

Perhaps the biggest barrier to thinking clearly about such objects arises from the fact that they are always conceived of in connection with definite properties. Unicorns, it might be mistakenly argued, must have some kind of existence if we’re justified in saying of them that they definitely have a golden horn attached to a horse’s body, or indeed, if any denial of their existence is to deny any such specific content. Otherwise – so the argument continues – denying the existence of unicorns would rule out nothing in particular, which is to say, rule out nothing at all. Any denial of existence has to have a point of application.

Of course, unicorns, and likewise, a most perfect being with the properties of God, do have a kind of existence: they exist as possibilities – which means, as the referents of token thoughts entertained by human minds. The mind is the very source of the merely possibly existent, and hence of something that might turn out to be non-existent. When I deny the existence of something, I deny that there is anything corresponding to a referent of a certain proposition made by a mind, or even of an expectation a mind may entertain.

Recognising merely possible entities as the products of our articulate collective consciousnesses enables us to turn Anselm’s argument upside down. The God of the Ontological Argument, rather than being the Creator of Man and everything else, is man’s creation. This God is a child of shared consciousness, a dweller of the thatosphere created out of language. As such, He is a marker of our extraordinary nature, which is our capacity to transcend the world in which we live. As Ludwig Feuerbach argued in The Essence of Christianity (1841), the idea of God is not a divine revelation: rather, it’s a projection from our individual and collective minds. And what extraordinary minds they are, given that they’re able to speak of the totality of things – of ‘the universe’. As for the necessity of God’s existence generated by Anselm’s argument, it is a purely verbal necessity, not rooted in actual things.

So much for Anselm’s argument. But notwithstanding its begging of the question, it has kept philosophers fruitfully engaged for nearly a millennium – as it was on 27th September 2012, when it was the topic of one out of over a thousand wonderful conversations broadcast under the modest title of In Our Time.

Raymond Tallis’s Prague 22: A Philosopher Takes a Tram Through a City is out now in conjunction with Philosophy Now.