How To Be An Agnostic
negates the gods’ role in morality – which would seem to be a
major blow. What is routinely missed is Socrates’ point that the
conundrum is not an issue for the gods, but for human beings.
The importance of the question is to show up the limitations of
human conceptions of morality. It says nothing about the gods’
involvement with it.
The loss of contemplation
No doubt the unknowability of God is very annoying to con-
viction atheists. Rather than see the conundrums it poses as
an invitation to grapple with the limits of human knowledge,
they reject them as incoherent. Another so-called argument
for the existence of God, the ontological argument, makes the
point directly. Formulated by St Anselm, it was meant by him as
another kind of meditation on God. It is found in his work, the
Proslogion. It is the sort that has the aim of trying to invoke as
profound a sense as is possible of the enormous mystery of God
in the human mind. The formula that Anselm derives to do this
is that God is ‘something than which nothing greater can be
thought’. He suggests a meditation: contemplate anything at
all, and God is greater.
Anselm’s ontological argument is often today summarised
thus: if God must be greater than existence, God cannot, there-
fore, be thought not to exist. QED – God exists! Little wonder it
comes across as nothing more than a trick of logic, which most
philosophers agree as a proof it probably is. The atheists then set
on it. They point out that it is only about the concept of God
and God’s existence, and this says nothing about what exists in
the real world. Under the same logic, someone could develop a
concept about the perfect example of anything – say a perfect
car or a perfect fl ower – and then ask why its perfection should
not entail its existence too. Clearly, it would be a fool who then
set out to fi nd this perfect car in the showroom or perfect fl ower
in the meadow. Therefore, they say, it is the fool who thinks the
ontological argument proves God exists too.