Atheism And Theism - Blackwell - Philosophy

Atheism and Theism 33

As I have just hinted, there has of course been a traditional theistic answer
to the question. This is that the universe exists because God created it. The
trouble here is that ‘universe’ must be taken to mean something less than
‘everything that there is’ (including Carter’s many universes, supposing that
they exist). There is still the question of God’s existence. The usual theistic
answer is that God necessarilyexists, and so there is no need for explanation of
his existence. A necessary being is one which just hasto exist. Or, to put the
matter more perspicuously, to say that God necessarily exists is to say that the
proposition ‘God exists’ is a necessary truth.

The Ontological Argument

In this connection it will be instructive to have a quick look at the so-called
‘Ontological Argument’ for the existence of God, put forward in slightly
different forms by Anselm and Descartes. A careful and scholarly discussion
of Anselm’s and Descartes’ forms of the ontological argument may be found
in Jonathan Barnes’s book The Ontological Argument,^60 but here I shall confine
myself to what I consider to be the bare bones of the argument. Anselm and
Descartes both thought of God as a being no greater than which can be
conceived, i.e. a being with all possible perfections. They then thought that
existence was itself a perfection, that an existent God is more perfect than a
non-existent one, and thence, they thought, it is absurd to deny that God exists.
We cannot, that is, have a consistent conception of a non-existent God.
Is ‘God’ a proper name? Bertrand Russell would have said that it is a
description, i.e. equivalent to something such as ‘the omnipotent, omniscient
and benevolent being’. More exactly, ‘God exists’ would come out ‘There is
anx such that for any y,y is an OOB if and only if x is identical with y’, or
in symbols ‘(∃x) (y) (OOBy≡x=y)’. The symbols are in fact clearer than the
ordinary language version, because of the ‘there is an x’ which is not like ‘there
is a lion’ or ‘lionx’: ‘x’ is a variable, whose use is for cross reference, not a
predicate. But for the need for cross reference we could just have said ‘some-
thing’. Thus we could say ‘something runs’ instead of ‘(∃x) runs x’.
The ‘is’ in ‘God is wise’ signifies neither existence nor identity. It is a
grammatical quirk, and we can mimic logical notation by writing ‘God is
wise’ as ‘Wise (God)’. On the other hand, ‘God exists’ comes out as ‘(∃x) God
x’. While we must treat ‘God’ as a name in ‘Wise (God)’ we must treat it as
a predicate in ‘(∃x) God x’. (E.g. ‘(∃x) omnipotent x. omniscient x. benevolent
x.’) The difficulty is clear. In formal logic when names are allowed we can
deduce ‘(∃x)Fx’ from ‘Fa’ where ‘a’ is a name. The assumption is that names
always name something.
We can hardly deduce ‘(∃x) strong x’ from ‘Zeus is strong’ because ‘Zeus’
names nothing. (We could deduce ‘someone smokes a pipe’ from ‘Sherlock