Atheism And Theism - Blackwell - Philosophy

Atheism and Theism 35

I would point out that there weren’t any agents that he named, and so ‘he
named’ is not like ‘he kicked’. If he kicked any agents there were agents who
were kicked. I think that by going metalinguistic one can probably bend these
intensional contents into extensional ones, much as one can ‘he desired a
unicorn’ which can be bent into the form ‘he desired-true of himself “pos-
sesses a unicorn” ’.^63
The upshot of all these considerations is that the ontological argument for
the existence of God does not work, which is as much as to say that there is
no logical contradiction in denying that God exists. If so the argument from
contingency cannot be valid if it is construed as arguing for the existence of
alogically necessary being.
Not only is the ontological argument invalid, but if its contention that
there is a logical contradiction in denying the existence of God were true then
the assertion of the existence of God would be trivial. Thus ‘pν not-p’ tells us
nothing about the world and ‘(∃x)Fxν ~(∃x)Fx’ only that something exists,
which we know already.

The Cosmological Argument

We need some suitable sense of ‘necessary’ other than that of logical neces-
sity, and we need a meaty premiss. The premiss of the argument from the
contingency of the world (often called the cosmological argument) is that
something exists and that it might not have existed. Now if the argument
were a purely deductive one it would obviously be fallacious. The premiss by
itself has no interesting logical consequences, certainly no consequences that
an atheist cannot consistently accept. However, the argument seems to me
best seen as what has come to be called ‘argument to the best explanation’.
Argument to the best explanation has come to be seen by many philosophers
as the fundamental type of inductive argument in science, history and com-
mon sense.^64 For example, a detective will make several possible hypotheses
about who is the murderer, and will choose the one which gives the best
explanation of the footprint in the rose bed, the open window, the unusual
demeanour of the butler and so on. The argument from contingency depends
on the idea that the best explanation of the existence of contingent beings is
the existence of a necessary being. In fact it is held to be the only ultimately
satisfactory explanation. The argument was put forward by Thomas Aquinas
as the third of his ‘Five Ways’.^65 In recent times the argument has been very
well put by F.C. Copleston in a discussion with Bertrand Russell.^66 It is the
argument most relied upon by modern Thomists.
Copleston reminds us that there are in the world contingent beings.
Hence the universe must have a reason for its existence that is external to it.
If this thing is itself contingent, the reason for its existence would have to be