As I said in my last blog post, those who continued to
follow this blog would hear reasons why I believe in the classical, orthodox
Christian worldview. As one of my Facebook friends commented, I may as well
have posted the Athanasian Creed. Now that my readers know what I believe, I
want you to know why I believe as I do. The purpose of this blog is not only to
answer skeptics of classical Christianity, but also to help other Christians
who have questions about the faith. Unfortunately, most people do not think
deeply about why they believe what they believe. In fact, I did not always
think much about my faith in Christ. I was sure I had really experienced God and
knew Him, but I would not have been able to tell you much else before I began studying Christian apologetics.
While serving in the United States Marine Corps, I found
myself in a foxhole* with an atheist in Baghdad, Iraq (contrary to the popular saying). He was not a
particularly bitter or angry atheist. He had never had a bad church experience
or strong objections to theism. He merely did not see any good reason to
believe in God. I desperately wanted to give him a reason to embrace God, but I
was not prepared to make a defense to anyone who asked me for a reason for the
hope within me (1 Peter 3:15). I hope and pray that someone reached that Marine
with the gospel, because I was taken off guard and an ineffective witness for
Christ. It was several years later when I discovered Frank Turek’s television
show I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist. Soon after I read the book of
the same title he co-authored with Norman Geisler. I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist was my introduction to Christian apologetics, but I wish I had begun to think more clearly
about my beliefs for the sake of the atheist in the foxhole and other atheists
I encountered before I discovered apologetics. In memory of that foxhole
atheist, I have decided to re-name this blog The Foxhole Evangelist. Now that I
have some answers, I want to give them to anyone willing to read this blog.
The ontological argument claims that proper reasoning about
the idea of a Perfect Being generates the conclusion that God exists. For this
argument, God’s existence is not merely possible or probable or very likely,
but is logically guaranteed. In this sense the ontological argument is “the
king of the hill” of all the theistic arguments. It is a priori (depending on
no debatable empirical conditions); it is deductive in form, thus making its
conclusion certain and not merely probable; and its conclusion is
metaphysically superlative: there must be a Perfect Being. If successful, the
ontological argument is a masterpiece of a priori or rationalist reasoning and,
as such, sharply and deeply cuts against the grain of the empiricism that
dominates both the popular and the academic mind.
I was intrigued, although part of me thought at first that
this argument might be too good to be true. I have friends who claim to only
believe in what is observable, testable, and repeatable. On one hand I realized that the empiricist
viewpoint is obviously self-contradictory; the idea that only the observable,
testable, and repeatable evidence is trustworthy cannot itself be observed,
tested, or repeated. On the other hand, an argument for God that relied purely on logic
without reference to tangible evidence seemed like a bit of a stretch to me.
Dr. Groothuis persuaded me otherwise.
The ontological argument was first conceived by the monk
Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109 A.D.). Anselm gave two versions of the
argument. For the sake of brevity I will quote Dr. Groothuis’s summary of the
arguments, but I encourage my readers to read Anselm’s Proslogium for
themselves. Inspired by Psalm 14:1, Anselm reasoned:
1.
God is understood or defined as a being “than
which nothing greater can be conceived.” Even the fool possesses this concept
of God.
2.
A thing exists either in (a) the understanding
only (such as the idea of a painting before it is painted) or (b) in both the
understanding and reality, such as existing in the mind of the painter and then
existing on the canvas.
3.
It is “greater” to exist in reality than to
exist merely in the understanding.
4.
If God exists merely in the understanding
(existing only in the mind of the fool), then God is not the greatest possible
being, since a being that existed in reality would be greater than a being that
existed only in the understanding.
5.
But God is by definition the greatest possible
being (from 1).
6.
Therefore, God exists not merely in the
understanding (as the fool claims) but in reality as well. By reductio ad
absurdum.
In other words, even the atheist understands that God is a
Perfect Being—the greatest possible being by definition—even though the atheist
does not believe such a being actually exists. The atheist understands what God
is; if the atheist did not understand God as the greatest possible being, such
a being’s existence could not be denied. Things that exist in the real world
also exist as concepts in the human mind, but there are also things that only
exist in the human mind that are strictly imaginary. The atheist claim is that
any Perfect Being is imaginary. Things that exist in the real world are greater
than things that only exist in the human mind. If God is only imaginary,
obviously He cannot be the greatest possible being, since the real is greater
than the imaginary. However, God is by definition the greatest possible being,
so He must be real since the real is greater than the strictly imaginary.
Dr. Groothuis points out that,
This argument is deductive and is formally valid. If the
five premises are true, the conclusion follows necessarily from them.
Of course, that’s a big “if.” If the premises are true, then
so must be the conclusion. If any of the premises are faulty, the argument is
too good to be true.
Premise 1 is not controversial. God, whether He really
exists or is make-believe, is by definition the greatest possible being.
According to the Bible, God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and
omnibenevolent. He is perfect in every way and to the nth degree. He has every
quality that it would be better to have than to lack, and He has no bad
qualities whatsoever. He is as good as any being can possibly be, and cannot be
(even a little) evil. He is all powerful, and has no weakness at all. He
created the heavens and the earth, and so nothing is hidden from His sight and
nothing is too difficult for Him to understand. He is perfect love. He is
perfectly holy, perfectly just, perfectly righteous, perfectly wise, perfectly
merciful, perfectly compassionate, perfectly creative, perfectly humorous,
perfectly clever, perfectly witty, perfectly playful, perfectly delightful,
perfectly beautiful, perfectly glorious, perfectly awe-inspiring, perfectly
victorious, perfectly perfect, and so on. As the Bible says, He cannot lie, and
He cannot fail. The Christian insists that such a being not only exists, but is
experientially knowable. The atheist denies the existence of a Perfect Being,
but even so must know what God is by definition in order to deny His existence.
Premise 2 is also easily agreed upon. Either a Perfect Being
is pure hokum, or a He exists in reality. Both theists and atheists can
conceive of a Perfect Being. The concept of God is universally understood, and
even those who deny the existence of a Greatest Conceivable Being must be able
to understand what such a being is in order to reject Him.
One objection is that such a great being is beyond human
comprehension. After all, how can finite humans truly understand an infinitely
Perfect God? This is something that had actually occurred to me when I had
heard of the ontological argument from Dr. William Lane Craig, who prefers the
term Greatest Conceivable Being, where Dr. Groothuis used the term Perfect
Being. I thought this description limited God to the scope of the human mind,
and I realized that even the greatest genius could not fully comprehend his
maker. Such a god could not be the transcendent God of the Bible, but only an
idol. While I figured that I must have misunderstood Dr. Craig, given his
prominence as a philosopher and theologian, this is how the argument sounded to
me, and I ignored it for a spell. However, Dr. Groothuis’s explanation helped
me to understand where I had gone wrong. When Anselm wrote of God as “a being
than which nothing greater can be conceived,” he did not mean a God that could
be neatly fit within the confines of the human mind, only that we could
conceive of such a thing as a Perfect Being. An exhaustive knowledge of God was
not implied or necessary to Anselm’s argument.
A possible flaw in the argument might be in Premise 3. Why
was God’s existence greater than His nonexistence? The strength of the whole
argument seems to hinge on whether or not Premise 3 is true, but this also
seems to be the most questionable premise.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant insisted that the idea of existing added nothing to the concept of
God, and it was therefore conceivable that God did not exist. A helpful example
of Kant’s reasoning was given by Dr. Groothuis,
Kant claims that while being almighty is necessary to the idea of God, existing is not necessary to the idea of God. In the same way, having three sides is necessary to the
idea of a triangle, but existing is
not necessary for the idea of a triangle. That is, it might be the case that no
triangles exist even if the very idea of a triangle requires that it have
exactly three sides. One can conceive of God as non-existent, just as one can
think of a triangle as nonexistent.
Premise 3 states, “It is ‘greater’ to exist in reality than
to exist merely in the understanding.” However, if Kant is right then this is
an odd statement to make. We do not typically think of things being greater
simply because they exist. We might say a well-trained dog is greater than an
undisciplined dog, but we would not think a dog “great” only because it
existed. We can apply the same kind of logic to almost anything. To merely say
something exists doesn’t seem to add to its greatness. Dr. Groothuis agrees
that in most cases, this is true.
It is not a settled
principle that for any possible being it is better for that being to exist than
not to exist. Indeed, it is better for an unstoppable flesh-eating virus not to
exist than to exist, and Anselm is not suggesting otherwise.
The difference here is that we have a Perfect Being in mind.
A Perfect Being that actually exists is obviously greater than an imaginary
Perfect Being. If the greatest conceivable being that Anselm wrote of exists,
then this universe was created for a reason, the best of reasons in fact,
because its Creator is maximally good. Our existence has real meaning and
purpose. We can take comfort in the fact that fine-tuning is not merely
apparent, but evidence that the universe was designed with the greatest wisdom
and precision. We can rest in the knowledge that God is not malevolent or
arbitrarily making up the rules as He goes along; rather, the standard of all
goodness and morality is rooted in His maximally great nature. He is sovereign
and just, and worthy of our trust and worship.
Premise 4 states that if God is imaginary, only existing as
a figment of the imagination, then He cannot be the Greatest Conceivable Being.
If a Perfect Being does not exist then there is no good or evil, right or
wrong, truth or falsehood. Mother Theresa was no better than Adolf Hitler, and
Adolf Hitler was no worse than Mother Theresa. The world has no purpose or
meaning, and we are simply the arbitrary result of the blind physical forces of
the universe. However, we are rescued from despair by Premise 5, which reminds
us that by definition God is the Greatest Possible Being. The inescapable
conclusion is a Perfect Being really does exist. Hallelujah!
There is a bit more to this argument. In fact, I have only
given the first version of Anselm’s ontological argument. However, the second
argument will have to wait until next time.
*To be perfectly accurate, no Marine nowadays uses the term “foxhole.”
It is now known as a “fighting hole,” and any Marine who unwittingly uses the
term “foxhole” will be swiftly corrected by their superiors. However, since the
proverbial saying is that, “There’s no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole,”
I have retained the older, more popular nomenclature.
