The Ontological Argument for God's Existence - Case Study Example

 Topic: The Ontological Argument for God’s existence Introduction Arguments for the existence of God are varied. Intellectuals are trying to prove the existence of God through reasoning, and this is the grave error being committed by such individuals. Divinity begins, when reasoning ends. For, reasoning is the domain of the mind. When one transcends the mind, divinity is experienced. Repeat, divinity is experiencing, not explaining. The ultimate reality, God, is beyond words. The printed pages cannot capture it. This is the problem between the wrangling intellectuals. The perfect design of things seen in the world, can be the handiwork of the perfect designer, it is believed. Arguments for the existence of God are based on revelations of the Realized Souls. At their level everything is perfect, ever the same, and without any confusion or contradiction. All confusion and arguments arise, when mind-level intellectuals begin to interpret the revelations of the transcendental! Arguments for the existence of God based on general revelation are also called natural theology. Next to general revelations, is the special revelation and this is the area where the problems for the humanity begin due to their wrong understanding/interpretation. Those issues are: who God is, what God has done and will do and how He expects us to live. Such divine instructions are found in The Bible, Qur’an, Shri Guru Granth Sahib Ji, Vedas, etc. Natural theology based on reasoning is incapable of demonstrating God’s existence. Relying on one’s own thought and reasoning skills to reach God is full of pitfalls. Human beings are likely to confuse the limitations of their thoughts as the limitation of God. Arguments for the existence of God based on the appearance of design in the world again form part of the domain of reasoning and inductive logic. Design arguments are also known as teleological arguments. The perfect order in the universe is offered as the perfect reason for the existence of God. The perfect order seen in the universe cannot be a matter of chance. If the watch needs the watch maker, the universe needs the universe-maker, so say the Creationists. The universe must be the product of intelligent design, they believe. Objections to the design arguments say that it is not necessary to depend upon a God-hypothesis to explain the orderly positioning of the things in the world. Science is capable of explaining everything, according to such votaries. They argue that life is created from the “Big-bang”, and one sees the natural evolutionary process in the things around. But these people should know that spirituality is also the science of sciences. The difference is, it is the science of individual experiencing, and the ‘laboratory’ here is the ‘inner chamber’ of an individual. Objectors to design arguments say that they do not need a God-hypothesis to explain why things are as they are in the world and the universe (i.e. complex and ordered). For these people, science tells them everything they need to know about the world and the universe they inhabit. For instance, they would say that life was 'created' from the 'Big-bang', and that everything is here as a result of natural evolutionary processes. Of course, it might be that scientific explanations of the origins of the world and universe actually explain how God created everything. In other words, maybe God used the 'Big-bang' and introduced the process of evolution, as the means to bringing about life? To sum up, there are four important philosophical arguments about the existence about God. They are: The Ontological Argument, The First Cause Argument, The Argument from Design and The Moral Argument. Even with all these arguments, human beings are still in a state of confusion about the existence of God and the purpose of Creation. Is religious belief just an emotional crutch for those unable to cope with the reality of life without God? The clash of the giants-Philosophers Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant: Thomas Aquinas Healy writes, “Thomas Aquinas was born into a minor aristocratic family in Italy in 1224 or 1225 at the family castle of Roccasecca, located not far from Naples on the road to Rome. As was the custom with the younger sons of the nobility, he was destined for a career in the church.”(2003, p.1) He was a priest, professor and philosopher and he is known for his methodical style of harmonizing faith and reason. He relied on Aristotle’s arguments to prove the existence of God and at the same time stuck to the truth of Christian beliefs, and said that some doctrinal truths are revealed only by faith. His thinking called Thomism was adopted by the church. Known as "the angelic doctor," he was canonized in 1323. In 1879, Pope Leo XIII declared Aquinas's works "the only true philosophy." He continues to hold sway on the Christian intellectuals as well as the common Christian. Healy writes, “ One reason for Thomas’s per during popularity, and thus one possible reason for devoting time and energy to him today, may be in the experience of many of his readers who have found that the more of his thought informs their own thought and action, the more coherent, profound and, so to say, livable it appears.”(Preface, 2003, p.vii) He believed that reason and faith are the alternative beats of the same heart and reason can sustain and operate within faith. The difference between the philosophy and the theology is one of procedures. Philosopher solely relies on reason, but the theology begins with faith, that is the starting point, and then it arrives at the conclusion with the use of reason. He argues that to detract from the perfection of creation is to detract from the creator. He died at the early age of forty-nine. The substance of his work, but not all its details, remains as an authentic statement of Christian doctrine. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) Immanuel Kant is a German philosopher, professor of logic and metaphysics. His Book “The Critique of Pure Reason,” appeared in 1781. Kant’s views philosophy truly scientific but his writing is so difficult, and it is beyond the reach of a common reader. Immanuel Kant was born in Königsberg (Kaliningrad). His father’s strict pietistic Protestantism impacted Kant deeply. He attended the Collegium Fridericianum, and at the age of 16 entered the University of Köningsberg. He was awarded his doctor’s degree for the work On Fire and he was appointed a lecturer at the university. He was dean of the university six times and rector of the university twice. He was engrossed in his study, and was least interested to travel outside. He relied on his own rational thinking and did not consider interaction with the world outside is necessary to solve the problems of philosophy. But he enjoyed argumentative conversations. He led a regular and disciplined life. Kant is difficult to understand, but not impossible. In The Critique of Pure reason, he attempts to prove, that though our knowledge is secured from experience, it is possible to have knowledge of objects before experience. The important question, therefore, is how are synthetic a priori judgments possible? The priori knowledge is independent of all experience. A priori proposition can be true or false, independent of experience. But experience is necessary for understanding the terms. Kant almost dons the garb of a Realized Soul, and knocks the portals of transcendental reality when he says that there is an independent reality outside the world of all possible experience. He calls this as the world of the noumenal. In other words, the world of things as they are in themselves, unaffected by any outside happenings, and of reality as it is in itself. The world of phenomena as we see it through our sense objects is the world of things as they appear to us. This is the directly known world of actual experience. In The World as Will and Representation Schopenhauer wrote: "Kant's teaching produces a fundamental change in every mind that has grasped it. This change is so great that it may be regarded as an intellectual rebirth. It alone is capable of really moving the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect... In consequence of this, the mind undergoes a fundamental undeceiving, and thereafter looks at things in another light." (Immanuel….) “The ontological argument is, roughly, the argument that God, being that than which no greater can be conceived, must exist, for if he did not then it would be possible to conceive of an existent God, which would be greater than that than which no greater can be conceived, which is absurd.” (Objections….)The ontological argument is the most refuted of the arguments and the non-classical theist Immanuel Kant is one of its bitter critics. According g to him, since the ontological argument rests on the judgment that a God that exists is greater than the God that does not, the premise rests on confusion. “According to Kant, existence is not a predicate, a property that a thing can either possess or lack. When people assert that God exists they are not saying that there is a God and he possesses the property of existence. If that were the case, then when people assert that God does not exist they would be saying that there is a God and he lacks the property of existence, i.e., they would be both affirming and denying God’s existence in the same breath.” (Objections…) To explain it in more detail, when one gives complete description of an object, all possible details about it are given like the size, weight, color etc. Not when we say that the object exists, by asserting thus, and vouchsafing for nits existence, we do not make any additions to the concept of existence of that object. The object is the same. If the existence or non-existence of God is to be explained by property-wise then Kant is correct. Both are qualitatively identical. This leads to the conclusion that a God that exists and a God that does not exist is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, etc are the same. Meiklejohn writes, “The celebrated ontological or Cartesian argument for the existence of a Supreme Being is therefore insufficient; and we may as well hope to increase our stock of knowledge by the aid of mere ideas, as the merchant to augment his wealth by the addition to his cash account.”(p.337) Responses to Kant Kant’s criticism of the ontological argument is widely accepted, but he receives criticism from some quarters. When asserting that an object exists, it depends on the way how we conceive it. On the same lines to say that God is not a mere figment of believer’s imagination and he actually exists, is like adding something to the concept of God. Kant’s argument is as follows: “Now [the argument proceeds] 'all reality' includes existence; existence is therefore contained in the concept of a thing that is possible. If, then, this thing is rejected, the internal possibility of the thing is rejected -- which is self-contradictory. My answer is as follows. There is already a contradiction in introducing the concept of existence -- no matter under what title it may be disguised -- into the concept of a thing which we profess to be thinking solely in reference to its possibility.”(Kant’s Refutation….) Kant argues that such an assertion is a mere tautology. He further asks, what is the nature of the proposition? Is it analytic or synthetic? If analytic, the assertion of the existence means nothing, as it does not add anything to the thought of the thing. “ In that case either the thought, which is in us, is the thing itself, or we have presupposed an existence as belonging to the realm of the possible, and have then, on that pretext, inferred its existence from its internal possibility -- which is nothing but a miserable tautology.”(Kant’s refutation….) If on the other hand it is admitted that all existential propositions are synthetic, it is unreasonable to maintain that the predicate of existence cannot be rejected without contradiction. Such a feature is to be seen in analytic propositions and that precisely is their analytic character. Opinion: The backgrounds of the two philosophers are different. The question is not who is correct and who is wrong. None of them is a Realized Soul. They are intellectuals. Kant reasons out that there is a power beyond the phenomenon world that we experience. To Aquinas, it is the question of faith. Both are speaking from the level of their progressions. As stated in the earlier part of the essay, Revelations of the Realized Souls cannot be explained through words. So, all the conflicts between the priests, mullahs, and the pundits are mind-level misunderstandings. The ultimate truth is the same; it is one without the second. It is immutable, imperishable and eternal. The sun and the moon are the same for the follower of any religion; the ocean and the cloud are the same for everyone. Aquinas is a right, and Kant is not wrong! They are speaking from their intellectual levels. To that extent the disputations are fruitless. Conclusion: About Kant’s position, Meiklejohn writes, “I maintain, then, that the physical-theological argument is insufficient of itself to prove the existence of a Supreme Being, that it must entrust this to the ontological argument—to which it serves merely as an introduction, and that, consequently, this argument contains the only possible ground of proof (possessed by speculative reason) for the existence of this being.”(p.350) What is reasoning and what is experiencing? Take the example of an apple. One can describe a dozen qualities of the apple like its size, color, taste etc. But that description is not experiencing. Experiencing is eating the apple. On eating the apple, no further explanation is necessary about its taste. The one, who has tasted, knows it. Similarly, the Realized Souls have experienced the Truth. Kant shows awareness about this position. He states, “In respect of time, therefore, no knowledge of ours is antecedent to experience, but begins with it……whether there exists knowledge altogether independently of experience, and even of all sensuous impressions?”(Meiklejohn, 2003, p.1) To elucidate about Kant’s position, let Kant sees a matchbox in front him; he also sees the matchstick, but asks where the fire is? To get the fire, there is a procedure to be followed in relation to the matchbox and the matchstick. Similarly, there is a procedure for Realization of the God-experience. The procedure is self-enquiry! ************** Works Cited: Healy, Nicholas, M. Thomas Aquinas: Theologian of the Christian Life: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003 Immanuel Kant--In the World as Will and Representation Schopenhauer Retrieved on May 14, 2010 Kant's Refutation of the Ontological Argument Retrieved on May 14, 2010 Meikloejohn, John Miller Dow. Immanuel Kant—Critique of Pure Reason: Dover Philosophical Classics, 2003. Objections to the Ontological Argument Retrieved on May 14, 2010 Read More