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You believe that there is no God? Well, what is God? Suppose that God is the greatest being that can be conceived. Now even if you don’t think that such a being exists, you can still understand the idea of such a being; you can still conceive of it. Therefore, whether or not such a being exists in reality, it must at least exist in your mind. But a being that existed in reality would be greater than a being that existed only in your mind. Therefore, for such a being to exist only in your mind, and not in reality, would be a contradiction in terms; for if it existed only in your mind, it would both be the greatest being that can be conceived (that’s what you’re conceiving of) and not be the greatest thing that can be conceived (because the same being existing in reality would be greater). So the greatest being that can be conceived – this being must exist in reality as well as in thought.
This is a simplified version of Anselm’s argument for the existence of God, often called the “ontological” argument. I’m not sure whether it really works; I’m inclined to say it doesn’t, although it’s hard to say where the logic goes wrong, especially in the more sophisticated version presented by Anselm himself.
Nevertheless, I consider it the best and most important of the proofs of God’s existence, even if it doesn’t work. Why? Because the God that it’s proving is actually God. A “greatest possible being” actually is likely to be omnipotent and omnibenevolent, a being that watches over us, intervenes in our affairs, and can tell us how we should and shouldn’t live our lives.
By contrast, most arguments for God’s existence are some variant on “cosmological” or “design” arguments – claiming only that the universe must be created by some intelligent entity or, more sparsely yet, some first cause that caused everything else to happen. But so what? If these arguments work, they don’t really matter all that much. The so-called God that they prove could just be some big thing that puts everything in motion and then goes away and ignores us, a “Divine Watchmaker.” And I don’t see that that makes any significant difference to our lives now. For that matter, they say nothing about the being’s goodness: Iris Murdoch quips that “a demon could have created the world.”
If Anselm’s argument works, it changes everything; if the cosmological or design arguments work, they change nothing, or almost nothing. Anselm’s argument doesn’t prove that God must have the historically specific qualities attributed to Him in any given tradition (such as becoming human in the person of Jesus); the God it proves could certainly be that worshipped by Jews, Muslims or Baha’is. But whichever tradition we associate Him with, this God is going to turn out a being that’s the best we can imagine – the most just, the most kind, the most powerful – and that’s the God whose existence, or lack of existence, actually matters.
EDIT: the last sentence of the first paragraph originally said “in thought as well as in reality,” which doesn’t quite get the sense of the point I was trying to convey.
I suspect you have the last sentence in your opening paragraph reversed?
I’ve always felt that the logic goes wrong because it ignores the gap between imagination and reality. Maybe there is no gap between the logical/conceptual and the actual, but that’s certainly not an assumption an atheist (whom Anselm is effectively arguing against) would accept. An equally applicable final sentence of the argument could be, “…therefore it’s impossible to adequately imagine god,” or a less denigrating version, “…therefore any god you imagine would not be as great as a real god.” (Though I confess I haven’t read the full/original version.)
Regardless, this certainly provides a highly *interesting* proof of god, as you lay out in the rest of your post. But there’s a flip side: it also produces a personalized god, one that’s the best each imaginer can imagine. Which I think may speak to a subtler flaw in Anselm’s argument: if god exists because he’s the greatest thing I can imagine (which includes the quality of existing), what happens if you and I imagine radically different “greatest things”?
Yes, it was reversed. Thanks, I’ve fixed that.
Whatever the argument’s weaknesses are, I don’t think that ignoring the gap between imagination and reality is one of them. Much of the argument rests on bridging exactly that gap. God can exist in our imaginations; that’s the first premise of the argument. The remainder of the argument is to show that that existence in imagination implies an existence in reality.
But I think the rest of your post is on the right track. The argument depends on a very large number of disputable metaphysical and epistemological assumptions, including among them the idea that greatness is itself something really existing, not something that differs in the mind from person to person – it’s certainly not compatible with a subjectivist conception of value. However – and this is why the argument doesn’t just immediately fall flat – any of those assumptions can also be (and have been) argued for on grounds acceptable to an atheist, grounds that don’t require God’s existence.
“But a being that existed in reality would be greater than a being that existed only in your mind.”
This is were my problem with the argument always comes into play. I don’t know why Anselm came to the conclusion that the existent thing is somehow superior to the imagined thing. I think that this portion of the argument often goes uncontested because of our inclination toward embodiedness. It is natural to think that, say, an real apple is superior to an imaginary one. However, I do not think that this distinction is useful. The idea of an apple is not an apple. I am reminded of Gaunilo. Basically he applied the same logic to the idea of an island. Imagine an the perfect island… blah blah blah. If the same logic held we would have an island that is perfect (and I think we would know where it was too. I mean, the perfect island would have easy access don’t you think?) Anyway, while I agree that this proof does have the highest set sights of the proofs, I disagree in that I think it fails just as miserably, if not more so, than the others.
Thanks, Brandon. Your post raises a couple of questions. First, “The idea of an apple is not an apple”… a lot depends on how we phrase things. What if we refer to “an imaginary apple” instead of “the idea of an apple”? If an imaginary apple is not an apple, what is it?
As for Gaunilo, that’s a bit weightier. I think the response would go on something like the following lines: Anselm’s argument depends first on our having the idea of the perfect being in our minds. A perfect being is a logically consistent concept, and therefore can be formed in our minds; but a perfect island isn’t. Consider even the property of easy access, which you mention: easy access for whom? It would seem that the perfect island for you isn’t necessarily the perfect island for me; the idea of an island which is perfect (full-stop) comes to be a logical contradiction. The same is going to be true of any entity that is finite, limited by space and time: for such an entity to be perfect is not even going to be imaginable. This isn’t true of the greatest being, because the concept of a greatest being doesn’t contain a contradiction in the same way. For that being, and that being only, we can form a conception of its being perfect in our minds, and therefore (so the argument goes) must be able to do so in reality.