Rene Descartes was also a supporter of the Ontological Argument, focusing specifically on God’s necessary existence. He reasoned that God was a supremely perfect being, and therefore had all perfections. He assumed, as Anselm had done, that existence was a perfection. God, therefore, would have the perfection of existence and it is impossible to think of God as not having it. God cannot not exist, and so must exist. Descartes maintained that existence belongs analytically to God; it is part of his definition, just as three sides are part of the definition of a triangle.
However, I do not agree with either of these presentations of the argument. There have been many critics of the Ontological Argument since it began, the primary being Immanuel Kant, who claimed a move from definition to reality is a false manoeuvre because the only way of knowing anything about the universe is through empirical data. Kant also questioned whether existence is a predicate of something (Anselm’s argument relies heavily upon it being so). I would have thought this a fairly obvious problem with Anselm’s argument - existence cannot be associated with other characteristics of something, like shape, colour, or size, because if something lacks it, there is no something at all, and we cannot claim anything about it. Existence is surely more than a feature of a thing or being, it is fundamental to whether it is. Kant observed that existence is not associated with the definition of something since it does not add to our understanding of that thing. We must establish the existence of something before we can say what it is like, not the other way round. I agree; a triangle can only have three sides if it exists in the first place, there is a God only if He exists in the first place. We cannot ascribe existence a priori to our definition of a perfect being, which is tantamount to saying ‘An existing God exists’. Obviously if there is a triangle, by definition it will have three sides, and we cannot logically reject this. But we can reject the three sides if we reject the concept of a triangle, and this holds true with a necessary being as well. If we reject Gods’ existence, we reject all His predicates too, thus avoiding a contradiction. There would then be nothing outside the thing or being to cause contradiction, since the necessity is meant to arise from within it, and there can be no contradictions from within the thing because we have rejected it. There is no such thing as a level of existence; things either exist or they don’t. Therefore, I do not think there is such a thing as a perfection of existence. I believe Anselm is guilty of twisting words to make it look as if is being logical: if we exchange the premise ‘God does not exist’ for ‘There is no God’ the entire difficulty vanishes and the Ontological Argument is no longer valid.
David Hume also levelled a relevant criticism at the argument, along the same lines as Kant, striking at the part of the argument that states that existence can be necessarily true. He maintained that all existential statements are synthetic – any statement about the existence of something may be true or not true. Just as, say, magic beetles may or may not exist, God may or may not exist. In my opinion this is a good criticism: it seems clear that existence is contingent. The idea of God existing necessarily, Hume claims, is nonsense. In addition, Thomas Aquinas and Gaunilo, despite both being theists, have criticised the Ontological Argument. Gaunilo refuted Anselm by showing that if the logic of Anselm’s argument was applied to things other than God it led to invalid conclusions. Replacing the word ‘God’ with ‘the greatest island’ led to an argument with the same form as Anselm’s, with true premises, and yet which leads to a false conclusion. We can conceive of an island with all perfections, but this does not guarantee the existence of such an island or bring it into existence. This can be clarified by reference to something mythical like magic beetles. We can imagine exactly what magic beetles would be like, with every perfection they could possess. But they still don’t actually exist because perfection does not necessarily entail existence.
Aquinas said that Anselm had made a transitional error – that is, moving from the definition of God to the existence of God. Understanding the term ‘God’ means only that God exists in the understanding, not in reality. Aquinas believed God’s existence in reality could only be demonstrated a posteriori – ‘Because we do not know the essence of God, the proposition is not self-evident to us, but needs to be demonstrated by things that are more known to us, though less known in their nature – namely, His effects.’ I would agree with him; as well, Anselm has made assumptions about the definition of God – his understanding of God may well not be shared by all believers. It does seem that, while there may be some believers who understand God to be ‘that which nothing greater can be conceived’, many will want to describe Him in other terms. There could, therefore, be good reasons for rejecting Anselm’s very definition of God – and as we can never know the nature of God anyway, it is impossible to base an argument on it. Therefore, I do not believe that we have found valid philosophical reasons to believe in God. Because the Ontological Argument is deductive, its premises must be true and lead to valid conclusions for it to succeed, but as we have shown, they don’t, and thus it is flawed.
Another common argument for God is the Argument from Religious Experience, a deeply convincing one for many. It is inductive and a posteriori by definition, since it is concerned with whether direct experience of God can provide any proof of His existence. If God manifests Himself to people, it supposedly becomes impossible to deny that He exists. The basic argument is that throughout human history, in all cultures and societies, there have been many reports of a great variety of religious experiences. What exactly counts as ‘a religious experience’ is highly debatable and varied, ranging from a full-on encounter with a divine being or a near-death experience, to visions, pictures, words, prayers or miracles, or just feeling the presence of a divine spirit. Many religious apologists believe the competing explanations for these reports are not as probable as is the supposition that some religious beliefs are true. Of course, it is not merely a question of whether the person had the experiences or not – there have no doubt been many experiences caused by nothing more than mental phenomena, e.g. hearing things, dreams and daydreams, hallucinations, hysteria, delusions, cycles of mania, depression or sexual passion. The issue would be whether the experiences were caused by a referent that is not located in the human psyche alone. Religious experiences can take many forms, but Caroline Franks Davies has defined them as ‘something akin to sensory experience’ or simply ‘experiences which the subjects themselves describe in religious terms or are intrinsically religious’. Richard Swinburne has also divided them up into ‘public’ and ‘private’ experiences – the difference, for example, between seeing God’s work in the night sky, and being directly visited by an angel. A distinction should also be made between the kind of experience that can change someone’s life, taking them in a completely different direction religiously, and the kind of experience that merely confirms what someone already believes. Naturally, the first kind is more difficult to explain away.
There are two positions regarding religious experience as evidence for the existence of God. The ‘hard’ position is advocated by, for instance, Terence Penelhum and maintains that there can be no natural theology based on experience. There could, it is held, only be such a natural theology if it could be shown that there is no non-religious explanation of the occurrence of the experience. The ‘soft’ position is advocated by John Hick and maintains that someone who has a powerful sense of existing in the presence of God must, as a rational person, claim to know God exists – such a person is as entitled to make this claim as others are to say they know the physical world exists. For a person who has had an experience, the argument becomes analytically true – although it remains synthetic to those who only hear about it. Believers may claim their encounter with God is so real and immediate that no justification is required. It is not easy collecting evidence for religious experiences, because people fear ridicule or scepticism, but it clearly has a significant role in the debate about the existence of God – between 30 and 45 % of the population of Britain say that they have at some point been aware of a presence or power beyond themselves. If these experiences can be verified, they would be very powerful evidence for the existence of God.
All major religions are based on religious experience: in Judaism, God revealed Himself to Abraham; in Christianity, Jesus was resurrected and appeared to his disciples; in Islam, Gabriel dictated the Koran. So clearly, divine revelation is important and influential to many faiths. The only problem I can see so far is the discrepancy between these religions – each seems to claim mutually exclusive truths. For example, Christianity believes Jesus to be a historical and physical incarnation of God, whereas Islam judges him to be a true prophet and a man who never died at all, but rose to Heaven. The vast majority of Jews do not regard Jesus as God, but only a man or a prophet. The fact that all of these religions (in innumerable other ways) contradict each other suggests that logically, some are wrong, and religious experience cannot be a reliable method of understanding God.
Swinburne puts forward two important principles which attempt to address the issue of how one moves from the claim of an interior certainty about a religious experience to the claim that this experience is an independent reality. He claims that if a person thinks that x is present, then x probably is present, because humans are generally rational and perceptive, and when we see something, it is generally there. This he labels the Principle of Credulity. He also maintains that in the absence of special considerations, it is reasonable to believe that the experiences of others are probably just as they report them. So, unless the person claiming to have ‘seen God’ was drunk or mentally ill, we should trust them. If they are of sound mind and reasonable intelligence, we should give them some credibility; otherwise we will ‘land in a sceptical bog’. This he called the Principle of Testimony.
Swinburne and Davies have claimed that the argument holds sway because of simple cumulative logic. If the arguments for and against the existence of God are considered, they are fairly evenly balanced. Some of the arguments strengthen the likelihood that God exists whilst others (for instance those concentrating on the problems of evil and suffering) make God’s existence less likely. If all these are taken together, then, it is held, it is neither highly probable nor highly improbable that God exists – the scales of probability are evenly balanced. Given this situation, it is reasonable to rely on reports of religious experience to tip the scales in favour of belief that God exists. However, I do not find this a convincing piece of reasoning because the existence of God is nothing to do with probability, and it is misleading to make it so. It is either true or it is false, and no amount of arguments will change this. According to this logic, we could just invent thousands of terrible arguments for the existence of God (perhaps we already have) and claim that now God must exist. Arguments do not change facts, or increase their probability, they can only convince people of these facts. Furthermore, it is not clear how we would measure the probability for and against God’s existence – it will be a largely subjective matter about which opinions will differ. Atheists, for example, might be totally convinced by the ontological argument for the non-existence of God but dismiss the cosmological argument, whereas a theist could subscribe to the opposite view. Swinburne says: ‘In so far as evidence is ambiguous or counts against but not so strongly against the existence of God, our experience (our own or that of many others) ought to tip the balance in favour of God’. But I think we could turn all the evidence round and use it as an argument against the existence of God, because surely if God existed, He would choose to reveal Himself to everybody He created, not just a select few, and do so more often and less ambiguously, with no room for confusion or doubt. He certainly wouldn’t only speak to those who already believe in Him. The fact that the vast majority of people who had religious experiences saw the God of their particular religion is a very improbable coincidence – it leads me to suspect that their evidence is biased, and their visions were based on what they wanted or expected to see. The character of religious experience, as Antony Flew puts it, ‘seem to depend on the interests, background and expectations of those who have them rather than on anything separate and autonomous.’ This is a very good point. There is a frequent claim made by Western liberals that all religions are really the same, but the basis for the claim is scanty. If religious experience justifies one religion, then why should it justify all and may be held to be more probable that it is the individual’s prior beliefs that shape whatever interior experience they claim to have. I find this a powerful challenge, as if there is a ‘common transcendental core’ giving rise to mystical and other religious experiences, it is likely to be so vague and general that it will have little in common with claims about ultimate reality made by any one religion. I therefore find the argument weak.
Moreover, religious experiences are significantly different to other human experiences because they are fundamentally not subject to objective testing – we cannot carry out a scientific experiment to determine whether they have, in fact, revealed God. They are ambiguous and can be interpreted variously. There are strong arguments against the validity of religious experience: they could well be the manifestation of psychological needs. It is possible that when individuals claim to have had a religious experience, in fact they are expressing their ego or super-ego and there is no external referent. Once those needs are identified they can be satisfied without reference to religion, which is nothing more than an illusion created by people to enable them to cope with the haunting fear of death and alienation. Similarly, the emotions and sensations that accompany religious experience could probably be explained by biological or neurological factors e.g. epilepsy. Furthermore, I would disagree with Swinburne’s Principle of Testimony. Humans can be highly fanciful and sensationalist – the chances of nobody ever, either, pretending they have seen God to get attention or to support their religious beliefs, deluding themselves that they have seen God, or falling into a freakish mental state that makes them think they are seeing God - are minute. Anyway, it is a logical certainty that people lie or delude themselves regarding religious experiences, because so many opposing claims have been made about opposing Gods. It is as though there were twenty jurors in court, all contradicting each other. If we know that the majority of people are wrong or being dishonest, it is perfectly conceivable that they all are. Indeed, although religious experiences are common, verifiable reports of collective sightings of God are not – if the volume of these experiences were in any way equal to that which the Bible documents, we would have very few atheists left. But it isn’t, and it is difficult to explain why God would have suddenly ceased his verifiable divine action in the world, now we could actually prove and record it. I would say claims to religious experience, however they are defined, are exactly what we should expect in this world, and far from giving us any cogent reason to believe in God, judging by the nature of humanity, they tie in well with an atheistic outlook. I would, therefore, reject the notion that the argument from religious experience gives us valid philosophical reasons to believe in God.
