Question Couldn't we take the "ontological proof" of God's existence to prove that there are many God-like creatures? For instance, imagine a creature that has all thinkable perfections except for the fact that it has dirty fingernails. If existence is a perfection, then this creature must have this perfection, since one can both exist and have dirty fingernails. And so, if the ontological proof proves that God exists, then it proves that dirty fingernails-God exists too. Doesn't it?

Accepted:
September 10, 2010

Comments

No, because dirty fingernails, as you would readily acknowledge if you saw mine, are not a perfection, and so cannot be attributed to God.

The point of perfection is that not everything can be a perfection. Even though I may have perfectly dirty fingernails, the most dirty fingernails ever seen in human existence, that would still not make me divine nor even divine-like, alas.

I read the question differently from Oliver. The questioner agrees that dirty fingernails are an imperfection, in fact, this is part of the point. We are to imagine a being that is all-perfect except for those dirty fingernails. Now if existence is a perfection, as the ontological argument assumes, then this imagined being has it. So it exists. (And never mind whether it's Divine or Divine-like, that's irrelevant to the point.) And likewise for all the other imaginable beings that are all-perfect except for one imperfection (other than non-existence) -- each of them also exists. And so do all the other imaginable beings that are all-perfect except for two imperfections (other than non-existence). And so on. So I think this is a nice reductio ad absurdum of the ontological argument for God's existence. If the ontological argument proves the existence of God, it also proves the existence of a vast number of other beings whose existence those interested in proving God's existence would have wanted to deny.

I'm with Thomas Pogge on what the real issue is here. For what it's worth, I'm also no friend to the Ontological Argument. But let's see if a supporter of the argument might have something to say in response to this challenge...

First of all, what form of the argument are we going to consider? It's been presented in many different ways over the centuries, and some versions have had much more force to them than others. In its simplest form, the argument basically goes as follows. God, by definition, possesses every perfection; existence is a perfection; therefore, God possesses it, i.e. God exists. But this version is notoriously vulnerable to objections like those that, for instance, Kant formulated way back in the eighteenth century.

But there are other versions. One of the best (particularly associated with Leibniz, but formulated by several other people too, both before him and since) basically goes like this. (i) God, by definition, possesses every perfection; (ii) necessary existence is a perfection; (iii) it is possible that a God, thus defined, should exist. Therefore, God does exist. Given a few extremely basic principles of modal logic, it can now be shown that the argument is valid, in the sense that the conclusion really does follow from the premises. How does this work? Well, to say that it is possible that God should exist is equivalent to saying that there is some possible world or other where God does exist. Thus far, this possible world may or may not be the one that we actually inhabit. But we can still consider what will be true at such a possible world, even if it isn't actual. And, given the other two premises, one thing that we can declare to be true at that world is that God necessarily exists. But to say that it is true at a certain possible world that something necessarily exists is equivalent to saying that it is true at every other world that it exists. And our world is certainly going to be among these others. So it is true at our world that God exists. Indeed, from this it follows in turn that God necessarily exists here. So there you have it: the Ontological Argument is logically valid! Sound the trumpets!

But, of course, validity isn't everything. What we really want is 'soundness'. It's not enough for the conclusion to follow logically from the premises: we also hope that the premises themselves might actually be true (and, indeed, that we might have solid grounds to believe them to be true), for only then will we have any solid grounds to accept the conclusion.

So let's now look more narrowly at the 'dirty fingernails' argument that you've raised. The place where a defender of the divine argument is most likely to criticise your reformulation of it will be on the possibility of the existence of the being that you've defined. People like Leibniz went to some lengths (albeit with questionable results) to argue that the perfections they attributed to God were all 'compossible', i.e. that it was possible that a being should have all of them together. And I think this would be how they'd respond to you: they'd deny the compossibility of dirty fingernails with the perfection of necessary existence. No being, they would say, could have both; i.e. they would reject your version of premise (iii). And, since the argument hangs on the interaction between the necessary existence described in premise (ii) and the possible existence described in premise (iii), they would thereby declare that your version of the argument was unsound.

And why might dirty fingernails be regarded as incompossible with necessary existence? Well, plenty of reasons. If we don't reject that compossibility, then we do indeed seem to be facing a very real prospect of being forced to accept the necessary existence of the being you've described. But that would mean that these dirty fingernails themselves necessarily exist, and that just doesn't seem right. Can't we imagine possible worlds where no fingernails exist at all? Moreover, if this alleged being's dirty fingernails are anything like the kinds of fingernails that we are familiar with -- and, if they're not, then why are we calling them 'fingernails' at all? -- then they ought to be every bit as destructible as any other fingernails are. But destructibility and necessary existence definitely don't seem to be compossible. So the being you've described (all-perfections-plus-dirty-fingernails) doesn't seem to be a possible existent; i.e. there is no possible world where such a being exists; and consequently the 'necessary existence at some world' step in the argument, and the move from that to existence in the actual world (and from that back to necessary existence in the actual world), never actually kicks in at all.