Two errors in assessing the ontological argument

✍ Scribed by Alan McAllister

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1978
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 408 KB
• Volume: 9
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0020-7047
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00134814

✦ Synopsis

The possibility of a logically valid ontological argument for the existence of God remains an issue in contemporary philosophy. But even if such an argument exists, what does it prove? How are we to assess such an argument? Does it, in fact, prove the existence of God or is the conclusion relative to the logical and metaphysical system in which the proof must be constructed? Once a theist has laboriously constructed an ontological argument, using the most advanced modal logic, for instance, is he to be confronted with a reply from an atheist, "If modal logic can be used to prove the existence of God, so much the worse for modal logic"?

One of the major problems that a defender of the ontological argument must confront is the problem of relativism--the problem that, while there may be a valid form of the ontological argument, it will be assessed as merely relative to the system in which it is constructed, outside of which it has no claim to "objective truth." In relation to this problem, two possible errors in assessing the ontological argument and what it does prove and does not prove are illustrated in articles by Edgar Towne, "Metaphysics as Method in Charles Hartsborne ''1 and by Forrest Wood Jr., "The Relation of the Ontological Argument to Metaphysics." 2 Both articles deal with Charles Hartshorne's formulation of the argument. The first article is a neat statement of relativism; the second is an attempt by a defender of the argument to overcome the challenge of relativism posed by the first. Both articles miss Hartshorne's point. But, more importantly, they fail to see the role of the ontological argument in metaphysics and in theistic rationalism.

Towne, while giving credit to Hartshorne's formulation of the argument, concludes that, as he states it, "In my judgement, it is