Anselm as Language Philosopher

            No one can prove that God does not exist.  This is not in the nature of God or in the nature of the universe; it is in the nature of proof.  No one can prove that anything does not exist.  Usually, there is no need for any proof because people usually disagree over what exists only in special cases, like the abominable snowman.  A related problem may occur in the apocryphal accounts of gunfights in the old West over whether the Pecos or the Rio Grande is the longer river.

            Perhaps even more closely related are the barroom brawls that occasionally erupted in west Georgia over whether Bear Bryant or Vince Dooley was the greatest coach that ever lived.  More closely related because of the difficulty in defining the terms.  In the case of the Pecos, one could settle the dispute by consulting an atlas or, for the determined skeptic, by riding the length of each river, from headwaters to delta, an comparing.  The debate over coaching is aggravated by the difficulty of establishing criteria for assessing “the greatest coach that ever lived.”  I seem to remember that teams coached by Bryant won more games, but perhaps Dooley could win the contest if the criteria were adjusted somehow.

            Of course, if the object of the participants is to have a fight, not to settle the issue, the Bryant-Dooley controversy serves the purpose better than the Pecos-Rio Grande because the issue is not easily resolvable by any readily agreed-upon criteria.  You can always find an excuse to fight there.

            But, to get back to the issue, a smart-aleck in a similar kind of argument pointed out that if someone claimed that pink elephants were floating near the ceiling, no one could prove that they weren’t there.  All we could say is, “I don’t see them,” and there the argument would have to rest, or degenerate into the kind of does-too-does-not quarrel prevalent in playgrounds.

            No one can prove that God does not exist, but no one can prove that God does exist if you take the statement “God exists” as what philosophers call a contingent truth, like “There are tigers in India.”  If it is a statement, that is, verifiable or falsifiable by observation or experiment, a descriptive statement.  You can go to India in much that same way that you can ride the Pecos and the Rio Grande.  You can check for yourself.

            Contention arises because people take the statement “God exists” as a contingent assertion like the one about tigers, an empirical statement that you ought to be able to check and find out about.  People who do religion tend to claim that they checked (read the Bible, took a nature walk, helped the poor) and, sure enough, God was there.  People who do not do religion tend to claim that they, too, checked, maybe in the same places as the other folks and probably in other places as well, and, sure enough there was no God in sight anywhere.  God becomes like the pink elephants floating near the ceiling, only a great many more people claim to see, or “see,” God, and the does-too-does-not quarrel tends to develop very quickly.

            But what if you take the statement “God exists” as a statement of what philosophers call a necessary truth like “2+2=4”?  If the claim that God exists is an assertion of a necessary truth, the dynamics of the argument change because what constitutes proof changes.

            “Prove” in a court of law means add piece after piece of evidence until a group of reasonable adults is persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant killed the victim, robbed the store, ran the traffic light.  Or not.  This means that the charge in a court of law is the assertion of a contingent truth to be proved or to remain unproved.

            “Prove” in logic and mathematics means something very different.  It means something like “demonstrate with absolute certainty that the asserted relationship between statements is valid.”  The syllogism has to work.  So, if all bald men have high levels of testosterone, and John is a bald man, then John has high levels of testosterone.  If you buy the premises, the conclusion is not up for discussion.

            But how can “God exists” be taken as a necessary truth, not a contingent one?  For one answer, we need to go back to the twelfth century and the “ontological” argument of St. Anselm.

            Later arguments marshaled by St. Thomas Aquinas are at least tainted with the appearance of being assertions of contingent truth.  The argument that God is the first cause only requires acceptance of the law of universal causation, but the argument from design suggests that you might want to go out and examine the universe to appreciate its design and admire the job that the Creator did.

            Anselm’s argument is of a different kind.  If God is the most perfect being, and a being that exists is more perfect than a being that does not exist, then God, as the most perfect being, must exist.  The very concept of God, in other words, implies God’s existence.  I think this amounts to a claim that  “God exists” is a necessary truth, like those of logic and mathematics.

            Whether Anselm’s proof actually proves anything is, of course, another issue.  But it has engaged some high-caliber minds—Descartes, for one—and refuting it involves more than saying, “I’ve looked, and I don’t see God."