Final Installment: Arguments for God's Existence 4

5.4 Arguments from Existence
We want finally to consider two final arguments for the existence of God that are sometimes made.

The first is often associated with the cosmological argument and it was Aquinas' third argument for the existence of God. It is sometimes called the argument from necessity or contingency. In Aquinas' version, we notice that everything we can observe within the creation is of a "contingent" sort. That is to say, it does not have to exist.

My parents might never have married, and I might never have been born. Mars does not have to exist, nor does the Earth. As far as we can tell, nothing in all of the creation has to exist, apparently even the creation itself. Admittedly, we are in no position scientifically to say whether something in the universe might have to exist, but it certainly does not seem so.

For Aquinas, we have a problem if everything that exists is only "contingent," unnecessary. For if nothing has a necessary existence, then in theory, nothing might exist. But if it is possible that nothing in the creation might exist, then how could anything thereafter exist? If at some moment contingency called in all its bets and nothing existed, then nothing could come back from nothing.

So, reasoned Aquinas, something must exist necessarily. "And this," said Aquinas, "we call God."

It is hard to evaluate this argument from the standpoint of reason. We really know so little scientifically on this level. It might very well imply that something must exist necessarily. However, what that necessary thing might be we cannot say from this argument alone.

A final argument for the existence of God is the ontological argument, apparently first put forward by Anselm (1000's). We might summarize it as follows:

1. We can imagine what the greatest possible Being would be like--the greatest possible Being exists in our thoughts.

2. One characteristic of such a greatest possible Being--which exists in our thought--is that it actually exist in the world as well as in our thoughts.

3. Therefore, the greatest possible Being must exist in the world as well.

Immanuel Kant, who of course believed in God, rejected Anselm's argument as incoherent. Basically, Kant argued that Anselm's argument mixed two different kinds of claims--one of which was about the world and the other of which was about ideas. Mixing the two together was like mixing apples and oranges or playing two different games on two different fields. The premises do not connect to one another.

The bottom line is that Anselm--as Descartes later when he advanced a similar argument--tended toward the idealist end of the spectrum, where reality is closely related to ideas. For Descartes, for example, if you could conceive of something clearly and distinctly, then it was in all likelihood true.

In more recent times, Alvin Plantinga has advanced new versions of the ontological argument. One of his chief claims is that belief in God is "properly basic." Belief in God is so fundamental to life that we cannot even imagine a universe without a God. Even those who think they do not believe in God must presuppose God's existence in all their thinking. The existence of God is a part of making our way through life in the same way that believing other people and objects actually exist is or that other people have minds like I do.