29th April 1999 : Michael Nisbett
ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENTS
I couldn't resist responding to C96/35 on Gödel’s mathematical proof of God's existence, which D.J.Berger and others identify as a form of the ontological argument.
As you know, the ontological argument for the existence of God concerns the idea of a being who necessarily exists. It seeks to establish that the idea of a perfect being who does not exist is self-contradictory. This argument, as I understand, has been criticised by Kant and others along the following lines:
Existence cannot be both predicated and not predicated of an identical subject. God is such a subject and either exists or does not exist. If we begin with the idea of God, then God's existence is a possibility entertained by the mind: as such it is not a substantive existence. If on the other hand we presuppose the existence of God for the purposes of the argument, then the question is begged. The idea of a perfect being failing short of existence may indeed be self-contradictory: he would not be perfect if he did not also exist. But as an idea, God's existence is not substantive.
I understand that some theologians have approached the ontological argument as signifying an attempt to make explicit that which each of us is said to implicitly admit: the necessary existence of absolute being, or else (as I would prefer to put it) that the self (whether Atman or Brahman or both) is an integral or implicate part of reality. It seems to me that, if the question is approached from this direction, then Bishop Berkeley seems to offer a far more satisfactory 'proof’ via the implicit acknowledgement of the continuum underlying the subject-object dichotomy in his dictum: esse est percipi.
In any given act of perception it is not possible, subjectively and existentially, to separate the perceiver and the perceived. The separation that we experience is a linguistic one. If I examine any act of perception closely, and ask my self where, in terms of actual perception, the dividing line between myself and the object lies, I find that there is none. The division between what I call myself and the object lies, not in the act of perception itself, but in the words that I have learnt to apply to elements of it, or that in themselves actually constitute those elements. Neither the object nor the subject can otherwise be separated from the act of perception, which Berkeley conceives as being a mental act.
Yet, since the objects of perception do empirically seem to continue to exist independently of the perceptions of any particular and finite subject, it follows that everything must subsist in a universal subject or mind. Or so, more or less, Berkeley would argue: and thus the existence of God is established. Where, it seems to me, Berkeley falls down, is in falling short of the realisation that the mind / matter dichotomy is the product of reflexive awareness, and that neither term is prior to the other.
The question "did anything exist before there was a mind to perceive it?" 'is otiose. Before there were minds, the dichotomy did not exist. Mind and matter (as I have argued - did I hear "ad nauseam" ? - before) are established by contradistinction. There is not something called matter unless there is something called mind, and vice versa. Prior to the advent of mind, there was only the continuum out of which reflexive awareness creates the dichotomy.
Sorry to bore you with more of the same old stuff.
Michael Nisbett