GOD

AND

EY/STENCE P. ~ .

Hutchings *

"If, now, we take the subject (God) with all its predicates (among which is omnipotence), and ~ay 'God is', or 'There is a God', we attach no new predicate to the concept of God, but only posit the subject in itself with all its predicates, and indeed posit it as being an ob,~ect which stands in relation to my concept. The content of both must be one and the same; nothing can have been added to the concept ... by my thinking its object (through the expression 'it is') as given absolutely. Otherwise stated, the real contains no more than the merely possible." Kantz Critique of Pure Reason A.599 B ~.627 Of course existence is not a predicate. And it is doubtful whether Kant was the first to make this observation, or to note what is important in it. The argument e x contin~entia mundi depends upon existence not being a pre~'oate, just as much as the ontological argument depends on its being once(I) The whole point of the argument e_~x cgntingentia is that from x's being a such and such, we can conclude that it is not a so-and-so,but from its 'bein6' or being said to be a such-andsuch we can not conclude that it exists. Existence is not itself a predicate, but, more to the point, it is not inferrable from any predicate or list of predicates. For any description it is always possible to ask

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The ontological argument can be made to "work" in terms of concepts and theory-impregnation, though not I think with any validity. But it "works" enough to have an initial (and indeed it would seem, perennial) plausibility, because "perfection" is a notion which lies across the distinction between essence and existence, i.e. across the possible distinction between the how and the that of anything, between its being so-and-so, and its actually existing. lial That "x is a perfect member of its class" tells us, if we know the characteristics of x and (b) the criteria of excellence for x' s, a great deal about x. But it does not tell us that x exists. However to a mediaeval to whom perfection was fullness of being, it also means that x exists. Any essential privation in an object was apparently thought by the scholastics to be a "defect in being", where this phrase is roughly equivalent to "having a bit missing". Now if all defect is privation or lack of a necessary or desirable bit, then perfection will be equivalent to having all necessary and desirable bits, and having them well arranged'~ this is fullness of being. But you can not have fullness of being without having at least being: hence perfection or absolute fullness of being implies at least existence. From this it should be obvious both that the ontological argument will not do and wh~ it sometimes feels as though it will. "Perfection" is used with skilful ambiguity to erode one distinction, and to persuade us of the erosion of another: Dept. of Philosophy,

University of Western Australia.

. "Is there anything which satisfies this description?" If I have bought a child a present and he asks me what it is, as children do to build up the suspense by almost destroying the surprise, he can put leading questions, or I can give him clues to its nature. If I say "it weighs no more than 2 lbs", he can at once conclude that it is not an elephant or a bicycle, though it may be any one of an immense number of things that weigh 2 lbs or less. On the other hand there are no predicate-clues from which he can conclude that the present s~tuall~ exists: he can be assured of that only by believing in my good faith when I tell him that it exists - but take good care that he shall not see it, or feel it, or see or feel anything to which his present would make any observable difference. However "it is less than 2 Ibs in weight" is of course ambiguous in ordinary discourse: from my remark about the present the child may conclude

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Cont'd.) ii) It is true that for a philosopher w h o said that x was perfect it would follow, on this use of "perfection", that x existed: since to be said to be perfect is to be said to exist. And here lies the ground o# the ~ccusation that the ontological 's%gument deals only with concepts~ even if we conceded that what was said to be perfect would have eo ipso to be said to exist, we can not concede that what is said to be perfect is so gus~rante'ed to be perfect, or that what is said to exist, b or implication or simpli'c'ter, really exists. What is said to be FY said to be x and ,~x need not be ~, nor need it be x when ~ x . The ontological argument goes no further than: what N~ would be involved in saying if he said X existed~ it can not go far enough to involve X in existing. A great deal of talk about the ontological argument bogs down because it is conducted in terms of tw__~ocategories: concepts and existence: there are three: concepts, existence and ~ . It might be that a concept of ~ perfection) involves ~ x ~ x , though this would make logicians weep for their tidy categories: but one can not find a sense of saying that ~x or that x which implies that ~x or that x, except the logically interesting but ontologically uninteresting concept of 'saying truly that': here what is said to be is guaranteed by what it is, and not vice versa. We might draw the teeth of the ontological argument thus: 'If it is true that God is absolutely perfect, viz., if it is the case that He is so, then it follows, on the notion of perfection that is in question, that He must exist'. But: Question (a) is it true that God is perfect, i.e. does p "God is perfect" correspond to a fact, as opposed to a definition e.g. of "God" as "perfect ..... etc."? Question (b) Is the perfection concept one that corresponds to the stracture of the facts. We might concede (b), but (a) would remain: i.e. the Question "Is it true that God is perfect". Now this question requires 'examination' of some fact before we can say "It is T~ue ..... or it is False to say 'God is perfect'".

I

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(a) that it exists and (b) that it is less than 2 lbs. But (a) is not always to be "inferred". e.g. in "X is a dragon", "dragon" rules out (a) since "dragon" has a non-existential concept-leading as well as a "being scaly, fire breathing, maiden-imprisoning" concept-loading. Words can have a negative-existential loading, but not a positive one. Not everything we talk about exists, and nothing but an encountering of existence, or an encountering of the object said to exist (or some acceptable substitute of an encountering) will ~ive us its existence. An essential description, a quidditativQ charaoterieation, will give us what x is and is not, or what x would be and would not be: but not that x is. Nor does the assurance or discovery that it is add an item to the predicate-list. The only "implications" from predicates to existential affirmations lie in an informal agreement about language: one is presumed w h e n one says "I have a present for you which weighs 2 lbs" to have the present: existence "follows" from the thing's being talked about, and not from ar~y particular predicates, or indeed any predicates at all, being assigned to it. Likewise the dragon is not rendered non-existential by its list of predicates - though a square circle would be - but by its being agreed that a dragon is a good example of a non-entity, a made-up beast. The present and the dragon both exhibit the same sort of "implication" here. What is talked about in good faith is presumed to exist, though some things are presumed not to exist, from the start. If I had a dragor, and said to a philosopher "I have a dragon" he would think, wrongly, that I was making a logic-book remark: the production of a dragon would change our attitude towards and expectations on hearing, "dragon". At present we are "set" to s~y "don't exist" when dragon is used or mentioned. We can be certain that x does not exist if we assign to it incompatible predicates: "x is a square circle". But we cannot be.certain that x exists, either from an examination of the predicates of x,(2) or from the fact that x is said to exist. Existence is not predicateimplied: nor is it implied by affirmation either, unless by true affirmation, but this is not ontologically interesting.

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One must distinguish between the guessing game case and "proper" entailment of existence by predicates.9 the game case can produce an "entailment": I am thinking of an x~ I list the predicates of x~ it turns out that if anything were to have these predicates it would be e.g. you, or your boots: therefore from the predicate list you conclude that the thing exists. This is not, of course, of any importance o. what we would need is something more than a translation of a given existent into predicates by which it could be recognised as 'the x I had in mind.' Existence does not follow from the predicate list: an existent is picked out from the world by means of it.

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The force of the proof ex contingentia comes from this: that one cannot conclude to existence save from existence. No list of characteristics will guarantee the existence of that which is characterised; such a list may guarantee non-existence, or enable us to isolate an existent, but this is all. Only an affirmation of existence, or an encountering of it, or an inferring from the existence of one thing to that of another will provide any case (3J for saying that an object exists. It is sometimes thought that in showing existence not to be a predicate Kant showed that theism was untenable: in fact what he did was to drive another nail in the coffin of the Ontological Argument~ while at th~ same time, directing attention to considerations that support the Cosmological Argument. That he thought that they were both the same argument is neither here nor there. PART IIj Theists make what capital they can out of Wittgenstein's "Not how the world is is the mystical, but that it is", and there are two obvious kinds of capital exploitation: one is to insist that "explanation" as we usually use it is concerned with how and not with that, and to distinguish in advance the radical ontological question about the that from less radical questions about the how. Such a distinction prevents a lot of obvious objections to Natural Theology; that we do not 9rdinaril~ mean by "explanation" what the Natural Theologian would mean, that we do not usually ask "why it is that x", except as a form of "how" question, and so on. The Natural T h e o l ~ man knows all this alread~y, and is not edified by being told again ~*J. Of course the Natural Theology question about existence is eccentric: there is only one such question, set against an indefinite number of possible "how" questions: but the philosopher has to avoid eccentricity-as-nonsense, and not eccentricity simply. (5). The second exploitation of Wittgenstein is this" some philosophers draw comfort from Wittgenstein's remark because they take it as an indication that even he thought that a question of the form, "Why is it that the world?", "Why is it that the world exists?", is not nonsensical. For such as need comfort, comfort can apparently be had, but some of us do not even need it, though we may still be grateful for the offer. And here we come to a very odd aspect of the human condition: some of us see perfectly well that that the world is requires an a c c o u n t : and some of

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Affirmations and inferrings make less good cases on the whole than encounterings dothat goes without saying. The essence of English positivism seems to lie just in saying this, with an air of novelty.

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Cf. my note "Necessary Being" A.J.P. Vol. 35 No. 3 December, at p.205 .

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One must distinguish sharply between technical uses of "eccentric" and simple pejorative ones: 'it is eccentric, technically, to refuse to use the physical object language', but, 'it is eccentric' can mean simply "not bike one". But one is not impressed by that: why should others be like on_~e, or one like them?

1957

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us do not. Those who see will assert, flatly, that what they have is an intellectual insight into the contingency of the world, i.e., into its being necessary to give an account for the world, since the world is such that it can not account for itself, ontologically. Nor will such persons be easily budged from their stand: it is necessary to show them that this insight is bogus, and not bogus a priori from some principle of limitation of discourse, but bogus in itself.~b). The problem of Natural Theology looks different, quite different, from where you stand. For the man who has not seen that the world needs an account, it is an axiom, or at least a heuristic principle that: what these other fellows say that they see must be the result of a conceptual confusion of some kind. To the people who have (what they claim to be) the insight, the problem is, in the short run, to rebut severally the attempts on the part of their opponents to demonstrate that they are conceptually confused, and in the long run to bring others to see what they see. In the course of doing, or failing to do one thing, anyone may discover that he is doing, or finding why he can not do, the other. As for rebutting objections, I am doing this in another place: my concern here is with the second problem, the publicising of the alleged, and in principle public insight into the radical contingency of things. I have, here, only one suggestion to make, and it may be a trivial one: but all avenues are worth exploring when a philosophical dialogue seems to have become bogged down in trench-warfare. We may begin by looking at what we do when we explain something: If we look for a moment at scientific explanations, and at God as an explanation of the world, with an eye to ar~v similarities we may find between these two kinds of explanation, something becomes at once apparent. Explanations depend on something being taken for granted, something being available to explain what is not taken for granted. Science takes for granted the world as it is, existentially given, using one bit, as it were, to explain ar~v other bit~ the God-as-explanation talk takes God as indirectly, if not empirically, given, simply because it will not take the world for granted. But even theism, insofar as it indulges an2 kind of explanation, is forced to take scmethin~ for granted, or is forced to talk of there being something that could be taken for granted: and this something is God.

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To take a brutal example: Ayer's curious version of the Verification Principle ended up, on his own admission, no more than a 'persuasive definition'z it is open to anyone to say "I am not so easily persuaded". If we swallow Ayer all sorts of things go by the board a priori-, but why should we swallow? One can only tell what one can speak of by trying: it can not be settled in advance. Ayer scratches metaphysics, where Schlick only tried to tighten up the stewards' rules. Some people prefer a big field, even if only for the excitement of the race.

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The Theist looks at the world and says to the atheist or agnostic: "You take this for granted?". And he knows that in terms of his own question, if it is understood at all, he will get the answer, "Yes". The "Yes" may sometimes be embroidered with testimonials to the profitability of taking the world for granted when this is the condition cf doing science. But the point about science is conceded b y the Natural Theologian: to ask the question about the that of the world is not to say ar~thing against asking questions about the how, or to say ar~vthing against taking the that as read, in order to get on with the how stuff. Both sides are agreed that science is self-justifying: but one side does not see that the world is. Now the agnostic who has been asked whether he takes "all this", i.e., the world, for granted may ask in a rejoinder: "Well, if you won't take this for granted, what would you take for granted?" And the reply to this is already well-enough known in principle, and it is this: "I would take for granted only something cf whic h it woul~ Dct make sense to ask why it is that it is." That is to say the theist asserts that he will take nothing of the ordinary kind of thing for granted at all. In the face of this reply, one is tempted to ask Oneself; does belief in God found itself ultimately on the profoundest kind of ~cQpticism? The answer to this question is "No", since scepticism is, characteristically, doubting what we have no alternative but to accept. There is a sense in which we must 'just accept' the world, and the Natural Theology man does not der~ this: he simply points out that, as he sees it, there is a further sense in which we can not 'just accept' the world at all: though his failure to accept does not involve him in any sceptical doubts, and does not cancel out his ordinary acceptance, which he shares with everybody else. It is useful to distinguish between, taking something as given and taking something for granted. The obvious distinction that comes to mind first is a rather tiresome moralistic one, as in "You ought not to take for granted everything that you are given". Now this may be offensively pious but it may also be instructive. To take something as given, seems to be simply to accept something, and usually go on from there; e.g., we take certain data as given and go on from them to something else, for instance, the explanation of some further thing, or a systematised account of the data themselves. This is mostly inevitable - and can hardly be said, therefore, to be illegitimate. To take something for granted is, of course, to take something as given; but the expression "for granted" carries the further overtones of not doing something that we might do. And specifically, of not doing what we might do with re6ard to the thing' s antecedents. For example: to take an historical date for granted is to accept it without verifying it at its remotest source. Or, another example - to take a kindness for granted is to fail to advert to the goodness of heart which prompted it, etc. Taking things for granted has often a pejorative colouring. We are used to being told, "You ought not to take such-and-such for granted", but this is sometimes right, and sometimes wrong. Insofar as taking things for granted consists in not enquiring into their grounds or antecedents, it makes all the difference what the thing is that we take for granted. "You take for granted the milk arriving on your doorstep every morning", simply

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invites the rejoinder, "So what?", unless or perhaps even if, it is the preface to a short social studies lecture. The grounds or antecedents of some things are not our concern, though they may be somebody else' s. We must avoid being bul'lied by people who say, "You are simply taking this for granted"; it is always open for us to say that it is not our business to enquire into the antecedents of these thirds. But it is impossible, to say that it is and could be nobody's business to enquire into the antecedents of these things. There is nothing in principle, perhaps, that we can not take for granted: that is, there is nothing to whose grounds or antecedents we could fail to advert in some circumstances. But to take thin~s for granted is to remain incurious concerning their grounds. It is not to deny that they h.ave grounds! it is not to deny that they ~ e d grounds; it is not to deny that they might be said to need grounds.~7). Takin~ for granted when it comes to taking as given can be the only possible policy in certain, otherwise different, kinds of circumstances. What we take for granted we use to explain other things; some things that we take we can take as given, but need not, thereby, take for granted~ these things we take as Aristotle, for example, took his first principles. And, as he said, if we do not take some things for granted, thzt is, if we do not stop somewhere, then explanation will have no end; and an endless explanation is unsatisfactory to say the least of it. We must, however, be careful that where we stop is a good place to stop. As for Aristotle's first principles, an inspection of them shows why they are good places to stop. They are places where we cannot see what it would conceivably be to go ar~y further. Aristotle's places were not simply places where we just have to stop because we do not know what to do next~ they are places where certain things are self-evident, where therefore, we would not know what it would be to go further. The existence of the world is so much a thing to take as ~iven that it is a joke to say, "It is a good thing to take the world as given." But though it is a good thing to take the existence of the world as given, it seems to some people not a good thing to take the existence of the world for granted. That the world is, is of course self-evident, and that perhaps in the most primitive sense of the expression "selfevident", i.e. in a sense which precedes even the simplest logical

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It would seem that one of the more unsatisfactory aspects of Hume's celebrated but unsatisfactory analysis of causation lies in his not having been sufficiently aware of the difference that there is between (a) not adverting to the cause or ground that something might have and (b) saying that something might not have a cause or ground. I propose to examine in another article the extraordinary phenomenology which misled Hume on this point.

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formulation. But that the world exists is not self-evident in the sense in which Aristotle's principles are self-evident, or in which some others, if not his, are. That the world exists is self-evident and a fact, i.e., the fact that the world exists cannot be denied, but it is not on the face of it, anyhow, odd to ask wh~~ it is that the world exiw though it would be odd to ask for example, why a thing cannot be and not be at the same time from the same point of view. The existence of the world is clearly a startS ng ~oint for certain investigations, the existence of the world supplies data; indeed it supplies all the data. But it is not a first principle in the sense of being itself intrinsically incapable of an explanation or account. It is not self-evident both that the world is and that it should be, only that it is. I~ is not self-evident that the world must be; and this being the case, the world is something that can be taken as given but not ultimately taken for granted. If one just stops at the world this has an arbitrary look~ or it looks merely as though one did not know what to go on to from here; stopping at the world is not a self-evidently satisfectory policy. It always makes sense to say 'where could we go from here?' even if one can not think of an answer. It is obviously sensible to regret the absence of an answerj because it is conceivable that there should be one. What a certain kind of intellectual theist has is an existential discontent with the undeniable and unaccou1~able existence of things; this discontent is, or seems to him, intellectual rather than poetical or mystical. It is a discontent with being forced by experience to take for granted contingent existents without there being given in experience the kind of existent that would be, on inspection, both a stopping place, and an evident 'place beyond which it is pointless to wish to go'. It is because people see the world as contingent and therefore as something that would have to be taken for granted, and see the contrast between this and that which could be taken and not taken for ~ranted, that they are discontented with the contingency of the world, and are forced to conclude to the necessity of God. The necessity of God is not an object of our existential experience, but the world is, and its contingency is, and this is enough. The Cosmological argument rests on a reflection on experience, on this kind o f thin~ to me, no._~wbeing less than self-evidently a place at which to stop asking for an account. Pragmatically of course the world is to be accepted, and no account needs be given of it "before" one can accept it. But the Pragmatic is unsatisfactory here. It does not seem to me that one even "bases" the Cosmological argument on some Principle, such as the Principle of Causality or the Principle of Sufficient Reason~ both these principles seem to me defensible, but to be oniy named brands of kinds of intellectual attitudes which are taken to the world: and these attitudes seem to me to require

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no justification over and above themselves.~8~C~ At the risk of being accused of launching The Higher Pragmatism, I would be inclined to assert boldly that taking the attitude of intellectual discontent to the world's contingency, and seeing this as the ground of an existential inference to the existence of a Necessary Being, are perfectly and evidently proper rational activities. This no doubt sounds cavalier, and it would be too, if one were not prepared tc talk as wells all the talk I have managed to do so far centres on this notion of taking a s given being different from t a k i n g for granted, and I hope that it is something. It is not enough; i.e., it is not a knock-down argument, but it m ~ enable someone to see what it means to ask about the that rather than the how. Once one sees that there could be something the matter w i t h taking the world for granted, one sees by immediate implication that only a being which could be t a k e n without being taken for granted, would do as a ground for a satisfactory ontology; that is an ontology satisfactory to someone who had this existential discontent. The theist sees perfectly clearly that what he wants is that existence should be a predicate or predicate-implied in at least one case. What the theist wants is precisely what he has not got in ordinary experience, the "that" of something self-evidently implicit in the "how" of something. When it is said that God's essence and existence are identical it is said that God is a self-evidently existential entity, an entity which on examination would show to be absurd the question.~ 'q~kv should this entity exist?" The theist knows very well that existence is not a predicate in the ordinary sense, and it is the very fact that existence is not a predicate in ordinary cases which forces him to say that existence must be a predicate in one case - namely the case of God. Now, whatever may be used to argue the theist out of this, simple remarks of the form, "Why should there be one exception to the rule that existence is not a predicate?" will not do. The case is self-confessedly eccentric; or, to talk theologically, centric, and theologically non-necessary being and its consequent descriptions and logical gra~muar, are '~eccentric". But this remark can sound no better than a tu ~uo~ue to the man who argues for, and "from"~ uniformity of logical shape. Even so, one must make the remark. In seeing that the world or existence poses a problem, one sees by direct existential implication that God is the answer, i.e. one sees that there must be a necessary being if there is unnecessary being; but one does not of course see what it is like for there to be a necessary being, save in terms of the vanishing of the problem of the world. Of course, as Wittgenstein said in a slightly different ccntext, the answer to this problem is seen in the vanishing of the problem, but the argument lies here: how can the problem be made to vanish? The theist settles it with God, the Necessary Being. The atheist must try to settle it by preventing the problem from getting started, or by making it vanish in

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Though I have offered a 'justification' of causality in my note 'Necessary Being' cited above, cf. pp.203-204.

lO.

some other way than the theist' s~ and this will probably involve him in showing that the problem is not a start-able one. Hence the stalemate: some theists~ and some agnostics for all one can tell, see that there is a problem and will not be talked away from it~ they want the problem to be acknowledged and dissolved without recourse to the theistic answer, before atheism is a demonstrable pcssibility for them. For my own part I do not know of any satisfactcry dissolutions: I know of a number of diversio~s~ but these will not do, except as anodynes: oil of cloves will not do if an extraction is really necessary. It is difficult not to get the argument into a stalemate, resolvable only by assertion or by "choosing" - which is often only a polite expression to cover something less rational than choosing. Something else must be possible. What remains an important philosophical enterprise is I think this: on the side of the theist, to devise techniques of argument which will bring others to see what he says he sees. These techniques of argument will have to be of a rather special kind, no doubt, because they will be arguments that recommend the taking of a certain point of view. That is, they are likely to be arguments that for the most part will make it clear what the point of view is, and therefore they will tend to be more like descriptions than like knockdown arguments. In so far as theists can hope to produce arguments, they will be more like moral ones than like logical deductions of the type beloved by P@re Garrigou Lagrange. Thomas Aquinas' arguments for the existence of God are notorious because their author said that he did not think that they would actually convince ar~ybody, though he thought that they were valid. Perhaps what he meant is that they would not convince anybody w h o d i d not already know that they were valid. One can, nowadays, encounter theists who do not think that the Five Ways will do: the toughest of them think that what is behind the Five Ways will do, though the five formulations are passe~ with the less than tough I am not concerned. The problem simply is to bring out the deep insight behind the five ways: the job of philosophy is generally to bring thir~gs out, and it is usually not easy. In this regard the insight into ~nntingency is in no worse case than a lot of other philosophical apercus. The job of the philosophical atheist is more negative, and therefore ~erhaps easier~ it is simply to shoot down what he cansimply? To the theist it looks as though the atheist ought to go in for a little apologetic on his own account~ he ought to show why the big ontological moral ought not, or can not, be drawn from the fact that existence is quite different from, and not implied by~ ar~y predicate. And he ought to show why the theist should not think of him as everyone now thinks o f ~ioliere's doctor who talked about the virtus dormitiva: the Doctor thought that the act~or of the opium was explained by the virtus dormitiva, and candidly said ~ much~ but one sometimes feels, no doubt unjustly, that although atheists do not talk about it at all, they nevertheless think of the world as explained by a virtus essendi.