TWO ERRORS IN ASSESSING THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

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 1 Southern Journal o[ Philosophy, 6, no. 1, Fall 1968, pp. 125-142. International Journal for Philosophy o] Religion, 4, no. 2, S u m m e r 1973, pp. 92-104.

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better to acknowledge that metaphysical necessity is a function of the premises of a metaphysical perspective which is itself relative, that necessary traits of reality are not known necessarily." 3 In other words, the argument may be valid, but it is valid only relative to Hartshorne's metaphysical system (relative, that is, to "the premises of a metaphysical perspective") since this system is one of many alternative "perspectives" and is, in that sense, itself relative. Towne, seeing the possibility of alternative systems, presumably of roughly equal merit on purely theoretical grounds, can only conclude that even if God does exist, we cannot know this with necessity. Wood correctly sees that the implications of Towne's view raise serious problems about the viability of the ontological argument: "If one adopts Towne's view that metaphysical knowledge is conditional upon the acceptance of the premises of a metaphysical perspective which is itself relative then the validity of the ontological argument is dependent upon the particular metaphysical perspective. Or one might say that the ontological argument is relative to a particular language game .... In this case does not the ontological argument lie on quicksand? ''4 In order to avoid the relativistic implications of Towne's view and its destructive effect upon the argument, Wood maintains that the premises and conclusion of the ontological argument are "meta-metaphysical propositions" which are "true regardless of the metaphysical system" 5 and thus independent of any particular metaphysical perspective. In this way, Wood claims that "the argument is not based upon some particular metaphysical system." e Wood's article contains little, if any, argument for this solution to the problem of relativism. Whatever plausibility the solution might have rests on a confusion. That confusion arises because Wood fails to take notice of a fundamental distinction which Spinoza made when speaking of true ideas; that is, the distinction between the "external agreement" of the true idea and its object and the "internal signs" of a true idea. If we recast this distinction in more contemporary terms, it is the distinction between the correspondence of a true proposition and what is the case, the objective state of affairs in the real order, 3 4 5 e

T o w n e , op. cit., p. 103. W o o d , pp. 102-103. l b i d , p. 100. I b i d , p. 103.

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and the logical necessity of a proposition, its truth by virtue of the meaning of its terms. It would seem to be quite obvious that if the conclusion of the ontological argument states an "objective truth" about reality, in that sense, agrees with reality, it holds, as Wood says, "regardless of the metaphysical system that one chooses." 7 When we make the assertion, "God exists," it is either true that He exists or it is not. And the truth of the assertion would not appear to depend upon any metaphysical system but only upon whether God does, in fact, exist since it is the state of affairs in the real order which will determine whether the proposition is or is not true. On the basis of the "external agreement" of proposition and fact, Wood is quite right to maintain that the truth of the conclusion of the ontological argument is independent of any metaphysical system. However, Wood seems to miss the point of the ontological argument, at least as it is formulated by Hartshorne: the point is to demonstrate, to show as logically valid, the proposition that God exists. The focus of the argument is thus upon logical necessity and therefore upon the "internal signs" of the truth of the conclusion. This point is further reinforced if we ask the crucial question about the content of an assertion such as "God exists." The determinate meaning of such an assertion is not obvious. In fact, considering the vastly different meanings which such a statement could have, it is doubtful whether it has much content at all; certainly it has been one of the major concerns of the various theistic metaphysical systems to provide precise meaning to this statement, to give definition and significance to the concept of God's existence. Thus, it can be by no means obvious that the statement, "God exists," is not dependent upon a particular metaphysical system for its conceptual content. Furthermore, there are many different, mutually incompatible conceptions of deity; unless theism is to lapse into a polytheism of quarreling deities, not all of these conceptions can be viewed as correct. Thus, how the theist conceives of God matters and what he means by asserting His existence, the conceptual content of the proposition, is not irrelevant to its truth since he would not want to maintain that all conceptions of the deity are equally adequate. While it may be true (and, indeed, as I have intimated, trivially true) that lbid, p. 100.

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such a proposition as "God exists" either holds or does not hold irrespective of any metaphysical system in that it depends solely on whether or not God does, in fact, exist, if we speak of a proposition with determinate meaning, then such a proposition cannot be considered to be true independently of the systematic context which gives it meaning. When an upholder of the ontological argument claims to have proved an "analytically" true proposition about reality, his claim is that this proposition is true by virtue of the very meaning of the terms, the very concept of "that than which nothing greater can be conceived." To claim, then, that the ontological argument is independent of the system of concepts, i.e., the metaphysical system, which gives meaning to its terms, is to obscure the entire purpose of the argument. The logical necessity of the proposition asserting the existence of God, what Towne refers to as its "metaphysical necessity," is a function of the conceptual system or system of propositions which constitutes the system of metaphysics. Thus, while objective truth is what it is no matter what metaphysics we hold, the ontological argument can neither be constructed nor shown to lead to a logically necessary truth in the absence of the systematic context which supplies meaning to its terms and logical integrity to its procedures. Hartshorne's claim is that the ontological argument proves that "God exists" is such an "analytically" true proposition; true under "tautological conditions": " I n general... [this] means analytic or Ltrue, true by necessity of the meaning of the terms employed." 8 The logical backing for this claim, according to Hartshorne, is provided by Rudolf Carnap's method of "meaning postulates." If we examine Hartshorne's use of this method, we shall see that, far from strengthening Wood's suggested solution to the problem of relativism, it would seem to add credence to Towne's view. In Hartshorne's modal formulation of the ontological argument, a premise is introduced which is of crucial importance to our discussion--the premise that "Perfection is not impossible" or that the concept of God is a consistently conceivable one? Although this assumption of the possibility of God is stated in the proof as an "intuitive postulate," Hartshorne admits that, of all the steps in his s Charles Hartshorne, The Logic o] Per]ection (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1962), p. 53. 9 lbid, p. 51.

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proof, it is the "hardest to jusify." ~0 The difficulty in the whole argument, as Hartshorne points out, is that the "idea of God is apparently not a conception of formal logic." " But Hartshorne justifies the introduction of the premise into the proof by citing it as an instance of the use of the method of "meaning postulates," 12 which is, according to Hartshorne, "a device for introducing analytic judgments, other than the merely logical, into a language." 13 As Hartsborne notes, without meaning postulates, neither the meaning of perfection nor the assumption of the non-contradictory character of perfection can be introduced into the proof; without such "suitable meaning postulates.., one has no determinate proposition to deal with." 14 The commitments involved in this use of the method of meaning postulates emerge through an examination of the logical theory behind the method. According to Carnap, an analytic truth is a sentence which "holds in every state-description"1~ of a language, a state-description being "a complete description of a possible state of the universe of individuals with respect to all the properties and relations expressed by the predicates of the [language] system. Thus state-descriptions represent Leibniz' possible worlds or Wittgenstein's possible states of affairs." 15 A relation of representation is thus set up between the "state-descriptions" of a language and the "possible worlds" described in the language. When meaning postulates are introduced into a language, the effect is to restrict "state-descriptions to those which represent posslble cases"; 17 that is, to restrict the state-descriptions to those which are compatible with the assumption of the meaning postulates adopted for the language? s State-descriptions cannot conflict with meaning postulates since it has been stipulated that they cannot; those that could conflict have been arbitrarily excluded from the language?" lo Ibid, p. 52. H Ibid, p. 53. 12 Ibid, p. 54. 13 Ibid. H Charles Hartshorne, Ansehn's Discovery (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1965), p. 98. 16 Rudolf Carnap, Meaning and Necessity, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 10. 16 Ibid, p. 9. 17 lbid, p. 227. ~ R.M. Martin, The Notion of Analytic Truth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969), p. 89. ~'~ lbid, p. 89. Martin criticizes Carnap's notion of meaning postulates on the

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Thus, "the analytic.., sentences, i.e., those which are true in virtue of meaning alone, are defined as those holding in all admissible statedescriptions." ~ (italics mine) As Carnap makes clear, any statement which requires the introduction of meaning postulates in order to become analytic, i.e., a statement which is logically implied by the meaning postulates, is said to be "L-true with respect to" those meaning postulates and is relative and internal to the specific language system for which the meaning postulates are adopted? 1 The implications of this account of meaning postulates are fairly clear. Hartshorne introduces the postulate of the consistency of the concept of perfection into his proof and his claim is that the condition of logical implication holds between this postulate as a premise in the proof and the conclusion: "Assuming certain 'meaning postulates' (to use Carnap's helpful phrase) concerning the import of 'God' and certain related terms, it follows that the existence of God is a logical or analytic truth."~2 Furthermore, this postulate has a great deal of metaphysical significance; in fact, Hartshorne claims that it is "implicitly the whole of metaphysics" and thus involves "all metaphysical axioms." e3 According to Carnap's notion of meaning postulates, all the postulates adopted for a language must be stated; furthermore, since all the logical consequences of analytic sentences are themselves analytic,~4 all the analytic sentences for a given language must be a finitely axiomatizable set. It follows from this that, for Hartshorne, the conclusion of the ontological argument is analytic with respect to not only this meaning postulate but to the complete set of "metaphysical axioms" which it implies; furthermore, the truth of "God exists" is relative to the language system for which this ground that they allow of rather arbitrary use: "Any set of postulates whatsoever can be taken as a set of meaning postulates if desired. The resulting notion of being analytic becomes arbitrary and varies from system to system " (pp. 89-90). ~0 Rudolf Carnap, Logical Foundation o/ Probability, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. xxi. 21 Meaning and Necessity, pp. 225-226. There is a particular feature of the postulate that Hartshorne proposes which should be noted- That perfection is possible with respect to a specific language system and its "admissible" statedescriptions does not mean, according to Harthorne, that perfection might, indeed, be impossible considered with respect to a wider set of state-descriptions since impossibility is defined as not holding in any state-description (see Carnap, Meaning and Necessity, p. 11). ~ Anselm' s Discovery, p. 3. 33 Ibid, p. 87. 24 Meaning and Necessity, p. 10.

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meaning postulate and these analytic "axioms of metaphysics" are stated. Hartshorne recognizes these implications when he maintains that the ontological argument is valid only within a language system, one which is adequate to the formulation of this concept of perfection? 5 As he states, the "theistic question" posed by the ontological argument can only be settled within a language and it is a mistake "to attack or defend the Argument without specifying the language within which one is operating." 26 Thus, Hartshorne would agree that the truth of the conclusion is internal to a language system and relative to the metaphysical system which gives it significant content. It may well be asked at this point how Hartshorne can possibly escape from a relativistic account of truth in metaphysics. However, while Hartshorne recognizes the implications of his use of the method of meaning postulates, he claims that the truth demonstrated by the ontological argument is unconditionally necessary and non-relative .,7 on the grounds that his metaphysical system is implicit in natural language, is the only system which can elucidate its meanings, and is the only consistent system of metaphysics. According to Hartshorne, "theism itself... [is]... in a broad and nontrivial sense analytic, since it is the elucidation of the full bearing of unavoidable word uses, categorical meanings, including the meaning of 'God'." '-~ Metaphysics, as the inquiry concerned with a priori truths about reality, ~'= attempts to further explicate and clarify these "theistic implications." In this way it is continuous with natural language and explicates its fundamental intuitions. But not just any metaphysical system can perform this function; according to Harshorne, systems of metaphysics are either necessarily true, necessarily false, or inadequately formulated and therefore too vague to be assessed? ~ Hartshome's claim is to have formulated a system of metaphysics of which the truth of the central proposition is unconditionally necessary. He carries out the implications of this claim in a hypothetical vein in the following passage: ~:' Logic oJ PerJection, p. 55. "-'" Ibid, p. 82. ~7 lbid, p. 53. ~ Charles Hartshorne, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method,

(London: SCM Press, Ltd., 1970), p. 153. 2~ Ibid, p. 19. :zo Charles Hartshorne, "The Rationalistic Criterion in Metaphysics," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 8, No. 5, March 1948, pp. 436ff.

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...many, but perhaps not all, metaphysical contentions may be such that they must either defy reasonably clear formulation, or else, as clearly formulated, must exhibit themselves as analytically false. Morover, suppose this should be true of all possible views but one, in answer to a given question. This one view could not then be false . . . . So to assume that rival metaphysical systems, that is, systems pretending to describe the common or necessary, might be internally meaningful or mutually incompatible, and thus represent alternative truths, is not simply question begging; it seems downright paradoxical, or sheer nonsense.~ It is clear, then, that relativism, the view that there are alternative "perspectives" on reality and that there is no procedure for rationally deciding between various candidates for truth, is not in any way compatible with Hartshorne's view. Thus, if his is the only possible metaphysics and the only possible body of analytic truths about reality in natural language, then these truths, while dependent on a system, are without significant alternatives and, hence, are nonrelative. This answer to the problem of relativism is rather formidable. Whatever Hartshorne's claims are worth, they certainly do not detract from the force of the ontological argument. While Towne's assessment would make the argument pointless and Wood's assessment is simply unsound, Hartshorne's assessment provides the basis for a rational theism and expresses the faith of rationalism in general, the faith that, in our reflective explorations, reason leads us to the one possible solution--the correct one. ALAN MCALLISTER

Y o r k University

31 Ibid, p. 436.