Back to Anselm.
So we left off with St. Anselm proving God's existence by showing that if God is the greatest of all things, and it's greater to exist in reality than just in the mind, then God must exist in reality outside of the mind.
It's flawless, which is probably why it's so absolutely wrong. There are scores of reasons that people come up with for why this doesn't work. I've come up with a few that I'm sure are written down somewhere by smarter men and women than I. Hopefully, you thought of a couple yourself, although there's something funny about Christians trying to prove why an argument for God is bad.
1) Man does not preempt God. This argument seems to weigh heavily on man's ability to imagine a being greater than all others. While this is possible, man's mind should not be the catalyst for the existence of God. This seems to be a fundamental flaw in trying to prove God's existence through logic in the first place. One cannot simply wish something into existence.
2) The imagination of a perfect being is not necessarily possible. Anselm believes that man can easily imagine a perfect being - yet what does this look like? To ask 100 people what a perfect being would be would garner 100 different answers. Anselm points to our ability to imagine perfection as a reason for proving God, yet it is more so the case that we know what "good" is and can therefore think in degrees of goodness. If we can imagine good, we can imagine better than good, and the best good.
3) Anselm is correct, but not about God. I actually agree with the entirety of the argument. I think the frustrating thing about it is that it's so clean that people have trouble finding flaws with it. I see no flaws for what it is - if we replace the word God with X. Anselm has proven that X exists - a being that is greater than all other beings. Most of you don't really know what I believe in or the dynamics of my belief, but they fall in line perfectly with Anselm's argument of a higher power. In the simplest terms, I'm a monist - I believe that the universe is made up of one object that is constantly reacting with itself along the lines of existing natural laws. Things unfold as the should because they must. You could also call me a pantheist - God living inside nature (not nature as in the trees and lakes, but nature as in all things). As a monist, if God exists, and there is only one object in existence, then God is that object and we are as well.
Anselm proves that there exists a thing greater than all others. But isn't that obvious? Isn't it clear that if there is a good, that there must be an exemplar of that Good? The best? The greatest? Even if it is obvious, Anselm does a great service in logically pointing out why it should be so - sometimes the most obvious things are the hardest to prove logically.
He certainly does it with a religious tilt, but his argument can be used to bolster pretty much any religion or no religion at all. At the root, it confirms that there is something in the natural world (or supernatural for Anselm) that exists that is greater than all other things. When read to the nth degree, it becomes an argument for a creative being that started the whole mess. So, perhaps the greatest flaw in Anselm's thinking is his projection of his own faith onto reason.
In your face, 11th century Archbishop and founder of scholasticism!
17 October 2007
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