Ontological hope

The first Ontological argument was buried in the convoluted ramblings of Thomas Anslem. There are conceptual problems that go beyond weather the argument has validity or not but for hundreds of years it's mathematical/logical underpinnings have stretched the minds of philosophy students and professors alike. (I'll look at some of the problems with what we mean when we say something exists in a later blog.)

Bertrand Russell, during his early Hegelian phase, accepted the argument; once exclaiming: "Great God in Boots!—the ontological argument is sound!"[Wikipedia] However, he later criticized the argument, asserting that "the argument does not, to a modern mind, seem very convincing, but it is easier to feel convinced that it must be fallacious than it is to find out precisely where the fallacy lies." Often people do not get bothered enough by this, taking the easy empiricist cop out that if it is unobservable by science it doesn't exist.

However a purely empirical system has bigger problems of it's own. For a start it can not explain anything because all possible ultimate causes are no-see-ums. There are also many other things accepted by science that are beyond the reach of empiricism. A simple ontological argument for the biggest creature in existence illustrates both how easy it is to have certainty in the existence of an unseen being and how hard it is to define the properties of that being:

Of all living creatures in existence in all of Space & Time there exists one that is bigger than all others.

This biggest creature (whether observed or not) must exist, however the usefulness of this concept is rather limited to the usefulness of the premises of the argument. The important thing in this case is how a living creature is defined. In the study of living creatures the search for the biggest will give valuable scientific information about the limits on living creatures generally and at the same time all other data on living creatures will inform the possible limits on the biggest one even if that is unknown/unseen. In this sense, although there may be no evidence of the biggest creature, all evidence about living creatures can be relevant to understanding the biggest.

Likewise, when it comes to conscious beings, it is a simple tautology that the greatest being or the best being existing, exists. The usefulness of the ontological and moral arguments for me is not in the fact that they are often framed as proofs but rather that they are arrows that point beyond the self and direct my seeking towards the greatest and best. To be certain that the greatest being is not also the best being would require certainty beyond the power of any finite being to achieve. Therefore hope in a good God is ontological and should be held on to firmly by the skeptic rather than pursuing wishful thinking or choosing the easier certainty of despair.

“Despair is for people who know, beyond any doubt, what the future is going to bring. Nobody is in that position. So despair is not only a kind of sin, theologically, but also a simple mistake, because nobody actually knows. In that sense there is always hope.”