Is God A Delusion by Reitan Eric

Author:Reitan, Eric
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2011-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

Ontological Arguments and the Concept of a Necessary Being

For Leibniz, a necessary being is one that “has in itself the reason of its existence.” It is a being “whose essence implies its existence, that is, to which it suffices to be possible in order to be actual” (Leibniz 1965c, p. 155).

I must admit I cannot imagine what such a being would be like. But David Hume didn’t just express perplexity about such an idea. He claimed that the idea of something that has to exist makes no sense. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, he reasons as follows: Anything that I can imagine to exist I can also imagine not to exist. And if I can imagine it, it’s possible. Non-existence is therefore never impossible, and existence is never necessary. And so there is no being whose existence is necessary (Hume 1989, pp. 74–5).

But perhaps Hume is operating with a faulty principle here. Perhaps the human capacity to imagine things is not a perfect measure of what’s possible.

Let me explain. Hume believed that empirical experience is the basis of everything we can think or believe. All our ideas, he thought, are derived from sense impressions. We can break these ideas down into their simplest components and recombine them in our imaginations – for example, we can combine the idea of a horn with that of a horse to generate the idea of a unicorn. But we can have no ideas whose basic elements aren’t derived from sense experience. For him, to conceive or imagine something just means to take the basic elements of sense experience and recombine them into a picture of how empirical reality might be arranged.

But maybe there are realities that we just can’t imagine in this way at all. What’s true of everything we can imagine may not hold for realities we can’t imagine. And so defenders of the cosmological argument might respond to Hume in the following way: That everything we can imagine as existing is also something we can imagine as non-existent doesn’t tell us anything about those entities that defy imagination. And what the cosmological argument shows us is that, in order to explain why there is something rather than nothing, there must exist precisely this sort of thing: something that defies imagination. Even if we can’t imagine what a necessary being would have to be like in order to be necessary, we nevertheless must conclude that such a being exists.

This strikes me as an important answer to Hume. Since the cosmological argument concludes that there must exist something that defies ordinary imagination, it would amount to question-begging to blithely assume that the only things that can exist are those we can imagine in Hume’s sense.

Furthermore, imagination in Hume’s sense may not be the only way to get at an idea. When Hume says there is nothing we can conceive of as existing which we cannot also conceive of as non-existent, he is deliberately dismissing the great medieval theologian and philosopher, St Anselm. Anselm

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