Many Christians struggle to defend the truth of the Christian review, but what if there was a podcast dedicated to answering the toughest objections to Christianity? That's the mission of the daily apologist podcast. I'm your host Dean Meadows and on this episode I sit down with philosopher Joss Rasmussen to discuss the ontological argument for the existence of God Ladies and gentlemen, I am here with Dr. Joss Rasmussen.
I am extremely honored to be with him Today we're gonna cover the ontological argument for the existence of God And so before we get into the actual Q&A Dr. Rasmussen for those of us and those people who might be listening who don't know your background Don't really maybe not don't know who you are. Why don't you go ahead and take a couple of minutes and just give us a brief Sketch of who you are where you studied and kind of what's your your specialty? Yeah, thanks Dean.
It's good to be with you I'm very excited about this time together. So I teach philosophy. I'm a professor of philosophy at the Azusa Pacific University And I study philosophy at the University of Notre Dame Album Plantinga was my advisor after Peter Vanuagen So I did a dissertation under Peter Vanuagen and then I actually did some postdoctoral work under Plantinga And I would say like my passion. This is what I keep coming back to is Understanding sort of the most fundamental truths about things and this applies to the nature of reality This applies to the nature of your mind consciousness My wife and I will talk all the time about different topics and it applies to relationships politics everything But the key for me is really to dig to the foundations because really when you can understand things on a more fundamental level Then you get light that can cast into the more detailed events it gives you a sense of meaning In an understanding that you might otherwise feel lost and so that would be kind of my area of focus is sort of fundamental ontology or Sometimes they just call it metaphysics.
I don't like using that word because it's kind of a misnomer It's not sort of esoteric speculation. It really is a scientific investigation into ultimate reality Outstanding so you are perfect for for today's episode and I I can't wait to start digging So with that let's go ahead and dig we've been doing a series where I've been doing a series We as the daily apologists have been doing a series on the ontological argument and I would I would argue That this is probably the most Misunderstood and hotly debated argument for the existence of God and so before we go down that line for our audience What what is the ontological argument? What is ontology? How would you explain that to somebody who maybe has never heard of the ontological argument doesn't really practice philosophy?
Yeah, I mean just a preliminary note on it's being misunderstood and sort of hotly debated One of my Facebook friends highlighted the ontological argument as an argument that if you endorse this argument You sort of lose credibility because there are other arguments And then this is a non-theist friend It's like there are other arguments for that that make me think like from design or the cosmoth argument the ontological argument It sort of looks like you're trying it's like a trick you you just must care so much about your God existing that you'll resort to this very bad argument and it's difficult because there's actually a whole family of arguments or a cluster of arguments and This is it'll be interesting to see how this conversation unfolds because I'm not like this great defender myself of the ontological argument although I think it will be helpful to make some distinctions because there are some pathways within this family that I think might actually be quite Promising and worth exploring and and even sort of at the edge of my current thought But as far as like what the argument is like sort of the basic idea is you start with the nature of God or the concept of God So you think of God as like a maximally great being or a being then which none greater can be conceived the greatest thinkable being Okay, God is so awesome that you can't even imagine a more awesome being you start with that concept And then the basic idea is that you're you're able to on reflection deduce that that being must actually exist and sort of in the original formulation And we'll get more into this but just to give a little bit of a feeling for this It's like if this great being didn't exist Well, then you can imagine an even greater being one which has love power knowledge and it actually exists You know, it's sort of even greater and so by reflecting on that this very nature is for a concept You can deduce that it must actually exist. That's the basic idea. Just like the cosmological argument It's not just one argument, but it's a family of arguments They're multiple ontological arguments just like they're multiple cosmological arguments Or even like an argument strategy like it's sort of an investigation from can you go from the mere nature of God And I think it's actually helpful for your listeners almost to think of this as an invitation to explore And as a strategy to investigate because I think what happens in the context of ideas, especially sort of in apologetics forms People get so quickly into the frame of is this a good argument or not? That almost shuts down the curiosity and so people don't see the complexity and we'll be unpacking that as we go forward Yeah, so I think one of the things we need to do before we go forward is when we understand, you know We've kind of talked about here briefly in the opening that this is not just one argument It's a family of arguments.
It talks about, you know, the highest conceivable being a maximally great being But even before that when we say it's that God's existence is a matter of ontology. What do we mean by ontology? Yeah, so that word has to do with being or existence and I think of it in terms of sort of the nature of things In the field of metaphysics, there's this field that's sometimes just called ontology which has to do with being or existence And that's kind of the basic idea is as far as what I think of maybe you have even something else in your own I'm right in line with you on that and so when we talk about the ontological argument for God's existence What's the origin of the ontological argument when did this argument appear in history and who's responsible for it? I think that's something also to kind of look at just kind of set the table for the ontological argument Yeah, so I mean I always imagine that for any idea there are various precursors various forms But of course Anselm is perhaps the most famous one who really articulated some Early formulations of the argument that we recognize today and it's been iterated and we'll talk about those iterations but you know and he was thinking in the Prose-logian about this arguments that it's sort of answer he calls him the fool but I don't like that phrase but the way he's thinking about is like if you can show that somebody who says that God does not exist but that person is Engaging a kind of contradiction because in order to say that God does not exist You have to at least have the concept of God in order to deny that God exists You have to like understand what it is that you're denying and then his whole strategy was to try to show that from that very concept If you really understand the concept then you can do is a contradiction from denying that that concept actually applies in reality So just from what I read it seems like Anselm has two versions of Ontological argument now.
I guess my question is Do you think that Anselm succeeded in showing that from the possibility of God that God actually does exist? So let me I there's a couple of things that I wanted this entangle here. So it's a great question So first there's this question about like how many arguments can you find in his own work and like what are those arguments? I actually did a review of a book called Anselm's other argument and he was trying to fish out what you might call a third version of the argument and so He was saying that this was sort of like implicit in what Anselm was thinking and the reason I want to kind of start here with interpretation Is that I want to be very careful about like being confident in saying that I know what Anselm's arguments are in their best form And so I'm just going to speak from my own perspective As far as the arguments that I've seen from him So far I've not been able to unpack them in a way that I can see Would be compelling to me if I didn't already believe in God Yeah, okay And I'm just saying that from my own perspective Okay, and people can maybe have a different assessment But a standard evaluation of Anselm's argument kind of goes like this when we try to make his argument rigorous And we put it into a logical formulation and we use first order predicate logic for example or even second order we make it rigorous We give it a formulation that is precise Then it looks like in one formulation when you start talking about God is the being then which none greater can be conceived that we're God either it picks out Something in which case that very first premise looks like it's presupposing the conclusion because it's presupposing that the word God actually picks out God God is the being then which none greater can be conceived or it picks out a concept And so you try to work this out precisely and then the worry is that well fix out a concept It's not clear how you can deduce the conclusion that this concept I mean the concept does exist in reality.
I have the concept the question is is what the concept is actually about does that exist in reality? And so if we really get this clear we work it out now Let me just be clear because I sort of think of the analogical argument in sort of three iterations There's anselm's original formulation Then there's a kind of updated formulation that your listeners will probably recognize in terms of planting us modal ontological argument and then even after that there's good alien versions of the argument and you could actually think of these iterations as Making clear and more precise the best form of anselm's argument And so when I say I'm not like convinced by the original form I mean in its original form without updating it in these particular here Essentially saying like the original form of how anselm constructed his argument isn't necessarily convincing But that doesn't mean that you're not convinced by these other updates that they're going to be a convincing version Yeah, so so with that let's go ahead and move along as we look at some of those Iterations, it's one of my friends. We have a couple guys on the team at the daily apologist one of my friends force anti-massars this will now be the second time that I've referenced him because I was very skeptical of the ontological argument and Have come become convinced of it. And so he's like you owe me ten thousand apologies Well, he was talking with a buddy of mine also Nathan Liddell and they were asking the question does the ontological argument?
Work and my buddy Nathan said well if anselm's original argument worked, why would there need to be a modal ontological argument? Which was it was kind of the the kind of like the jab at forces the ontological argument guy on the team And so with that, you know, we do see this iteration that comes to fruition through Alvin Plantika the modal ontological argument So kind of unpack for us for our listeners. What's the big difference between anselm's argument and planting us? modal ontological argument Yeah, so I sort of this is how I think of the difference and I mean each of these questions different philosophers will perhaps answer them differently Because there is some controversy of like how to tease these things apart But the way that I think of it is that what Plantika does is he updates the argument in terms of our latest and best modal logic Which is the logical possibility and necessity and he sets up an argument that can be summarized very briefly like this the greatest possible being is Actually, let me say this differently premise one a maximally great being possibly exists premise two if an maximally great being possibly exists then a maximally great being actually exists Therefore an maximally great being actually exists and what Plantika does is he uses the latest modal logic to provide supports For that second premise that if a maximally great being possibly exists and actually exists and we can unpack that And then he defines carefully what he means by a maximally great being that was gonna be my next question because the listeners Okay, what in the world is what does he mean by maximally great being?
Yeah, I mean before we get into those even just like the story of your own thinking is interesting to me So you say that you were kind of initially skeptical and you've been convinced that a version of it works Would you say like plantika's version? Yeah, I would say I I see that if there's an iteration I'm not familiar with the third that you've mentioned. Yeah, we'll get to that fairly fairly new to the Ontological argument, but I kind of kind of assume the same thing that you talked about with regards to Anselms. Yeah, first or his original argument and then Plantinga comes along with the version that you just laid out and I think it makes a pretty compelling case there There's still some questions I have but as far as like do I lean towards it more being Sound rather than unsound I mean more towards that.
I still have some questions That have recently been raised by a friend of mine on the daily apologist team Nathan Liddell that I'm hopefully Gants to ask you so yeah, let's just kind of wear where I go I think you know with regards to his argument. I think the the base point of Contention would be the first premise. Yeah, his argument. Let's let's go ahead Well, even before we zoom in as if I may just say something that I think a lot of your listeners might resonate with a certain kind of Objection like to the whole project which is this feeling that you can't define something into existence Like you can't like in principle Just look at the concept of like a unicorn and by studying that concept you realize oh actually is a unicorn like in principle and and this is where I think planning this version helps to To kind of break that a little bit or to reveal some more complexity If I could just sort of stand back and point to this same kind of reasoning in the philosophy of mathematics or in the philosophy of logic For example, there are these arguments and I'm convinced by these arguments for sure Which isn't to say that there is an version of that analog argument that is promising as well But that you can actually show just by logic itself that logic Exists and the reason for this is because one of the principles of logic is that logic the principles of logic are necessary And then if necessity entails truth and truth entails existence that is to say as something that is true is a something It's a probably a conceptual something or something or something So I actually have this article a publication called from necessary truth to necessary existence And I just want to point this point to this for your listeners because I want to show there's more complexity here Even an initial worry that you couldn't principle show from the concept of something that actually applies in reality There are these arguments from the mere concepts of logical inferences to their necessity It's maybe you might say the concepts are windows into their nature Maybe that's a better way of putting it and then once you see their nature You could deduce from the nature of their necessity and from necessity to actuality that logical principles actually Exists and necessarily exist out there like outside of my mind.
So yeah, so it's it's not something what you're saying is then With regards to the ontological argument that that principle that plantiga uses is not some Foreign concept in the field of whether that's philosophy or mathematics that it's not something that's strictly kind of a catch-all for Proving the ontological argument. That's right. Yes. There's an independent line going from the nature of things to actual existence That's why we recognize and so here we're just applying that reasoning and I don't want to get too far down the line I really want to return yeah to that idea But let's let's kind of go back for a second before we get there and say all right So what does plantiga mean by maximally great being because this is a place where with my Scaptical friends that there's a lot of conversation about maximally great being.
What does that even mean? I recently There was a friend of mine who is a talk show host at The atheist community of Austin her name is Vla Bianca And she was doing this thing where you have I think it was like hot takes of the week or something like that And so my first point was episode three of Star Wars is better than rise a Skywalker And then she said well, I don't know much about Star Wars So then I said kind of to set the conversation I said the ontological argument for God's existence works She goes I have a lot to say about that and so in the middle of that conversation They said well even the idea of a maximally great being is incoherent With regards to some of the features in a maximum a great all knowing all powerful perfectly mortal There's some idea in there that this is logically incoherent So what is planting a mean by maximally great being and is that concept? incoherent so I think I have to actually look at his exact for relation I think he just lists a bunch of classical attributes omnipotence ambitions moral perfection and then adds Has these in all possible worlds? Yeah, and so these are you might say excellences and that the maximum great being is a being That if exists would have all of those Excellences then in the way that I think of it is that there's this core attribute of greatness or I've been calling it purely positive or perfection Absolute perfection and it's intuitively related to those excellences because when you just think about the list of You know power knowledge goodness like if you're worshipping a being or praising a being or even just admiring a friend You can begin to list positive traits.
There's something those traits haven't come There's a kind of positivity Yes, I think there is this kind of basic concept of positivity I think the best way to draw it out is through examples One of the things that I'll do sometimes is I'll just tell a story of how I will praise my wife and I'll tell her how she's so beautiful She's so awesome. She's just weak You know, she just can't do anything and she's so smart and it's like which one of those things is not like the other people smile because they know Calling my wife weak wasn't like in keeping with praise, you know I think even that they smile on the giggle and it always happens that people always smile They always give I think it shows that intuitively we understand there's this basic concept of positivity or greatness And so I mean I've combed the literature I can tell you from one who's read the the arguments trying to show there's incoherence or incompatibility that although there's some interesting I would say puzzles with respect to certain analyses of certain properties I have not seen anybody establish an incoherence and the basic con the root concept of pure positivity or absolute perfection In fact, I think that those analyses those puzzles help to sharpen our understanding of what that root concept Implies I think that there have been some articulations of let's say omnipotence for example or omniscience that are problematic But doesn't mean that there isn't a being that is maximal in knowledge maximal in power It just means that if you analyze maximal knowledge or maximal power in these particular ways, then that's gonna be problematic But there are other analyses that aren't problematic or you know, even even if and I haven't seen that this has been done But even if every attempt at analysis has a problem that still doesn't show that the original root concept is problematic And so I think that's an important station that has to be made here No, I think that's a very good point to be made with regards to the analysis of a maximally great being and how we either study that maximally great being or how we analyze Those attributes great insight there on the ontological argument. Dr. Rasmussen.
Thank you so much for coming on the show today I cannot wait to continue our discussion next week so we enter into part two and for our listeners as always Head on over to the daily apologists.com check out the blogs check out our social media platforms There's some videos also on the website You don't want to miss and don't forget to support the apologetics report run by force and some stars If you can't find your apologetics in use there It does not exist and on behalf of dr. Rasmussen on do me no signing off and remember to quick yourself to engage culture