Many Christians struggle to defend the truth of the Christian worldview, but what if there was a podcast dedicated to answering the toughest objections to Christianity? That's the mission of the Daily Apologies podcast and on today's episode I conduct part two of my interview with Dr. Josh Rasmussen about the ontological argument for God's existence. I guess the biggest question with regards to Planting his modal ontological argument really really boils down to maybe maybe a couple of things just from what I see on the internet What I see on Twitter those conversations that I have with everyday atheists is number one.
How in the world can you go? from something possibly existing to something Distant concept to something actually existing because for instance as we've as we said and these are classical objections What about you know if it's possible that a maximally great pizza exists or a maximally great island exists then surely it must exist And that's kind of like the the thrust of the the opposition's dagger so to speak to that argument So would you speak to that for a little bit? Yeah, so there's a couple things There's parodies and then there's just this question of how you actually make the inference from possibility of actuality I've got a link where I show the inference very rigorously that I can sense you that you could perhaps give to your listeners But the basic idea is that this inference it doesn't apply in general It only applies when the thing in question would have necessary existence were it to possibly exist so If there is something that let's take the night, okay Could you say that one more time? Sorry?
Yeah, it's something that would have necessary existence were it to have possible existence It's sort of built into nature or the concept of the thing to have necessary existence now Actually might be more helpful to just kind of cut to the chase and give you a sort of visual image of the possible world So you just like imagine that there are four different Possible worlds a possible world is just let's say a complete way reality might possibly have gone and And so we can imagine like one possible world is one of which I don't know like I didn't marry my wife Rachel or whatever And so you describe the whole world except I didn't marry her and then another possible world is one where like the material universe just doesn't exist Okay, so something else but just for simplicity imagine there are four possible worlds and then now Let's just imagine that in one of those possible worlds at least okay There is something that exists in all the possible worlds Okay, so we're defining a necessary thing is something that would exist in all the possible worlds if it works It exists in any and so and so if it's possible further to be an necessary thing then there is a possible world in which There is something that spans all the other worlds and the idea here is that if if it is the case that there's a possible world But it's something that spans all the other worlds then you can show that it follows that there is that thing in our world, because our world is one of the possible worlds. Now there's a technical, that visual description kind of maybe helps satisfy the mind, but there is a sort of technical premise there, which is that the possibility of a world doesn't vary from world to world. So what sort of what makes a world possible in the broadest sense of possible isn't going to change. So an example would be, let's say unicorns are possible, let's say your existence is also possible, it's actual.
But if we go into a world in which there are unicorns, your existence is still metaphysically possible. At least at some time, it's still consistent with the basic rules of reality, the basic mystery rules of reality that you could exist. And so that technical distinction is built into what's sometimes called S5 modal logic, it's basically the necessity of the possibility. I want to say sometimes people get this confused, they think S5 modal logic is the logic that has almost like as an axiom that if God possibly exists and God actually exists, and people don't really see that as being true, and so then they have doubts about S5, that's a mistake.
S5 actually builds in more basic axioms from which you deduce through a rigorous set of steps that basically the picture I just described, that if this necessary maximal being possibly exists in one world, then it will thereby span the other world because of its necessary existence. And so I think it is worth kind of having the link and looking at the deductive, the deduction of that, because it's not just sort of a trivial thing. I'll put that in the description of the podcast. So let's just look at, for instance, the unicorn, right?
If it's possible that unicorns exist, then don't they actually exist? Well, it sure seems that that doesn't work, right? Because unicorns don't have necessary existence in the very concept of them. So then the retort, I guess, would be, well, then isn't the first premise just a big old question bag?
Yeah, because let me just draw that up. Because somebody might say, okay, well, what about a necessary unicorn? Isn't it at least possible for a necessary unicorn to exist? And now I'm going to say, well, I don't know if that's really as possible for a necessary unicorn to exist.
It seems like almost by definition, unicorns are things that could break down, be destroyed. Okay, but then somebody might say, well, maybe that's the same thing with God. Well, now I actually don't think that's a good parody, because God by definition is the kind of being that couldn't break down and be destroyed. So there is a relevant difference there between God and unicorns.
You could talk about islands, you know, maximum, like islands. Sure. There was one that I saw from a buddy, a friend of mine, also at the, at the ACA, we were talking the ontological argument. And he mentioned a, if I have to go back in and look at it, but it was, it was, no, I know what it is, it was a, a eater of maximally great beings that happened to be a penguin.
But it was possible for an eater of maximally great beings to exist. I love it. Then, then it does exist. That's very clever.
Yeah. Well, well, I said, well, if it's a penguin, I thought to myself, well, if it's a penguin, right, then a penguin couldn't be maximally great, because a penguin isn't a necessary being. So yeah, it seems like limitations. Yeah, the question becomes, could something be maximally great, if it could be eaten by a maximally great, if it could be eaten by anything, it couldn't be maximally great.
So it was a very clever attempt, but it seems to me it fails in two spots. One, penguins aren't necessary beings and could something really be maximally great, if it could be eaten by another thing. Yeah, you know, just to kind of play the other side here, I mean, it might be that the goal is to sort of maybe expose and implicit inconsistency in a contradiction of a maximally great being, sort of in the way that we're trying to expose an inconsistency in the concept of a maximally great penguin. The idea is that like, a maximally great penguin is sort of a contradiction in terms because any kind of penguin would be able to be destroyed and so could be maximally great.
And sort of in the same way, a maximally great being is a contradiction in terms because any maximally great being you could imagine could also be imagined to be destroyed. But maybe the problem is, well, you're not coherently imagining it being destroyed. So let's take that on real quick. Let's say, you know, you're in a discussion, in a debate, and that argument's thrown at you, there's if a maximally great beings exist, then it actually does.
How do you how do you navigate that? Dr. Rasmussen, how do you? Well, I mean, if I'm in the conversation, what I like to do is see clarity, you know, so I might just spend some time and it's really kind of my goal.
And I feel like this is really important for anybody interested in influence and ideas to almost like spend more time trying to break your own arguments than trying to defend them. Because if your arguments survive, if they're resilient enough, if they're really good arguments, they will survive the attack, you know, so you can sort of join the skeptic and really, you know, be quick to listen slow to speak, really try to enter in, maybe there's a cluster of objections, you know, maybe you can try to articulate the objection but I mean, in this particular example, I'm not I'm not impressed. I mean, we're going to get to an objection to this modal analogical argument that doesn't press me, but these sort of parodies don't really impress me because it seems like they are pointing to relevant differences, each one points to something like a penguin or an island that by its very concept includes limitation. Because there can always be more sand on the island.
Yeah, right, it's very concept. There can always be extra topping on the pizza. Exactly. So what we would need to have a parody is something by its very concept doesn't include limitation, but then it sounds like the only parody would be, well, like an excellent great being.
That's not a parody, you know, so that's not going to work. That's an agreement. Yeah, right. So as we move through this, you've mentioned previously, you know, and we've kind of talked a little bit about some of these parodies with regards to the ontological argument.
So how do I how do I talk to somebody and say, all right, so this is how you get from possibility to actuality when it comes to God, right? So what's a what's a good maybe, and I might be asking too much here, what's a what's a good, quick, you know, not necessarily sound bite, but say, and if you were writing a summary, a good page or so, how do I get from possibility to actuality when it comes to the ontological argument? Like, how do I how do I get there? Because that seems to be the other big, hang up, even with friends of mine who are, you know, who are apologists, a lot of apologists don't use the ontological argument, because they either seem that it doesn't work or it's too complicated, or they have to deal with this thing of, and how do I show that possible to actual with regards to God?
I think that's where it does help to know your audience. Some people are more empirically minded, they want the sort of fine tuning argument or whatever. Some people are really more rationalistically minded, and the ontological argument is just the thing that sort of would let them sort of at least peer into sort of the nature of God, as far as getting from the possibility to actuality, because you know, there's two steps in this argument here, right? The first step is that it maximally great being as possible, and the second is that if it's possible, then it's actual, and apart from using the picture of the possible worlds as I described it, I would probably just send them to the link because they need to feel like they can check this for themselves and really see that deduction.
It's not really a trivial deduction, and I actually feel like in the popular sphere, what I see is I kind of get the sense that people don't really have a firsthand penetrating understanding of that deduction, and it's more passed along kind of by scholarly authority, like, oh, well, this comes from modalogic, and I've seen then skeptics say, oh, well, then, you know, so much for modalogic, because they've always seen modalogic associated with like this argument, you know, it's like, okay, there are some technical questions even among philosophers about those those axioms, but I think you can actually get past those through some definitions, so that, you know, the kind of possibility and necessity that we're talking about is such that these axioms do implicitly characterize this notion, and then have a look at this deduction, it is, it is a big technical, it takes a little bit of work, you know, if I want to give it to you intuitively, I'm just going to give you the picture of the possible worlds, okay, and then I think what people are going to do there, because just to review quickly, and then to take us to, I think, the looming objection, if I say imagine a being that is as great as a being can be, and it includes necessary existence, it's very nature, and by that, I mean, it includes existence in all possible worlds by its very nature, now imagine that actually does exist in some possible world, so there's a possible world in which it spans all the other worlds, well, then you can sort of see that well, then we'll have to be in our world too, it would have to be in our world, it would have to be, yeah, okay, and so I think that's the intuitive way of doing it, but I worry, I guess because I really want people to see truth and not be let along by feeling intuition or by authority, do check the more rigorous derivation, and that that among philosophers is, I think, especially if you just define possibly necessity, so that those axioms are characterizing the intended meanings, then that deduction should be really uncontroversial, the only thing that should be controversial is that first premise. So for the audience, it's out there, what we are prescribing you do is take some time, look at the argument, and study, that's what's required here with regards to that, and I think that that's a good thing to do, because we don't want to take things just because somebody said that, hey, this is how the ontological argument works, look at it for yourself, so let me go to this because we might be thinking of two different looming objections here, what is the looming objection that you find to be the most difficult for the ontological argument, specifically planting goods? Yeah, and this would be the objection that even planning against self, I think would recognize as the most significant objection, which is the what sometimes about the reverse ontological argument, where you reverse the argument, and you start, so just to get the picture in your own mind. So on one side, you have the possibility that God exists, and then if that's possible, then God exists.
On the other side, now we have the possibility that God does not exist, and the deduction in the second premise that if possibly God exists, then God does exist. If that is true, then it follows that either God's existence is necessary or impossible. And if that's true, then we have a parallel second premise in the reverse argument, which is if possibly God doesn't exist, since God's existence is either impossible or necessary, then if it's possible God doesn't exist, that means it's not necessary that God exists, which means that it has to be now impossible to God exists. Yeah, God does not exist.
And it's not just that he doesn't exist, it's impossible to exist. So that's like a scary monster in the closet of the ontological argument. So it seems then, and this is something that Dr. Grotys mentions in his book, Christian apologetics.
He says, okay, and I think he quotes, he does quote, planting in that, and he says that, all right, so there's this stalemate now, the ontological front. And so so far at this point, at this point, there's this stalemate, because either, you know, it's possible that God exists, and he does exist, or it's possible that he does not exist, and it's impossible for him to exist. So you've done some work in this area. And that's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on the show, because I want you to explain, at least from your time in meditating on this stalemate and your time meditating on this argument, how are you, how do you think that chain that stalemate is broken?
I was just talking with the cosmic skeptic, Alex, capturing Christianity about this, and he brought up the stalemate, and I affirmed that there is a kind of stalemate at this point in the dialectic. Now, if you again, if you think of these arguments as kind of strategies for investigation, then it can instead of lead you to this place of like, ah, vindication, like the ontological argument, like fails or something, you might start thinking like, hmm, like, is there any way in which you could break the stalemate, either in favor of possibly God does not exist, or in favor of possibly God does exist? And so you start thinking, but are there any asymmetries between saying what is possibly existent, possibly non-existent? And there are a cluster of different, used to explore here, before the show I mentioned Ben Arbor, and he has an argument where he says there's an asymmetry between the positive existential, that's a claim about what exists, versus a negative existential claim about what does not exist.
And he has an argument that in the case of the possibility of God, that there's a way of justifying that, because the positive possibility that is missing when it comes to the possible absence of something. It's like you can't sort of comb reality to see its possible absence in the same way that you can sort of sense that something's possibly there. So that's one path to explore, to see if there's an asymmetry there. Another path to explore that I've been thinking about lately, is I mentioned sort of three iterations of the of the ontological argument, Anselm planning this modal ontological argument, and there are other modal ontological arguments besides planning goes, and then a kind of Godelian ontological argument.
And you can think of Godel's style of ontological argument. Real quick before we get into that, who is, who is her Godel or her, I've heard of that, sorry, who is who is she, what's her background and what is her argument? Yeah, Kurt Godel, he's sort of famous for his incompleteness theorems and mathematics, where he has these arguments that you can't deduce from any sort of finite set of axioms and number theory, every truth in number theory. And so there's all sorts of philosophical implications for that.
People know him in that area, but he also has this kind of ontological argument from the positivity of perfections. And there's a variety of different versions of this argument, but the basic idea is that I'll give you the argument and then I'll show how it can break the stalemate. And then I'm going to point to a third strategy for breaking the stalemate that I'm kind of actually the most on board with, because in this relates to my own work in modal cosmological arguments. And so I think that'd actually be kind of a nice kind of landing point.
Sounds good part is the argument. But so one way of putting the Godel argument is you have this premise that says, positive properties don't entail negative properties, or perfections, like perfect knowledge, perfect love, perfect goodness, don't entail imperfections. And you might find that sort of intuitive or just plausible. And but the entailment here is kind of necessary relation.
So like necessarily if something is perfect in love, it's not thereby evil or limited in some way. Okay, it's not thereby it's not a necessity, you know, there's nothing about that property that entails something negative. Well, then from there, you can actually deduce the possibility of a maximum perfect being, as long as maximal perfection is positive. Because if that were not possible, okay, then there actually would be a kind of inconsistency there, you there's a kind of trivial entailment from every impossible property to every other property.
And so and so you can actually show that if this premise is true that the positive properties don't entail the negative ones, then you can deduce the possibility of an absolute perfect being. And so and you can't do this in the other direction. In other words, because the question is, can you break the symmetry? Can you show that the possibility of God is somehow more plausible than the possibility of no God?
And the Godelian argument here gives you a support or reason, independent reason to think that this God is possible, because perfections don't entail imperfections. And but now I guess the question is, could you reverse that? You know, is there a way to reverse that? And to be honest, that has been something I've been exploring and thinking a lot about, and there's sort of a complexity in my web of thinking.
There's multiple lines that we don't have to go through all those positions, but I'm still exploring that, that particular pathway. And so I think it's helpful for me to kind of just point out that there is a kind of strategy here. The best version of this Godelian argument that I've seen so far is by this guy Cesar Bernstein, he's got article giving the ontological argument it's due. Have you seen this?
I have not seen it. And this is a way of perhaps breaking that symmetry, giving the ontological argument it's due, and he develops one of these Godelian arguments. And if his argument goes through, then it provides a way breaking the symmetry. Now, my favorite, like I said, I'm still exploring that.
And I'm not there are things that I want to get into, because I'm just exploring it. But what I have explored quite a bit, and I feel a lot more confident in is the work that I've done on modal cosmological arguments. So a modal cosmological argument is an argument from the possibility of causing finite limited imperfect things. And so I have an argument that if there's actually a whole cluster of these kinds of arguments as well, but the strategy here is to show that if we're trying to find the best explanation of limited finite contingent things, and we want to avoid a circular explanation, then this is going to take us to something that isn't limited finite contingent as an ultimate explanation.
People say, well, I think everything actually has an explanation. It's like, well, or I think every limited contingent thing actually has an explanation. Well, maybe not, maybe at least just possibly has an explanation. And that's enough to then get you to the possibility of a maximally great being, and then that breaks the symmetry.
And very important, I want to make this point, because a lot of people in the public sphere who write blogs on this, they will question whether this modal cosmological argument could be reversed, in the way the ontological argument could be reversed. And the answer is, no, or at least not clearly so, or like we'd have to see how to do that, because it's fully consistent with this argument that it's possible for contingent things, contingent limited finite imperfect things, all those things that aren't maximally great. It's possible for them to not be caused, we can grant that for sake of argument. So I actually don't think it is possible for them to be caused, but for sake of argument, we'll just grant it is possible for them not to be caused.
And but it doesn't follow from that, that it's not possible for them to be caused. And all you need is the possibility that they're caused to get a possible maximum being. And also, by the way, doesn't follow from their possible non cause, that it's possible for there to be no maximum being. That just does not follow.
Okay, and so that's the difference there. So you can't reverse that in the same way. And I think that's a very interesting pathway and way of breaking symmetry there. Well, ladies and gentlemen, obviously, if you're, when you listen to this, you're going to have to put your thinking cap on and follow along.
It is definitely a deep dive, Dr. Rasmussen, and for our listeners, this is not the end of our conversation. Next week, we're going to have part three of Dr. Rasmussen.
So hang in there, go back, listen to the first two episodes, grapple with what we're talking about and come back to part three. And also, while you're listening to the podcast, go ahead and check out the website, TheDailyApologist.com. And if you find this content valuable, please consider giving us a donation so we can continue to produce high quality content for the sake of the gospel. And remember, equip yourself to engage culture.