Scottish verdict - not proved, not settled, not closure

Looking at the ontological argument for the existence of God, which is an argument that claims that we can demonstrate the existence of god simply by an analysis of what the concept "god" means, that by the exercise of reason and reason alone, we can come to the conclusion that a god must exist.

Philosophical reflections support at least four conclusions --

• Those who claim to know whether God exists display terminal hubris
• Intolerance is an inappropriate response to worldviews that are different from one's own, religious or otherwise
• Religious claims are better seen as locutions in an alternative paradigm that construes the world as an arena of intention, rather than in the usual one that construes the world solely as an arena of causation
• Religious discourse can usefully be seen as a fabric of stories aimed at fruitfully illuminating the human condition

Even examining how one might claim to know that there is, or is not, a deserving target for human worship turns out to be a Scottish verdict.

The ethical monotheists' form of life has two distinct dimensions.  It is an intentionalist paradigm marked by the telling of stories for a purpose.  Supplementing the interpretive categories of science, ethical monotheism adds a nexus of intention to its construal of events.

Not so much an attempt to describe things directly, most of the disclosure of ethical monotheism consists of interpretive stories, fables, myths, and parables designed to highlight the intention/value dimension of the world.  In this context, worship itself is somewhat re-construed, not as obedience at the feet of perfection, but as celebration of the intentional fabric of life in all its forms.

Something approaching dualism invites consideration here by anyone who sees the world in an intentionalist paradigm.  And even those who don't share the intentionalist paradigm can still enlist in the cause although the stories of the faithful will remain to them just stories.

Cases of individuals who have claimed to have direct contact with God

Even if ontological, cosmological and teleological arguments fail to make their case, we have not shown that there is no God.  

There are cases, and today more than ever, especially among the Muslims, where knowledge of divine existence is said to be the result of direct encounters (such as visions, auditions and dreams) with the divine.  

One can take the position that such reports relate instances of direct or immediate contact with the divine that call for no inference, argument or interpretation.  This is to claim that such contacts are "transparent," that is, unambiguous, reliable on their face and self-guaranteeing - constituting a kind of immediate experiential knowledge or awareness that is not confined to religious or "sacred" settings, though it is most common there.

It is also to claim that the knowledge that is said to occur in these contexts is properly basic, that is, neither derived nor needing to be derived from any more basic knowledge.

However, let's not get too carried away.  Albeit these are real, there are many that are not.  I would not want to even guesstimate the ratio, but let us understand them with these two caveats.

• An encounter may not be transparent
• the way to understand why making cultural distinctions is useful in figuring out "what something means" in another culture, is to acknowledge that what we call "reality" may have more than one meaning or interpretation, often vastly different. Most human beings have a tendency to believe that what they see is "real," and assume anyone observing or experiencing the same situation would "naturally" describe, react to, or characterise the event in the same way they do. Anthropologists call this propensity "naive realism," or the belief that everyone sees the world in the same way you do. A corollary is that most human beings also assume that there is only one reasonable way to look at the world. However, psychologists and interculturalists have shown that the world rarely looks the same to everyone, and that the culture you are raised in will strongly influence how you will view even the most simple behaviour
• In order to talk about argument patterns and detect the so-called logical fallacies, one has to distinguish the argument as it manifests itself in natural language from its formal representation. This is because the meaning of natural language expressions is 
far from being transparent. One cannot rely solely on the syntactic configurations and
the occurrence of some key-words to guarantee a common ground understanding of
the logical form of natural language expressions. What the formal representation is
called out to do then is to fix an interpretation that is accurate and precise enough to
determine the standards against which an argument can be evaluated. In what follows,
formal representation is understood as meaning interpretation in this sense.
• belief seems to me to be as strong a candidate for an expressivist interpretation, given expressivism about rationality, as prototypical thick moral concepts are given expressivism about morality
• universal generalization must be nomic, supporting subjunctive conditionals, and not merely accidental. It is never a description, an extensional statement whose truth
conditions concern just the actual world. In many instances, it is an interpretation, an intentional
statement whose truth-conditions involve considering other possible worlds
• encourage and facilitate consideration of alternative possibilities, employing different conditional dependencies or registering their absence. This should ideally promote refinement of initial hypotheses and more transparent and productive discussion of inferential reasoning. Disagreements (reflecting divergent standpoints or premises) may well persist, but are now challenged to meet more exacting standards of rational justification.
• A conservative posture here would suggest that taking a contact as transparent should be a hypothesis of last resort - the surviving piece of an extended disjunctive syllogism from which all alternative possibilities have been eliminated.

The Danger of Claiming to Receive Direct Revelation

Validity is truth preserving

Are a priori arguments sterile and consequently, ontological arguments to prove God exists sterile too?  Lets turn our efforts to infer the existence of God from the occurrence and/or nature of the world rather than the from the meaning of a concept.

Two classical writers (Gaunilo and Kant) have claimed to refute the ontological argument.  

• Gaunilo did not identify any specific fault with the argument, but argued that there must be something wrong with it, because if there is not then we can use its logic to prove things that we have no reason to believe to be true.
• Gaunilo’s argument proceeds by attempting to use Anselm’s strategy to deduce the existence of a perfect island, which Gaunilo views as a counterexample to the argument form.
• Gaunilo’s objection, even if successful, only shows us that something must be wrong with Anselm’s argument, but it doesn’t show us exactly where the error lies
• One problem with Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God is that it invites parody.
• Anselm replied back to Gaunilo by saying that his argument is not in line faithfully with his. For, a perfect island is not perfect in the same sense as a perfect being is.

• According to Kant the confusion lies in the fact that existence is not a predicate
• But it is not obvious how this slogan is supposed to relate to the ontological argument. Some, most notably Alvin Plantinga, have even judged Kant’s dictum to be totally irrelevant to Anselm’s version of the ontological argument.
• While Kant’s criticism is phrased (somewhat obscurely) in terms of the logic of predicates and copulas, it makes a plausible metaphysical point.
• Kant’s objection to the ontological proof on the ground that existence is not a real property was path-breaking in Kant’s era and remains highly influential today.
• Kant simply reduced the size of Anselm’s God by telling that if something exists in our mind, and if it also exists in reality then by no means can we conclude that what exist in reality is any better than what exist in our mind. What exists in reality is only an affirmation of what exist in our mind.

A general twenty first-century reply is that a priori arguments, in general, yield only "analytic" conclusions, not "synthetic" ones.

A positivistic reply is that words can be used without naming or referring to any entity.  If "god" is a vacuous term, then both "God exists" and "God does not exist" are neither true nor false, but pseudo propositions and are unknowable.

The ontological argument is a valid, sound (and strong) argument against idolatry.

Validity and truth-preservation

Truth-Preserving, Logical Validity, Soundness, and Inductive Strength

Validity 

LOGICAL CONSEQUENCE AS TRUTH-PRESERVATION

Independent of experience

Maybe we can sort out "ontological" argument for the existence of God, that is, argument that divine existence is entailed by the very concept of the godhood.

A priori arguments allegedly reach their conclusions without any appeal to experience, while a posteriori arguments rely on inferences that are experientially based.  The "ontological" argument for the existence of God is an a priori argument.

• Anselm's ontological argument purports to be an a priori proof of God's existence. Anselm starts with premises that do not depend on experience for their justification and then proceeds by purely logical means to the conclusion that God exists. His aim is to refute the fool who says in his heart that there is no God (Psalms 14:1). This fool has two important features:    
• He understands the claim that God exists.
• He does not believe that God exists.
• Anselm's goal is to show that this combination is unstable. Anyone who understands what it means to say that God exists can be led to see that God does exist. On this view, the atheist is not just mistaken: his position is internally inconsistent.

• Descartes' ontological (or a priori) argument is both one of the most fascinating and poorly understood aspects of his philosophy. Fascination with the argument stems from the effort to prove God's existence from simple but powerful premises. Existence is derived immediately from the clear and distinct idea of a supremely perfect being. Ironically, the simplicity of the argument has also produced several misreadings, exacerbated in part by Descartes' failure to formulate a single version.

Anselm's Ontological Argument

Descartes' Ontological Argument

A PRIORI KNOWLEDGE REVISITED