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The Proof of God: The Debate that Shaped Modern Belief

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There are already some good reviews to this book, so I will only add that I was somehow worried I could not understand it. Far from that, it is easy to follow and in order to savour it one only needs to be a curious layperson. So my rate is 5 (content) and 5 (pleasure).

I also suggest reading the following readable books dealing with philosophical matters in addition to Witham's interesting book: a) "Justice. What's the right thing to do" by Michael Sandel; b) "The God Question: What Famous Thinkers from Plato to Dawkins Have Said About the Divine" by Andrew Pessin; c) "The proper study of mankind" by Isaiah Berlin; d) "Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors" by Susan Sontag; and e) "Hegel: as biography" by Terry Pinkard. Other interesting books, but no so readable would be the following: 1) "The accessible Hegel" by Michael Allen Fox; 2) "Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy" by Rüdiger Safranksi; and 3) "The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies" by Thomas McEvilley.

Is there a God? It's the big question. And now we have proof that there is a God. Well, actually, we have had a proof for almost a thousand years now. There are plenty of such proofs, all of which have been attacked in some way or other, as has the proof dating from 1078 of the medieval theologian Anselm of Bec, also know as St. Anselm of Canterbury. Anselm's Ontological Proof, however, is the "`only general, non-technical philosophical argument' from the Middle Ages that continues to occupy the interests of modern philosophers." That's what Larry Witham calls it (quoting historian R. W. Southern) in _The Proof of God: The Debate That Shaped Modern Belief_ (Atlas & Co.). Witham is a religious affairs reporter who posed himself the question, "Can something as nebulous as the medieval Ontological Proof be explained in a popular book?" The answer is yes, and the book proves it convincingly, though Anselm's proof divided philosophers in his time and all the way through our own. Witham has examined Anselm's life and work, and has used his proof as a way to conduct a brisk tour of many centuries of philosophy.

Here is Anselm's proof, as summarized by Bertrand Russell, who believed it when he was younger and then found logic that invalidated it: "We define `God' as the greatest possible object of thought. Now if an object of thought does not exist, another, exactly like it, which does exist, is greater. Therefore the greatest of all objects of thought must exist, since, otherwise, another, still greater, would be possible. Therefore, God exists." There is something going on here, some interplay between ideas and words that is mysterious and not completely satisfying. Anselm's contemporary, the monk Gaunilo of Marmoutiers, countered in a little tract called _On Behalf of the Fool_ that anyone could conceive of a most perfect island. Such an island of pure perfection probably doesn't exist, but then, if you think of a most perfect island, and it doesn't exist, it isn't the most perfect island, because the most perfect island would, in addition to having all the other attributes of perfection, have the attribute of existence, so the most perfect island has to exist. If this seems an absurd argument, Gaunilo claimed it was no more absurd than Anselm's. Aquinas was another believer in God who could not accept this as proof of God's existence.

Anselm was not a doubter who came up with a proof to convince himself of God's existence. Indeed, this sort of proof is simply not the way people come to their religious convictions. It is not a proof at the rock hard syllogistic level, whereby, for instance, if we accept that all men are mortal and that Socrates is a man, then it is inescapable that Socrates is mortal. It is not a proof like the mathematicians have that there is no highest prime number. Indeed, if Anselm had forever proved that God existed, we would have stopped arguing the issue centuries ago. His proof relies on too many subtleties, like what words mean or whether abstract qualities are real or merely names. Importantly, such a proof, even if it were completely watertight, cannot tell us anything about which of the thousands of gods people have believed in is the right greatest god. People have been getting by on believing in one particular god or another (or many gods) on the basis of a faith which no proof can touch. Nevertheless, Witham quite appropriately quotes the words of the unbeliever Bertrand Russell, "Clearly an argument with such a distinguished history is to be treated with respect, whether valid or not." Witham's cogent evaluation of Anselm's argument and the philosophical history that followed it is itself a measure of the respect Russell suggested.

This short, but very informative volume tells the history and thinking of three important scholars who addressed the question: Can we prove that God exists? The three are Anselm (1033-1109), William of Ockham (about 1288 to about 1349) and Rene Descartes (1596-1650). All three were believing Roman Catholics. All three tried to prove the teachings of their church and, arguably, failed. The book also tells about other philosophers, such as Thomas Aquinas who offered what he considered five ways that God could be known.

Readers will be fascinated by the history that Witham describes. For example, until the eleventh century, the Roman Catholic Church was radically different than it is today. Hildebrand, who became Pope Gregory VII in 1073, guided his predecessor to begin to exert religious power, centralize the power in Rome, take away the secular rulers' ability to select bishops and popes, strip secular rulers of church ownership, require clergy, who until then married, to be celibate, and broke with the Greek church who refused to allow the Roman pope to lead the church as its top bishop.

One way this was accomplished was by the pope recognizing an adulterous royal marriage. Another was a compromise, the pope would appoint bishops but the bishops would continue to pay a bribe to the kings.

Anselm lived when "scholasticism" began. The church introduced the rational ideas of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BCE) into church teachings, but they refused to mention his name during the early scholastic period because Aristotle was a pagan.

Anselm wanted to go beyond faith and scripture and prove the existence of God based on reason alone. Ancient Christian teacher such as Augustine, like many Christian teachers today, counsel that belief in God is a mystery that must be accepted based on faith.

Anselm introduced what is called the ontological argument to prove the existence of God. He contended, in essence, that if a person could think of something, it must exist. Thus since people think of God, God must exist. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer criticized Anselm saying his argument "is really a charming joke." Many modern people would agree; people can think of flying horses and friendly idols, but thinking it does not make it so.

Ockham developed what is called Ockham's Razor, but extended the idea too far. He said that when there are two or more possible explanations of a phenomenon, the simplest explanation is generally correct. Thus he claimed that it is simpler and therefore correct to say that the universe caused itself to exist rather than that God it; one thing was involved rather than two. Unlike Anselm, Ockham regressed and insisted that people can only know God though blind faith. Thus many scholars identify him as the founder of the Protestant faith.

Descartes contended that people not say anything unless they can prove it. Thus, he is famous for declaring that basic knowledge is "I think therefore I am." This, of course, is problematical. People could think that they have two legs, while the truth is that a four legged being on the planet Venus is dreaming about them. Descartes also insisted that people have both a soul and body and both are separate. He was unable to explain how the separate soul affects the body; how people, for example, could want to move their leg and do so. He also claimed that belief in God is an idea that God implanted in people. He insisted on these ideas because they were what he understood were the teaching of his church, even though he could not prove them as he was supposed to do according to his philosophy.

Readers of Witham's small book are given a large dose of information concluding with the fact that none of the philosophers proved God's existence, and readers may be prompted to ask, "Were these thinkers misled by their religious teachings?"

This attractive little volume sails under slightly misleading colours: Proofs of God and the subtitle ('The Debate that Shaped Modern Belief') are only a small part of the book.

The first `Proof' that Larry Witham looks at is Anselm's Ontological Proof for the Existence of God; but in that section, as in later ones, he ranges much wider: we have some history of the times when Anselm formulated the Argument; we have a lot of details about his life, which have nothing to do with the Proof; we have material about quite different theological issues, such as the Investiture Controversy. No matter: this somewhat extraneous material is well and entertainingly presented; and the actual discussion of the Ontological Proof is also good and clear.

The Ontological `Proof' is essentially of baffling simplicity: God, the most perfect being that can be conceived, must exist, because if it did not exist, it would not be perfect! So it purports to prove the existence of God by pure `logic'. (Witham puts Anselm at the beginning of the scholastic period, scholasticism being based on the Organon, Aristotle's works on Logic and Categories, and in Anselm's time the only work of that philosopher known in the West. But Anselm did not acknowledge this debt, because Aristotle was a pagan whose works were at that time still officially banned by the Church.) Invoking Logic, Anselm MIGHT have written, "Intelligo ut credam" (I understand so that I can believe"). In fact that was the formulation of Pierre Abélard a generation later. What Anselm ACTUALLY wrote was the opposite: "credo ut intelligam" (I believe so that I can understand); and that rather gives the game away: if he had not already believed that God is the most perfect being, he would not have been able to construct this proof, for only IF there is something that is supremely perfect might it be said that existence is part of that perfection. Someone who did not believe in such a God, as Aquinas would point out two centuries later, would not be persuaded by this `proof'. (Curiously, there is no discussion of, indeed no reference to, this famous quotation from Anselm in this book.)

Witham goes on to discuss Aquinas and William of Ockham with the same mixture: there are passages relevant to what they and their opponents said you could know about God, but there is also much about other theological issues which have nothing to do with that problem, and there is a wide historical background. We are introduced to the debate between Nominalism and Realism (though Witham does not use the word Realism). These are difficult concepts with wide ramifications, but for the purposes of this book, Nominalists like Ockham believed that, though we give a NAME to God, we can have no Knowledge of His existence through the intellect (i.e. through logical arguments, such as the Ontological one), but only through Faith. Realism, in the context of the subject under discussion, believed that the existence of God is not ONLY a matter of Faith, but can also be demonstrated by the intellect. This view was held by Aquinas, who actually rejected the Ontological Argument but produced other arguments which he thought were more logical.

We return to the Ontological Argument in the next section - or rather, Descartes returns to it. Again we learn about much else about the man and his times, and very interestingly Witham tells it.

A short final chapter traces the controversy about the Ontological Argument through its influence on Spinoza and on Leibniz and its rejection by Hume and Kant. Surprisingly Bertrand Russell was persuaded by it when he was twenty-two, influenced by his teacher, F.H.Bradley, who said, crisply, ` What may be and must be, is' - `the secular Ontological Argument in its purest form', as Witham describes it. Russell soon rejected it, but wrote in his History of Western Philosophy: ` Clearly an argument with such a distinguished history is to be treated with respect, whether valid or not.' Witham manifestly thinks so, too, or he would not have given us this enjoyable little book.