09a. Anselm and the Argument for God. Part 1/2.
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Hank: It's about time we had a serious talk about religion. The philosophy of religion is often confused with theology, which makes sense, because they both take God and religion as their subjects. But theology starts by assuming that God exists, and then figures out what follows. Or theology might try to solve philosophical problems that might arise from a belief in God. But one thing that's never on the table in theology is simply not believing in God. Atheism is not an option. That's what separates the philosophical study of religion from the theological. Philosophers take nothing as a given, and that include religious belief. Everything is on the table, and everything needs and argument. So, no area of belief is sacred, and that means even your sacred beliefs are going to need to be examined, and evidence will need to be given.
Some people say that religion is the one area where you don't need arguments, that faith alone is enough. But philosophers don't take faith for an answer. After all, I might have faith that the moon is made of green cheese, so what? Faith is definitionally unprovable, which makes it, from a philosophical perspective, not valuable.
So, if you're a theist, now's the time to offer some justification for your religious beliefs. And if you're an atheist, it's time for you to pay attention too. No one's off the hook, we all need to pay attention to these arguments, because religion is hugely important. Can you think of many things that have been as influential in shaping history than religious belief? Probably not. So if we can get to the bottom of it, we should.
(Crash Course Philosophy Intro)
I'll get to God in a minute. But first I want to go over a few other things that the philosophy of religion is not. It's not about believing whatever your parents taught you. Because that doesn't prove anything about the truth of a religious belief. If how you were raised proved something about religious truth, then every religion, and therefore no religion, would be true. So, how you were raised can give you a reason that you hold a certain belief, but it says nothing whatsoever about its truth.
Philosophy of religion is also not the study of the Bible, because you can't use what's written in a book to prove the truth of the book. You need outside evidence. There's also a whole area of scholarship devoted to understanding the Bible, by considering the time and place of which it was written, and such study can be very helpful in understanding certain things about religion. But it doesn't help here. Philosophy of religion is also not religious anthropology, or religious sociology, or psychological understanding of our reasons for religious belief. Those are all wonderful things that you can and should study, but they are not what we're studying here. What we are doing is considering whether we can offer arguments in support of belief in God's existence. And a long time ago there was a man who argued that God's existence is provable, 11th century French monk Anselm of Canterbury. He offered a deductive argument for the existence of God, based on what he understood to be the nature of God's being, or the definition of God. Because the study of being is called ontology, this argument, and others like it, are called ontological arguments.
Now, what do you think God is like? Long, flowing white beard, robe to match? Nice guy, hard to reach on the phone? Well, Anselm aimed a little bit higher. In fact, he thought that God is, by definition, the best possible thing we can imagine. THE. BEST. THING. Just try to think of the coolest, awesomest, most amazing and wonderful thing you can imagine. And whatever you're thinking of, Anselm said that God is better. He's just the best. In Anselm's words, "[God is] that than which no greater can be conceived." So what does that mean? Well, it means that God must exist, according to Anselm?
After all, he pointed out there are just two ways in which something can exist. Something can exist only in our minds and be strictly imaginary, like Santa, or unicorns. Or it can exist in our minds but also in reality, like pizza and horses, something that we can imagine but that's also real. Anselm pointed out, and he does appear to be right about this, that any good thing would be better if it existed in reality as well as our minds. I mean, unicorns. They're pretty great. But wouldn't they be better if they were real? Or the perfect romantic partner; smart, funny, hot, likes the same movies and games that you do? Pretty rich? Would be pretty nice in your mind, but even better if they actually existed.
