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A REFUTATION OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2010

John Shand
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Extract

The following argument presents a refutation of the existence of God under a certain description, which, it will be maintained, is the only description that most traditional monotheists could accept. Therefore, either God, as defined by traditional monotheism, does not exist or something that might be called ‘God’ exists, but would not be acceptable to monotheism as truly being God. Either way, God does not exist.1

Type
Research Article
Information
Think , Volume 9 , Issue 26 , Autumn 2010 , pp. 61 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2010

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References

Notes

1 I should like to thank Harry Lesser and David E. Cooper for helpful comments on the paper.

2 William Wainwright, ‘Concepts of God’, states unequivocally: ‘The object of attitudes valorized in the major religious traditions is typically regarded as maximally great. Conceptions of maximal greatness differ but theists believe that a maximally great reality must be a maximally great person or God. Theists largely agree that a maximally great person would be omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, and all good.’ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concepts-god/.

3 The cognates sometimes used are ‘Perfect’ and ‘Absolute’.

4 cf. Spinoza, Ethics (1677) (trans. Edwin Curley (London: Penguin 1996)). For Spinoza God sub specie aeternitatis cannot really be a traditional personal God who cares for us. The idea of a traditional non-immanent God is derived from the inappropriate anthropomorphic idea of a protective father. Spinoza would not accept the argument presented here that God because of unlimitedness cannot think, as shown by Ethics, Part II, Proposition 1: ‘Thought is an attribute of God, or God is a thinking thing.’ However, thinking is not sufficient for being a personal God. If God thinks, per impossibile, he could not be a personal God, for if he were able to think in a personal manner then he could not be really be God. As Stuart Hampshire puts it, ‘we must not apply to God any part of the vocabulary that is applicable to finite minds.’ (Ibid, Introduction, p. viii).

5 A generalised and more extensive argument for the contentions in this section are in, Shand, John, ‘Limits, Perspectives, and Thought’, Philosophy July 2009CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Support comes from the so-called ‘frame problem’. See, de Sousa, Robert, The Rationality of Emotions (Cambridge MA and London: The MIT Press, 1987)Google Scholar, and Why Think? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

7 There is a foundation available here in the tradition of existential phenomenology, as found in the work of Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. There is also the perspectivism of Nietzsche, which opposes an absolute description of reality, which presumably God possess.

8 One may draw upon the insights of Wittgenstein to underline the argument here. The nature, and indeed existence, of one's language and thought are dependent upon one's ‘form of life’. In this one may see Wittgenstein as in sympathy with Heidegger's Dasein, our ‘being-there’, or Sartre's being-in-the-world. God as traditionally conceived of could have no form of life whatsoever because such a life emerges from an interaction between contingent facts about what kind of limited creatures we are and the world. It only makes sense in this context. So, while ‘If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.’ (Philosophical Investigation, p. 223. trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974)) because its form of life is so different from our own, with God we take a step further; his life is not merely different, rather there is no form of life to fail to understand at all. Yet it is upon and with a form of life that thought and language are founded and make sense.

Wittgenstein's consideration of the duck-rabbit picture also supports the argument here, and connects to his remarks on the imagination. What makes you see it as and duck and as a rabbit, is not the picture as such, but arises only because it refers to something beyond the picture. What is beyond arises from a differential interest in ducks and rabbits in the world resulting from our form of life being what it is. If one were asked to draw what one saw when one saw the picture as a rabbit and as a duck, one would draw just the same thing. That we see one or the other, or indeed either, depends on our form of life and our having a form of life. But God has no form of life, so the conditions for such differentiation do not exist.

9 We are after all told in the Christian tradition that we should convert with the trust and humble simplicity children if we are to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Matt 18:1–6.

10 This is characterised and explored as the ‘transcendental pretence’ by Solomon, Robert C. in Continental Philosophy Since 1750: The Rise and Fall of the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

11 See Williams, Bernard, Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry (London: Penguin, 1978)Google Scholar.