Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Kant on the cosmological argument
What sense does anyone make of Kant's claim that the cosmological argument rests on the ontological argument. The OA attempts to prove the existence of a necessarily existing God by definition, the CA by causal inference. The only thing I can think of is that the CA doesn't get you a perfect being necessarily, just a necessarily existing first cause, and you need another argument to establish God's perfection after that. Only, Aquinas' fourth way is a different way to establish God's perfection, which is different from the ontological argument. So I'm still confused.
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3 comments:
I hardly read any Kant, but I've come across this claim in the literature several times. I've always understood the claim to be that the argument from contingent beings to a necessary being requires that the concept of a necessary being be coherent, and that if it were coherent then the ontological argument would be valid, which (Kant thought) it isn't.
I'd welcome any comments on this too. As indicated above, this doesn't come out of any level of Kant scholarship so ...
I don't know enough to be able to critique Kant's (or even Aquinas') position on the topic one way or another; but fwiw, I've always treated the CosA as being a type of OntA, too. Or to be maybe more precise, I've always treated various CosAs, and various arguments which tend to be labelled OntAs by their proponents, as being _about_ ontology.
Thus, I've never had much appreciation for OntAs where the goal is to argue for the existence of a being based on our ability to conceive such a thing (i.e. if we can conceive it, it must exist). But I have a lot of appreciation for CosAs where the discovery of a single Independent Fact's existence (or, put another way, a deduction that I should not believe infinite regressions or multiple limited IFs to be true but rather believe a single IF to be true instead) can be established by means of principle analysis. Yet neither do I have much appreciation for CosAs that attempt to do the same thing (or more) by means of inference from scientific data. (Not that I think such an attempt itself is necessarily spurious, just that the attempts I've seen so far along that line look extremely problematic to me.) On top of which, I have yet to find any kind of either such argument, that _in itself_ arrives validly at the conclusion of God's existence per se (or even at the conclusion that we ought to believe God per se exists.)
Even so, all these attempts--the ones I think work (so far as they go), and the ones I don't yet find to work--are concerned with the topic of ontology.
As I said, I have no idea whether this helps make sense of what Kant was trying to say; but it may be of some help as a position developed more-or-less independently of Kant's work, as a comparison. Was he trying to say something like this, but going about it differently?
JRP
H'mmm. I should say straight out, as this is my first comment in your journal and it may come across as hostile, that I am very much a Christian (Catholic flavor).
The ontological argument is (as some hostile people have said of religion) a disease of language. It assumes that because we have an adjective token superlative form ("greatest," "best," etc.), it must correspond to/represent something in the universe (for a given value of "universe").
As for the cosmological argument, I believe it begs the question, but it's a question that can't not be begged. The fundamental form of the question the CA seeks to answer is not, "Is there a God?" but "Why does something exist rather than nothing at all?"
But that question cannot not be begged; for any answer, A, you propose for it, intellectual honesty requires you to ask, "Yes, but why A?"
If A is an extant/thing (such as God), then A is necessarily encompassed in the true form of the question (being part of the "something" that exists), and so the question is simply deferred rather than answered.
But even if A is not an extant/thing, but a process or law, we can (and therefore should) then ask, "But why is A the case?"
In other words, we have only two choices: to accept an infinite regress, or to abandon the rationalist idea that everything has a cause; but if we do the former, there is no room for a First Cause, and if we do the latter, there is no need for one.
Fascinating journal, sir. I'm going to read more of it, and probably make more annoying remarks.
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