atheism, atheist, christian, ontological, anselm, god,I'm pissed off somebody got paid to write it. Honestly, I would have written something for the New York Times equally as stupid for half the price. I don't even have to know what the price was.
The Self-Thinking Thought by Nathan Schneider
Seriously, the entire article can be summed up by Mr. Schneider's drawing above. Think of something. Imagine it doesn't exist. Nonexistent things aren't really all that great. So if this thing really is great, it must exist. This is Anselm's Ontological Argument.
That is the stupidest proof of god I have ever heard. Pascal's Wager at least has the element of fear to it. This is just . . . silly. Oh, hey, you think spaghetti is great? Well, now imagine there is no spaghetti- haha, you spaghetti's not so great now, is it!
The thing is, I can totally imagine anything not existing, including spaghetti, god and myself, for that matter. The fact that Anselm apparently can't imagine god not existing is a failure of his imagination, not a proof of god. That, or Anselm presupposed that god is great, and worked backward from there. Either way, stupid. Really, really stupid. Stoooooopid.
Anyway, Anselm's exercise in something that vaguely resembles logic made Mr. Schneider feel better about things. Or something. Then he dumps on atheists.
I let the rapture in his proof take hold of me. For passing moments, lying on my back with the book in my hands, I came to sense the whole enormity of a God wrapped around my little mind, like a lonesome asteroid must feel touching the gentle infinity of space. Then, always, my mind wandered elsewhere and I forgot some movement of the logic. The whole thing dissolved away, along with the sense of certainty. I started to remember the echo of Kant’s devastating complaint against Anselm: existence is not a predicate. God seemed to disappear.
But I read on. I was reminded it wasn’t God’s existence that plagued Anselm — of that, he had no doubt — it was the phrasing. Modern arguments and evangelists and New Atheists have duped us into thinking that the interesting question is whether God exists; no, what mattered for Anselm was how we think about God and about one another.
Sure, for Anselm, you know a freakin' monk living in the eleventh century, the question was not whether or not god exists. It is a question, though. And Anselm's "proof" doesn't answer that question. And dealing with any other question before answering the existence question is like trying to decide the proper way to care for an animal you aren't even sure exists. "Do you think lillies are poisonous to unicorns?"
Seriously. Schneider gets paid for this.
