St. Anselm (centre), terra-cotta altarpiece by Luca della Robbia; in the Museo Diocesano, Empoli, ItalyAlinari/Art Resource, New York
The first cause argument should, perhaps, be examined in somewhat greater detail, because it both has an immediate plausibility and lies at the basis of many different kinds of metaphysical systems (that of Hegel, for example, as well as that of Aquinas). The argument begins with the innocent-looking statement that something contingent exists; it may be some particular thing, such as oneself, or it may be the world in general (thus, the description of the proof as being a contingentia mundi, or “from the contingency of the world”). In describing oneself or the world as contingent, one means only that the thing in question does not exist through itself alone; it owes its being to the activity of some other thing, as a person owes his being to his parents. Contingent things are not self-complete; they each demand the existence of something else if they are to be explained. Thus, the move is made from contingent to necessary being; it is felt that contingent things, of whatever order, cannot be endlessly dependent on other contingent things but must presuppose a first cause that is self-complete and so exists necessarily. In Hegel the necessary being is not a separate existent but, as it were, an order of things; the loose facts of everyday life and even of science are said to point to a system that is all-embracing and in which everything is necessarily what it is. The principle of the argument, however, is unchanged despite the change in the conclusion.
Damaging criticism was brought against all the traditional arguments for God’s existence by Hume and Kant in the 18th century. The ontological proof was undermined by the contention that “being is not a real predicate”; existence is not part of the concept of God in the way in which, for example, being all-powerful is. To say that something exists is not to specify a concept further but to claim that it has an instance; it cannot be discovered whether a concept has an instance by merely inspecting it. The first cause argument, it was contended, suffers from two fatal weaknesses. Even if it is correct in its assertion that contingent being presupposes necessary being, it cannot identify the necessary being in question with God (as happened in each of the Thomistic proofs) without resurrecting the ontological argument. If it is true, as supporters of the causal proof suppose, that God alone can answer the description of a necessary being, then whatever exists necessarily is God and whatever is God exists necessarily. Modern supporters of the causal proof have tried to meet this objection by saying that the equivalence is one of concepts, not of concept and existent; the existence of a necessary being is already established in the first part of the argument, and the equivalence in the second part of the argument is between the concept of necessary being and the concept of God. In other words, they distinguish between existence and essence. In the first part of the argument, the existence of a necessary being is proved; in the second part of the argument, the essence of that necessary being is identified with what men call God. Beyond this first contended weakness, however, there are grave difficulties in the move from contingent to necessary existence. Things in the experienced world are causally related, and some account of this relationship can be given in terms of the temporal relations of events; causal relations hold primarily between kinds of events, and a cause is, at least, a regular antecedent of a specific kind of effect. But when an attempt is made to extend the notion of causality from a relationship that holds within experience to one that connects the experienced world as a whole to something that falls wholly outside it, there is no longer anything firm on which to hold. The activities of God cannot precede happenings in the world because God is, by definition, not in time; and how the relationship is to be understood in these circumstances becomes highly problematic. Some metaphysicians, like some recent theologians, seek to evade the difficulty by saying that God is not the cause of the world but its ground, or again by distinguishing causes of becoming, which are temporal, from a cause of being, which is not. It is doubtful whether these moves do more than restate the problem in different terms.
The argument from design is itself a form of causal argument and accordingly suffers from all the difficulties mentioned above, together with some of its own, as Hume and Kant both point out. Even on its own terms it is wrong to conclude the existence of a Creator rather than an architect. Furthermore, it infers that the being in question has unlimited powers, when all that the evidence seems to warrant is that its powers are very great. The argument lost much of its force by the publication of the English naturalist Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. The unbroken reign of law throughout natural evolution is impressive, but as a line of reasoning it does not seem to bear close examination.
The metaphysical problem of God’s existence is more of an issue today than the problem of universals; there are still thinkers who hope to restate the old proofs in more convincing ways. The ontological proof, in particular, has won renewed attention from thinkers such as Norman Malcolm, a philosopher strongly influenced by Wittgenstein, and Charles Hartshorne, an American Realist whose form of theism is called panentheism (the doctrine of a God who has an unchanging essence but who completes himself in an advancing experience). Increasingly, however, philosophers of religion are preoccupied not with these metaphysical abstractions but with the status and force of actual religious claims. “The most real of all things” is no longer at the centre of their attention: they seek to investigate God as a suitable object for worship. The soul, mind, and body The soul–body relationship
As well as believing in the reality of Forms, Plato believed in the immortality of the human soul. The soul was, he thought, an entity that was fundamentally distinct from the body although it could be and often was affected by its association with the body, being dragged down by what he called in one passage “the leaden weights of becoming.” The soul was simple, not composite, and thus not liable to dissolution as were material things; further, it had the power of self-movement, again in contrast to material things. Ideally the soul should rule and guide the body, and it could ensure that this situation persisted by seeing that the bodily appetites were indulged to the minimum extent necessary for the continuance of life. The true philosopher, as Plato put it in the Phaedo, made his life a practice for death because he knew that after death the soul would be free of bodily ties and would return to its native element. He also thought that the soul was “akin” to the Forms; it was through the intellect, the purest element in the soul, that the Forms were discovered.
Plato mentioned and attempted to refute alternative accounts of the relationship of soul and body, including a Pythagorean view that described the soul as an “attunement” of the body and thus tried to explicate it as a form or structure rather than an independently existing thing. A theory of this kind was worked out but not taken to its logical conclusion by Aristotle in his treatise De anima (On the Soul). Aristotle defined soul in terms of functions. The soul of a plant was concerned with nutrition and reproduction, that of an animal with these and with sensation and independent movement, that of a man with all these and with rational activity. The soul was, in each case, the form of some body, and the clear implication of this was that it would disappear as the body in question dissolved. To be more accurate, the soul was the principle of life in something material; it needed the material element to exist, although it was not itself either material or immaterial but, to put it crudely, an abstraction. Even though Aristotle wasclearly committed by everything he said in the earlier parts of the De anima to the view that the soul is not anything substantial, he nevertheless distinguished toward the end of this work between what he called the active and the passive intellects and spoke of the former in Platonic terms. The active intellect was, it appears, separate from the rest of the soul; it came “from outside” and was in fact immortal. It was, moreover, essential to the soul considered as rational, for “without this nothing thinks.” Aristotle thus showed the Platonic side of his thought in the very act of trying to emancipate himself from this aspect of Platonism. The mind–body relationship