Abstract
By defining God as a maximally great being Plantinga is able to devise an ontological argument which validly infers from the possibility of there being a God that there necessarily is a God. In this article I shall argue that Plantinga’s argument is not only question-begging, as several critics have complained, but circular in the strongest sense of the term. Based on reflections on the relation between the notions of coherence and possibility, I shall defend two arguments, previously proposed by Tooley (Mind 90:422–427, 1981) and Guleserian (Nous 17:221–238, 1983), against the existence of a maximally great being. The article concludes with some critical remarks on Plantinga’s rationale for conceiving God as such a being.
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Notes
My characterization of modal ontological arguments does not fit Lowe’s ‘new’ modal ontological argument (Lowe 2013). In my view the latter is not just a variant of Plantinga’s modal ontological argument, as Eklund (2019) suggests. It may even count as a cosmological argument, Lowe’s claims to the contrary notwithstanding (2013, p. 69). At any rate, the critique of modal ontological arguments developed in this article is not intended to apply to Lowe’s argument.
To be fair: Malcolm actually suggests that God should be so conceived that He possesses omnipotence and omniscience necessarily (1960, p. 50). He does not explain, however, that this qualification is essential to secure the validity of the modal ontological argument.
Oppy discusses an argument of this sort and describes it as ‘very similar’ to Plantinga’s argument (1996, p. 70).
Nagasawa, for instance, suggests that ‘[t]he modal ontological argument reduces the burden on theists dramatically’, since ‘[a]ll they need to do is to show somehow that the existence of God is possible’ (2017, p. 185).
Plantinga’s premise (12) has been defended, among others, by Cordig (1981), Pruss (2010) and Nagasawa (2017, pp. 202–5). A proper discussion of these attempted defenses is beyond the scope of this article. Here I shall only observe that, if correct, the reflections from the previous section undermine all these attempts. For the arguments in favor of (12), proposed by the authors mentioned, crucially rely on the assumption that (12) is a genuine possibility claim, and not, as I have argued, a necessity claim in disguise.
Note that this argument against the existence of a maximally great being also employs the strategy mentioned in the previous section, though less explicitly so than Tooley’s argument: premise (30) implies that there is a possible world without a maximally excellent being; and this is what rules out the existence of a maximally great being in the actual—or any other possible—world.
Compare Wittgenstein, for instance: ‘it is not the property of an object that is ever “essential”, but rather the mark of a concept.’ (1978, p. 64).
One such exception is Thomasson who has recently defended a Wittgensteinian account of necessity in her (2020).
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I am grateful to David Dolby and to an anonymous reviewer for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Büttner, K.M. Evil and maximal greatness. Int J Philos Relig 91, 93–109 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-021-09810-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-021-09810-1