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Some Comments on Hartshorne's Presentation of the Ontological Argument
Abstract
Although the basic ideas of the ontological argument can be found in Aristotle and Philo Judaeus (cf. AD pp. 141 ff.), the argument received its classical formulation in Anselm's Proslogion and his Reply to the objections raised by Gaunilo. During the succeeding nine centuries the argument has had a chequered career. It was supported by some scholastic theologians but rejected by Aquinas. Descartes and Leibniz offered their own versions of the proof but Kant's refutation of the argument has generally been accepted as conclusive during the past century and a half. Nevertheless, interest in the proof has never completely disappeared—perhaps provoked by Aquinas' suggestion that the proof may be valid for God even though it cannot be valid for us because of the inadequacy of our knowledge of God. Recently there has been a revival of interest in the ontological argument. J. N. Findlay put the argument into reverse to show the necessary non-existence of God in an article in 1948 (Can God's existence be disproved?) but in later writings he has suggested that the argument may have positive significance. In 1960 Norman Malcolm published a paper in which he distinguished two basically different forms of the ontological argument in the Proslogion and defended the possible validity of the second of them.
... The gist of Pailin's argument is that "necessary existence" is a formal feature of the divine being, which is of the same type as other formal features. The attribute of necessary existence, therefore, does not commit to any claim about what is logically necessary, for it is an ontological category, not a logical one (Pailin, 1968). ...
At the start of the “Preface” to Man’s Vision of God Hartshorne points to the “mountainous — I had almost said, monstrous — mass of writings devoted to ‘philosophical theology’ ” and asks what there is left for him to add. His reply is “exactitude, logical rigor.”1 What he claims here “simply, if without apparent modesty,” has been one of the major characteristics of his publications in the succeeding half-century. Whereas, for instance, it may not be possible to arrive at “a trouble-free interpretation” of Whitehead’s theological views (and, according to Hartshorne, Whitehead himself “said once that he felt that his thought about God was ‘very vague,’ but that others would be able to clarify the matter” 2), Hartshorne has made important contributions to theistic thought by discriminating analyses of the contents of such notions as those of the divine necessity, perfection, relations, power and awareness. In this respect he has considerably clarified the concept of God not only for process theology but also for theological understanding generally.
In recent years, the ontological argument and theistic metaphysics have been criticized by philosophers working in both the analytic and continental traditions. Responses to these criticisms have primarily come from philosophers who make use of the traditional, and problematic, concept of God. In this volume, Daniel A. Dombrowski defends the ontological argument against its contemporary critics, but he does so by using a neoclassical or process concept of God, thereby strengthening the case for a contemporary theistic metaphysics. Relying on the thought of Charles Hartshorne, he builds on Hartshorne's crucial distinction between divine existence and divine actuality, which enables neoclassical defenders of the ontological argument to avoid the familiar criticism that the argument moves illegitimately from an abstract concept to concrete reality. His argument, thus, avoids the problems inherent in the traditional concept of God as static.
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