Only one type of argument for God's existence?
According to this article https://metaphysicsnow.com/2018/03/18/god/ Kant seemed to think that all arguments for God's existence ultimately rest on the Ontological argument. Does anyone know why? After all, the Argument from Design seems to be very different from the Ontological argument as far as I can tell.
Comments (5)
I probably don't have a clue either way but am interested, do you mean why it would be so or why Kant would think so?
In addition to this, traditional philosophy also discriminated between what is real and what (merely) exists - which is an iteration of the metaphysical distinction of 'appearance and reality'. In Platonist philosophies (and in Aristotle and Augustine), the intelligible domain is of a higher degree of reality than the sensible domain; sensible particulars are real only insofar as they're expressions or instantiations of an archetype or form. But this or that particular, and indeed worldly existence itself, isn't necessarily either good, or even totally real, in its own right; it only exists as a simulacrum or facsimile of the real form or Idea (which is something that only the wise know; knowing it is what earns them the designation 'wise'.) So in traditional philosophy, the degree to which something is good at all, is the degree of faithfulness or in some sense the 'proximity' it has to its actual archetype and the ground or source of Being. So the mere fact of its existence is not necessarily a good thing as one might have an accursed form of existence; but the possibility that it can exist at all, is a good thing, from this point of view.
Kant's argument that 'existence is not a predicate' is: to say of something that it exists, is not to add anything to it. It's something like a tautological expression. Whereas, I think that the original impulse behind the ontological argument, is that what really is, is not necessarily the same as something that merely exists. So, very roughly speaking, 'what really is', is necessarily good; whereas what exists is not necessarily good - might be, or it might not be, depending on a number of things because after all, individual beings are merely contingent - except for their 'intelligible soul' which is what about them that makes them good in the first place.
So by the time of Kant, I think this understanding has to all intents been forgotten or lost. It was present in early medieval philosophical theology, I think, but became eroded by various currents of thought in later medieval time; I think the idea of the nexus between what is real and what is good, or the ground of goodness, has been lost. I think, anyway. It's a deep question. I have discovered that there is a form of neo-Thomism that tries to incorporate Kantian insights, so am doing some more reading.
See http://lonergan.org/2017/03/31/reality-or-being-are-these-the-same/ for a sketchy blog post on whether reality and being can be distinguished.
See https://luminousdarkcloud.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/radical-orthodoxy-a-theological-vision/ for the first of a series of posts on 'radical orthodoxy' which explores the 'flattening' of the understanding of ontology in late Medieval Europe.