Writing to Alvin Plantinga

[This is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. There it appears as 'Contra Plantinga'. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

I wrote to Alvin Plantinga on Sunday, 2nd of July 2017, concerning the ontological argument, which he has done so much to promote.

I imagine ... that you would be interested to see alternative arguments for the reality of the divine, were these to exist.

And they do exist. I spent many years assembling the arguments for the understanding of the divine in the ancient world. These are quite different arguments from those offered from St. Anselm onwards.

You are under no obligation at all to read my book, but it may be worth a look, if only to dismiss the arguments as threadbare, or even completely baseless. And in short order.

If you are interested in reading the book, I will send it to you either as an ebook or a pdf, according to your choice. You are under no obligation at all to respond, if you accept the book.

I didn't get a response from that, so I wrote again on 18th of July, 2017 

The ontological argument has obviously been important and highly influential over the past thousand years. But I argue that, in any of its instances, it is not sound, and does not resemble argument about the divine in the ancient world. I've written about this issue in detail in The Sacred History of Being, which was published in 2015. 

I think we have come to the end of a road with the ontological argument, which has profoundly influenced the history of philosophy, theology, and the development of anthropology. Ancient discussion of the divine was based on logical argument about the nature of a transcendent reality, which gave rise to space and time, rather than the more constrained question of whether or not God exists in a pre-existing and unexplained frame. Mesopotamia provides the intellectual background for the development of public philosophy in Greece. I will send you my book by email if you are interested in reading an alternative view.

Professor Plantinga was kind enough to accept the offer of a copy of my book, and a PDF was sent by email the next day. 

I followed up on the exchange on the 19th of September:

Some useful things can be taken away from the arguments in The Sacred History of Being. First of all, if the Divine and Reality are not artificially separated from each other (they are usually coterminous in eastern thought), then atheism is unreasonable and almost unthinkable. This separation is a characteristic of western philosophy, after the closure of the schools. Plato does not argue like this. Neither do the Neoplatonists. 

The importance of belief is less important when the Divine and Reality itself are not understood to be separate. In ancient religion (if we insist on referring to the phenomenon with that term, rather than using Cicero's more appropriate phrase 'cultus deorum'), belief was mostly beside the point, being subordinate to observance, if you understood the basis of what was being discussed. Belief is a phenomenon which assumes importance when a population does not know the traditional arguments concerning what is Divine, and the speculative and conjectural conclusions which might be drawn from those arguments.

This was the case by the time Anselm put together his version of the ontological argument. Faith is slightly different, since it isn't the same as blind belief, but signifies an understanding of why certain arguments are made, and an acceptance of the scope of what they suggest. The possibility of conjecture and discussion remains.

How does Plato argue about the nature of the Divine? He understood the Divine to be beyond physical space, and the dimension of time. Without shape and colour, or any other characteristic which could be easily understood by the human mind. However, and paradoxically, the Divine was capable of participation in the world, because some aspects of the Divine have exemplars on earth. Such as totality, greatness, perfection, completeness, etc. The  nature of the Divine emerges from a number of philosophical questions, such as: if the Divine is one, how is the many possible? If the Divine is one and beyond change, but God needs to make a copy of it in which movement is possible, has the integrity of the nature of the ur-reality been fatally compromised? If the one thing which we should all look to is, by definition, one and unchanging (see the self-description of God in the 3rd book of Malachi, where God says: 'I do not change'), how is participation in the world of movement and change possible? 

And so on. Frazer wrote these arguments off as 'popular questions of the day', with no more significance than that. A rational basis for belief, is I think, a contradiction in terms. If it is rational, then belief is unecessary. A key conclusion of The Sacred History of Being, is that the basis of ancient religion was the acquisition of knowledge of the Divine, and as a corollary, the acquisition of knowledge itself, since it was understood to be already present in the Divine (an idea most clearly expressed in Mesopotamian literature and liturgy).   

We lost almost all of that in the west, except in rhetorical and literary terms. But the evidence from antiquity does not support either the necessity of belief in religion, or the necessity of God possessing the property of existence within an unexplained and inexplicable pre-existence of space and time, The evidence from antiquity *does* support the reality of God, and the importance of the reality of the Divine in every aspect of human existence.

Of course if the Greeks did invent philosophical argument and sound logic, and no-one else around the Mediterranean and the ancient Near East was able to think about the Divine in such terms as far back as the middle of 2nd Millennium B.C.E., when they were building their accounts of the nature of reality, then this argument would be impossible to support. I would suggest instead, that the argument be reversed, as it can be, however much the classicists and the historians of philosophy would object to the loss of Greek intellectual primacy which would result.  

Best regards,  

Thomas Yaeger