The Ontological Exercise: The Cartesian and Kantian Positions In the book Philosophy of Religion, John Hicks summarizes the main point of Rene Descartes’s version of the ontological argument as:
“The essence or defining nature of each kind of thing includes certain predicates, and Descartes’s ontological argument claims that existence must be among the defining predicates of God… [s]o existence is a necessary characteristic of a supremely perfect being” (Hick 18). The main premise of Descartes’s argument is that God’s existence can be deducted from the nature of God. Descartes used the analogy of a triangle to propose that, if the idea of a triangle can be deduced from the nature of shapes, then the idea of God can be deduced from the nature of existence. This main premise of Descartes argument seems to presume that because the idea of God can be perceived as an absolute perfect being, then existence is a predicate belonging to God (Hick 18).
For this argument to work, the inverse of this premise would be that if God did not include the predicate of existence, then the idea of God would not be perfect. Descartes held that the idea of an absolute perfect God without the predicate of existence would …show more content…
Kant uses the example of money to show that the “… [a]ctual contains nothing more than the merely possible” (Kant 567). As an example, and similar to the one Kant uses, if I had $1,000 in my wallet, and if I was thinking about $1,000, then there is nothing less or more about my concept of the money than there is the actual money. Thinking about the money is a concept while the actual money is an object. If the actual $1,000 contained more than my conception of the $1,000, then the actual $1,000 would not be expressed correctly by my conception of it. However, I can easily spend the actual $1,000, while the conceptual $1,000 does nothing for me. As Kant rightly states
“The essence or defining nature of each kind of thing includes certain predicates, and Descartes’s ontological argument claims that existence must be among the defining predicates of God… [s]o existence is a necessary characteristic of a supremely perfect being” (Hick 18). The main premise of Descartes’s argument is that God’s existence can be deducted from the nature of God. Descartes used the analogy of a triangle to propose that, if the idea of a triangle can be deduced from the nature of shapes, then the idea of God can be deduced from the nature of existence. This main premise of Descartes argument seems to presume that because the idea of God can be perceived as an absolute perfect being, then existence is a predicate belonging to God (Hick 18).
For this argument to work, the inverse of this premise would be that if God did not include the predicate of existence, then the idea of God would not be perfect. Descartes held that the idea of an absolute perfect God without the predicate of existence would …show more content…
Kant uses the example of money to show that the “… [a]ctual contains nothing more than the merely possible” (Kant 567). As an example, and similar to the one Kant uses, if I had $1,000 in my wallet, and if I was thinking about $1,000, then there is nothing less or more about my concept of the money than there is the actual money. Thinking about the money is a concept while the actual money is an object. If the actual $1,000 contained more than my conception of the $1,000, then the actual $1,000 would not be expressed correctly by my conception of it. However, I can easily spend the actual $1,000, while the conceptual $1,000 does nothing for me. As Kant rightly states