Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

200 J.J.C. Smart
so-called quantifier ‘there is a’. Anselm needs a stronger and more suspect
notion of modality such as is furnished by a semantics that talks of possible
worlds other than the actual world. Later I shall briefly discuss an argument due
to Alvin Plantinga which makes use of possible world semantics. 2 I shall not
here press this consideration in discussing Anselm’s ‘can be thought’. In fact,
Gregory Schufreider in his valuable book An Introduction to Anselm’s Argument
3 says that the argument depends on the contrast between what can exist
in the understanding alone and what exists in re. Thus the present King of
France exists only in the intellect but the present President of France exists
not only in the intellect but in re.
In reply we may say that what exists in the intellect are ideas and concepts,
so that unicorn ideas exist but unicorns do not. At bottom therefore I do not
see whether as a proof Anselm’s is really better than Descartes’ one. Even if
we have a concept of a being of which a greater cannot be conceived (after all,
we seem to understand the phrase), there still remains the question of whether
this concept is instantiated, whether there is such a being.
By interpreting Anselm’s use of ‘what exists in the understanding’ as
simply ‘concept’, we have as things that exist not only stars and planets but
the concept ‘star’ and ‘planet’, and the concept of a star or of a planet is not
star or planet. So we have no need for two modes of existing (two senses of
‘being’). W.V. Quine, in his essay ‘What there is’ in his From a Logical Point
of View, 4 after discussing a benighted metaphysician McX, supposes a scarcely
less benighted one, Wyman (note the pun!). Wyman wants to distinguish
existence from subsistence. Russell did that at one time, so that he then
thought that rabbits and stars exist but that mathematical objects only subsist.
This, as Quine says, is to ruin the good old word ‘exists’. Just as rabbits and
lettuces do not have two kinds of existence, zoological existence and botanical
existence, universals and numbers do not have non-spatio-temporal existence
as opposed to spatio-temporal existence: there are just (in the unitary sense of
‘there are’) both spatio-temporal rabbits and non-spatio-temporal numbers.
In the Proslogion, after arguing that the thing a greater than which cannot
be conceived can be identified with God (has the properties which we ascribe
to God), Anselm argues:
Only that in which there is neither beginning nor end nor conjunction of parts,
and that thought does not discern save as a whole in every place and at every
time, cannot be thought not to exist. 5
He deduces this from the idea that what can be thought not to exist can be
thought to have a beginning and an end and a conjunction of parts. Does
Anselm here propose that God is eternal or that he is sempiternal? The
sempiternal can be thought to have no beginning or end if it is thought that