THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT (6 of 8 notes)

Part Three
Theology Proper: 16 PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
A DISPENSATIONAL THEOLOGY
By Charles F Baker

This argument has been presented in various forms. Hodge gives three other arrangements of it:

Descartes’ argument was in this form. We have the idea of an infinitely perfect Being. As we are finite, that idea could not have originated with us. As we are conversant only with the finite, it could not have originated from anything around us. It must, therefore, have come from God, whose existence is thus a necessary assumption.

Dr. Samuel Clarke ... Nothing is necessarily existent, the non-existence of which is conceivable. We can conceive of the non-existence of the world; therefore the world is not necessarily existing and eternal. We cannot, however, conceive of the non-existence of space and duration; therefore space and duration are necessary and infinite. Space and duration, however, are not substances; therefore, there must be an eternal and necessary substance (i.e., God), of which they are accidents.

Cousin, in his ‘Elements of Psychology,’ repeats continually the same argument in a somewhat different form. The idea of the infinite, he says, is given in that of the finite. We cannot have the one without the other. “These two ideas are logical correlatives; and in the order of their acquisition, that of the finite and imperfect precedes the other; but it scarcely precedes it. It is not possible for the reason, as soon as consciousness furnishes the mind with the idea of the finite and imperfect, not to conceive the idea of the infinite and perfect. Now, the infinite and perfect is God.”¹⁴

14          Charles Hodge, op. cit., I, pp. 205-207.

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