Walton, the atheist

In his very well written essay, “Can an ancient argument of Carneades on cardinal virtues and divine attributes be used to disprove the existence of God?”, Walton sets himself to prove that the concept of God is contradictory. And he does that by using an argument from the ancient philosopher, Carneades: “Carneades’ skeptical argument is not only very powerful as a device for raising doubts or questions. It can be extended to generate a proof for the nonexistence of God, constructed below.”

 And the argument is the following:

1.      God is (by definition) a being than which no greater being can be thought.

2.      Greatness includes greatness of virtue.

3.      Therefore, God is a being than which no being can be more virtuous.

4.      But virtue involves overcoming pains and danger.

5.      Indeed, a being can only be properly said to be virtuous if it can suffer pain and be destroyed.

6.      A God that can suffer pain or is destructible is not one than which no greater being can be thought.

7.      For you can think of a greater being, that is, one that is non-suffering and indestructible.

8.      Therefore God does not exist.

        My first objection concerns the first premise. Walton takes the definition from Anselm – a definition used, also, by Kant. But, of course, this isn’t the definition a classical theist uses – the one that is derived from the cosmological argument. From the cosmological argument it follows that God is immutable and without passions (which implies the impossibility of suffering). All of these are built in the classical concept of God. So, to speak of a suffering God is a contradiction.

            Of course, any classical theist understands God as a perfect being. God’s perfection is implied by the classical definition. There is a difference, though, between “the greatest possible being” and “the greatest conceivable being”. But I’m not going to press further in this direction.

             The greatest problem of Walton’s definition is the concept of greatness. He uses this concept as if it includes the concept of being virtuous. But there is an important problem here, because the virtue of a thing depends on its nature. So, the goodness of a tree is very different from the goodness of a human being. Thus, God’s perfection is very different than man’s perfection. So, insofar as virtue can be applied to God, it must be in a different sense than it is applied to humans. In general, we use words analogically, not univocally, to speak about God’s attributes.

            More than these, there are many virtues which don’t apply to God. Some examples are: courage, prudence. And, of course, there are many aspects of divine perfection which aren’t the least relevant to human perfection.

            The conclusion is that the third, fourth and fifth premises must be rejected: the third talks about virtue in general, without concern for the virtue’s subject; premises (4) and (5) may be true about human virtue (although, they aren’t), but Walton applies them to divine perfection.