Proving God Exists: Kant Refutes St. Anselm’s Proof
by Roger Berkowitz
Does God exist? 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal summed up the opinion of many when he wrote, “It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that He should not exist.” Unsatisfied with this ancient paradox, however, philosophers both before and after Pascal have sought to prove or disprove the Almighty’s existence. The most famous of the proofs for God’s existence is the “Ontological proof,” developed by Saint Anselm (1033-1109), Archbishop of Canterbury.
Anselm’s Ontological proof follows three basic steps. Step one, the major premise, gives a logical definition of God: God is the most perfect being. Step two, the minor premise, states definitively that a perfect being exists. The final step, or conclusion, reasons that because God is a perfect being (step one) and a perfect being exists (step two), therefore, God exists.
Philosophers had accepted Anselm’s proof for centuries until Immanuel Kant argued that reason alone could not prove the existence of any being, including God. According to Kant (1724-1804), Anselm’s proof is flawed because it confuses conceptual “being” and actual “existence.” Conceiving of God’s being, Kant insists, does not prove His existence (from the Latin existere, meaning “to stand out in reality”). Existence, Kant insists, is an empirical concept that can only be proven through direct experience, so when Anselm asserts in step two that a perfect being “exists,” he wrongly equates existence with being.
A core insight of Kant’s philosophy is that logic, or reason, can reveal the truth of concepts, but they cannot provide knowledge about the actual world. The truth of God’s existence is, for Kant, not a question that philosophy can answer, which is not to say that God doesn’t exist, but simply that philosophy can’t prove God’s actual existence through reason alone, as Anselm maintained.