Nowadays, most people who consider themselves to be religious rely on faith rather than reason. That means that they do not explain what results in the belief about the doctrines or liturgies of a religion, as is a proof of God or a miraculous cause that people believe was true, such as the Resurrection, but rather in a belief about a proposition about doctrine and liturgy that does not require explanation and so a believer refers to the confidence of one’s beliefs rather than for the proof or demonstration of one’s propositions. The believer looks at the consequences of beliefs rather than as the causes of belief and shows those consequences in the most flattering light, belief believing the cause of morality or decency or industriousness or happiness, putting aside the question that full blooded Christians, for example, can believe in a variety and even contradictory things, as when some Christians believe that Blacks and whites are to be forever separated or, on the other hand, melded into the greater single humanity. Believers cannot avoid making judgments or reasons aside from their faith as to what inferences to make about their faiths and so are on their own, like everyone else, independent of faith as to what to make of the consequences of faith. That is an inherent paradox of religion, which is that its beliefs are volitional even as they seem to be enjoined by the premises and we shall look into the most abstract way of having discussed that, by St. Anselm in his proof of God, to clarify that as best he can.
A good example of the modern stance about believers to emphasize the consequences of belief rather than the reasons for belief is offered by Tish Harrison Warren. She is an Eposcopalian priest and an op ed columnist in the New York Times who comments on religious matters. She says that her beliefs let us understand contemporary controversies, citing recently the discussion about Critical Race Theory, a topic, I might note, not discussed in the New Testament except the general injunction to be kind with people, which begs the question of which of the two parties in conflict are the ones to deal with as the ones to be kind. Harrison has a clear solution. Christians are to be aware that they have original sin and so are always prey to lapse into doing evil and need to repent for their sins and so it is easy for Christians to think that slavery and Jim Crow and endless insults to Black people need forgiveness and atonement, to remember themselves as human beings for having again lapsed and things needing to be made aright. But there are Christians who do not see it that way but regard continued guilt for slavery and its aftermath as unwarrrented, there nothing inherent in the original sin of white people and so that taint no longer to be retained. Original sin has to do with metaphysical issues, people might say, not with politics and social history. Does that mean that Christianity is not clear in indicating where it stands on race? Or is it that only Episcopalians and some related liberal Christians know the truth? And there are people who are not Christians who understand the remaining plights of the Black population. So Christianity is irrelevant to deciding what to think about politics even if it can be invoked to support beliefs about politics that suit you. Politics is circumstantial to Christianity even if original sin is essential to Christianity and whatever that concept might mean and how it is to be applied to real life. Explain the doctrine rather than rush to its political application.
How different that is from St. Anselm, the Eleventh Century theologian from Normandy, who was not influenced by the succeeding High Medieval Scholastics, centered in Paris, who did separate faith from reason, St. Thomas believing that the doctrine of the Holy Trinity could not be justified by reason, although thinking great many things concernin g ethics and social structure, such as the perversity of homosexuality, could be justified by reason. St. Anselm was an Augustinian who followed the idea that everything that was believed on faith could be explained and so coherent. He extended that idea so that everything and I mean everything that was believed in Christianity could be proven and so rational and necessary, including the creation of Adam and Eve and the fall into wickedness and most especially the proof of the existence of God. This is a breathtaking endeavor and I cannot think of anyone, with the possible exception of Kant, who proved it all but in a secularized way, who was so radical, so audacious. Only theologians and philosophers, alas, are still taken with St. Anselm, but only to show the limitations or the downright fallacies of what is called his ontological proof of the existence of God rather than show how profoundly he delves into the meaning of the relation of faith and reason.
St. Anselm’s proof of the existence of God is treated as syllogistic. The idea of God is that he is perfect. It is also the case that existence is superior to being non-existent. Therefore God exists because he has to exist so as to be perfect. Critics say that you believe God exists if only you already believe that God exists. Kant made a different argument, which is that existence is not a property of an entity, as is the case with color or size, and so existence cannot be levered into describing God, which is a very elegant way of saying that existence is independent of other descriptions. But rather than look at the ontological proof syllogistically, look at it experientially. When a person contemplates the concept of God, the person cannot think of that idea without it being real. That is because the concept itself includes its existence because not to exist would make the concept imperfect. Now, many people may well deny the idea that God exists(though fewer of them than were thought at the time of St. Anselm), but to think that is to have an imperfect sense of the concept, the same thing that allows a fool to say that there is no God. The fool doesn't understand what he means by the word and so can say anything that he likes, but a person who understands the term deeply, who appreciates all its characteristics, can say and must say that God has to exist.In that case, the belief in God is an on/off switch rather than a matter of degree, as when Cardinal Newman argued in the Nineteenth Century that a person can have greater and greater confidence in the belief of God because of a variety of empirical and persuasive arguments. Rather, a person gins in an illumination that the whole of the universe is transformed by seeing how every part and parcel of God’s universe is informed by God, whether it is that there is an intelligent design whereby microbes intersect with one another, or because social life is informed by original sin or, if not a Christian, some other basic feature of human nature, such as the fact that the Israelites will always seem to lapse in their fidelity to God. And that psychological fact that people get with God wholly or not seems to be the case with many religious believers. So Anselm is describing the journey to belief. It is like Paul on the road to Damascus.
The trouble is that there are any number of conditions that can be considered entailed by the concept of God. Both Catholics and Protestants believe that Chrisians are compelled to inquire whether or not they are good people or not and so destined to be damned or saved. Martin Luther thought that there was nothing he could do about the abject nature of his unworthiness while Catholics think that good acts and suffering can be redemptive even if thousands of years in purgatory or forever in Hell seems to me a very harsh penalty for people. Jews also think being good is important. Morality is the primary criteria for judging people, something inevitable even though morality, as best I understand, was conflated with religion no more than 3000 years ago, religion based on spirits to have preceded that into the much farther past. As an atheist, morality is only one feature of social life. People can also judge themselves by heir appreciation of beauty or knowledge or the ability to charm the opposite sex.Yes, some people are moral than others, but why does it have such a central claim when many people are indifferent to it? People have other motives than morality and can get along quite fine without it, acting on the basis of greed or envy or friendship and loyalty, which are not, strictly speaking, matters of morality because there is no need to impose an obligation, such as “Thou shalt not kill”, which Kant thought was the necessary element for morality. Maybe morality is conjoined with God because it is a way to leverage people to be guilty. But functional reasons aside, morality does seem to many a bedrock of religion and so entails to God, who cannot be or do evil and haunts people with whether or not they are so. Why, therefore, should we not generalize St. Anselm? In that case, God has to by nature be concerned with morality and the absence of it makes the idea of God vacant. Many people would think that but there are any other properties to be found conjoined or specified within the rubric of morality, part of being God, such as more entitlements or, on the other hand, eliminating abortion. So the Anselm proposition is just too broad.
On the other hand, maybe what St. Anselm is just offering the way religious experience does things. It associates aspects of God or whatever as necessary and therefore necessary by nature. That way nothing is an accident, whether a butterfly turns right or left, or whether it matters that a homicide or a genocide takes place. Or that there is a tornado or a social revolution. Everything impacts everything to make a seamless whole. A secular or scientific approach does just the opposite. It isolates events so that some events can be treated as caused by another, whether that means that an inclined plane will allow speeds to be seen or not when balls are rolled down, or because there are cycles of hurricanes different from cycles of hot weather, or some planets have moons while others do not, and so the facts have to be independently established however much people may conclude too quickly that everything is related to everything. There is a different way of thinking about god than there is about science and nature and Anselm pointed that out.
Actually, the basic method of the ontological proof of God is fatally flawed and not because existence is not an attribute. It is because there are any number of other qualities that could be associated with God so as to make God perfect that nonetheless have to be independent of God in order to make sense. Consider morality, which clearly enough would be part of God, part of the concept of God, because God, as perfect, will include morality. But if that is the case, then morality is arbitrary in that morality is whatever God says is moral and there would be no way to decide whether God were proposing a good thing or not, such as “Thou shalt not kill” even if we suppose that God, being God, would only propose only good things as the ones God proposed. There still has to be an independent standard of morality by which God can decide what is proposed is good. The same is true with other metaphysical entities. We can’t say that God is beautiful unless there is a standard of beauty lest whatever may be ugly might not be proclaimed beautiful by fiat. The same is true of truth. There are transcendental ideas of logic, which is the standard that has to be met to prove that God exists and so is independent of God. Where does logic come from? Beats me. Wittgenstein said just let it alone; it takes care of itself. So God has to be something other than those metaphysical entities and perhaps best regarded as a creature of the universe, just a very powerful one, and so is no different from the pagan gods who were also subject to the forces of nature even though some of these like fate were personified even though abstracted into a metaphysical entity. Trying to think of God as beyond being a creature just gets into twists and turns that are unresolvable, however hypnotic and grand is the attempt to conceptualize the idea of a most perfect and abstracted idea that is also a creature which has will and consciousness. It just does not compute.