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Does Kant Succeed In Undermining Traditional Attempts To Prove God's ...

Does Kant Succeed in Undermining Traditional Attempts to Prove God's Existence?
In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant claims that he has disproved the three traditional attempts to prove God's existence. These attempts he terms the ontological proof, the cosmological proof and the physico-theological proof. In this paper I will argue that Kant does indeed succeed in undermining these arguments, by showing how the latter two rely on the ontological argument, which he can show to be invalid. To understand how he does this, I will develop the three arguments that try to prove God's existence and Kant's critique of them. Due to the importance that Kant places upon his critique of the ontological argument, I will examine this critique in particular.
The first proof that Kant seeks to undermine is the important ontological argument mentioned above. It is important because, as I will explain below, Kant argues that both the cosmological and the physico-theological arguments surreptitiously rely on it. The ontological argument claims that because we have a concept of something that ‘necessarily exists', there must be necessary existence otherwise there would be a contradiction (A592-603). This something that must necessarily exist is God, and to have a concept of God that does not contain God's existence would be self-contradictory. This is an argument put forward by Descartes (1996:24-36) among others. Kant (A597-598) claims that there is a serious error in this argument. There is only contradiction, Kant (A595) argues, if we reject the predicate while retaining the subject. But if we reject the subject and the predicate, then there is no contradiction at all. He gives the example of a triangle, and notes that if we posit a triangle, but reject its three angles, then there is contradiction. If we reject both the triangle and the three angles however, then no contradiction takes place. The same holds for the concept of an absolutely necessary being for Kant. If we reject the concept, then we automatically reject any existence related to that concept, and no contradiction occurs. The only way to argue against this, Kant (A596) claims, is to insist that there are subjects that cannot be removed. But this is merely another way of saying that there is something that necessarily exists, and Kant has already called this into question.
The problem with the ontological argument for Kant (A597) is that it is tautological in its assertion of God's existence. For if a proposition is analytic, then all predicates are already presumed in the subject (such as ‘all bachelors are married men'). But, Kant argues, as all existential propositions must be synthetic, that is, something must be added to it from outside the proposition to assert existence (such as, ‘all bodies have weight'), then the predicate must not necessarily be contained in the subject, (‘weight' is not necessarily contained in ‘bodies').

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