"The B.B.C. Principle," by Prof. Eric Walther, given 10 July 2005 at Manhattan's Jane Street Tavern in his words "to amuse a small group, not as a well-thought-out manifesto." Following his presentation, he received many profound questions from Dr. David Goldman, Dennis Middlebrooks, Suzanne Walther, Warren Allen Smith, and Dr. Dr. Dr. Taslima Nasrin (an M.D. plus honoraries from the University of Ghent and also the American University in Paris).

    I was pleased and flattered when Warren invited me to speak to you at this official meeting of “Ginny-SeeSee-Burs” [GNYCCBRS].  As you know, this is one of the tiny but lively organizations founded by Warren and Dennis every few years, always with a name that produces a cute acronym.  My maiden participation was with the group named FANNY, which I thought stood for Freethinking Atheist Nonbelievers of New York.  I liked the name, with its ironic self-criticism that we radical groups do nothing but sit around on our fannies – but it turned out that the “A” stands for “Activist”, and indeed Warren has seen to it that we occasionally get off our fannies.  Anyway, I indulged this love of acronyms by choosing, for my title, “The BBC Principle,” which has nothing to do with Britain or Broadcasting and will become clear in good time.

    In fact I want to begin with the Ontological Argument.  My formulation generally follows Descartes.  We start with the idea of a supremely perfect Being – not with the presumption that this perfect being, or God, exists, but merely with the conception of God as supremely perfect Being.  This is not entirely archaic; I am inclined to endorse this definition of God.  It is useful because one can derive from it the familiar list of divine attributes: infinite knowledge, omnipotence, benevolence, perhaps also uniqueness, non-contingent existence, and the role of Creator of the universe.  If I find myself existing after death, I might be able to use those criteria to choose between a religious and a science-fiction-y interpretation of what’s going on.  Well, maybe not.  Anyway, returning to the Ontological Argument, I repeat that it’s only the idea of God as supremely perfect Being that is taken for granted.  But then (here comes the magic) one notices that a Being who actually exists, whose existence is necessary and eternal, is surely more perfect than the merely hypothetical Being we were thinking of at first, a Being who might actually not exist.  So that supremely perfect Being we were conceiving of, must actually exist.  Bingo.

    No doubt everybody thinks at first that the argument is obviously fallacious.  Yes, the idea of a perfect being includes the idea of necessary existence, but this is only a connection of ideas.  It doesn’t mean that actual existence can be inferred.  God is to existence as mountain is to valley, says Descartes: I cannot think of a mountain without a valley, but that doesn’t mean that either mountain or valley must exist.  But wait, continues Descartes: that conclusion misrepresents the analogy!  Mountain and valley are inseparable in thought, and indeed that implies nothing about existence.  But if God and existence are inseparable in thought, I am not at liberty to think of God as separable from existence.  If I am thinking of a Being that necessarily exists, I cannot in that same moment smuggle in the thought “but He doesn’t really exist, of course.”  At this point I have sometimes felt a chill race up my spine.  The argument has got to be nonsense, but it seems to be working.

    Perhaps you will seize upon my statement that God and existence are “inseparable in thought” and point out that being inseparable in thought is different from being inseparable in reality.  Good for you; but the argument springs back to life when we notice that a Being that’s inseparable from existence in thought is less perfect than a Being that’s inseparable from existence in reality – so your distinction does not refute, but instead strengthens, the Ontological Argument.  Many ways of objecting to the O.A. can be rebutted in similar fashion, and becoming adept at this game of move and counter-move builds one’s respect for, and enjoyment of, the O.A.

    However, let’s look more carefully at the connection between perfection and existence.  It is argued that a Being that actually exists, is made more perfect by the fact of its existence.  I suggest that this seems plausible because existence makes a good thing better, and “better” means “more perfect” in the sense of more perfectly good.  In the same way, it would seem that existence makes an evil thing worse, and “worse” means “more perfect” in the sense of more perfectly evil.  So there would seem to be a “dark side” version of the Ontological Argument.  Consider a Being so perfectly evil that nothing more evil can be conceived.  At first we wouldn’t presume that this Evil Being actually exists; we are only exploring the consequences of our conception.  But we at once notice that an Evil Being that doesn’t exist is less evil than an otherwise identical Being that does exist.  And an Evil Being whose existence was necessary would be even more evil than an Evil Being that just happened to exist.  These are exactly the moves that are familiar to us in the traditional Ontological Argument.  So we actually have two, extremely similar, Ontological Arguments to consider: the first affirms the existence of perfect Goodness, the second the existence of perfect Evil.

    We can hardly leave it at that, because the two arguments are incompatible.  A Being whose inherent perfection excluded the possibility that infinite Evil might also exist, would be more perfect (that is, perfectly good) than a Being who coexisted with such evil.  Then again, a Being whose inherent perfection excluded the possibility that infinite Good might also exist, would be more perfect (that is, perfectly evil) than a Being who coexisted with such goodness.  Is one of these arguments stronger than the other?  There is in fact a dominant tradition in Western philosophy – explicit in both Plato and Aristotle, in the Stoics, among the Schoolmen, etc. etc. – that presumes an ultimate unity (or even identity) of Being and Goodness.  Within that tradition, a perfection of Being would imply goodness and exclude evil.  But I would argue that the premiss linking Being with Goodness is external to the Ontological Argument as such.  So let us limit ourselves to weighing the two Ontological Arguments one against the other, ignoring outside considerations.  Which is stronger, the idea that perfect goodness requires existence to be perfectly good, or the idea that perfect evil requires existence to be perfectly evil?  I must say that the second seems much stronger to me.  After all, a goodness that is perfect except for being nonexistent is an ideal, and an ideal as such is a very good thing.  An evil that is perfect except for being nonexistent is a nightmare, and nightmares as such are not so very terrible.  So my opinion is that the perfection of evil requires existence much more persuasively than the perfection of goodness requires existence.  The dark side triumphs.

    Well, something is wrong with the whole story.  Descartes himself pointed in an interesting direction when responding to the critic who said “my thought cannot impose a necessity on things.”  He replied:  “it’s not that my thought imposes any necessity on things; but rather the necessity of the thing itself, namely of the existence of God, forces me to think this.”  And there is the crux of the matter.  If my thinking reflects the necessity of the thing itself, then that inference is unimpeachable.  But if my thinking reflects the arbitrariness of a particular way of conceiving things, then the inference from concept to reality is unjustified.  How can I know which it is?  Perhaps my thought expresses the labor of Hegel’s Negative, or the transcendental synthesis of Kant’s apperception, or the pure description of what remains after Husserl’s ultimate epoché.  But perhaps it’s just little old me and my way of seeing things that my thoughts express!

    One path has always beckoned to philosophers at this point.  If the concepts one is using are basic, truly fundamental, then any alternative concepts will necessarily be analyzable in terms of those basic concepts, and the inference from concept to reality is justified.  Descartes’ “Fourth Rule” is an example.  He proposes, “in all cases to make enumerations so complete and reviews so general that I should be certain of having omitted nothing.”  Ah, yes.  Certain that the ingenuity of mankind would never discover any alternative and better way of conceiving things.  What could have given Descartes that astonishing self-confidence?  What else but the very impressive clarity and distinctness that he found his own ideas to have.  Ideas so simple, so basic, must surely be exhaustive of all real possibilities … well, but we know that he was wrong, don’t we.  His method misled him at this point, by persuading him that his concepts were truly basic.  A lesson suggests itself:  Beware of Basic Concepts!  Does it seem to you that there is a fundamental link between Perfection and Goodness?  Beware!  Does it seem to you that your concept expresses a way of conceiving things that is so clear and obvious that it must express the basic nature of reality itself?  Beware!  I’m not saying that you have to be wrong.  In fact I’m a scientific realist, and thereby I’m committed to a realist interpretation of some basic concepts, sometime.  The “Beware” principle just reminds us that such commitments are very risky; it doesn’t exclude them in principle.

    I think Charles Sanders Peirce had an excellent understanding of this.  In an early paper he described four ways of “fixing belief” – that is, of removing doubt and becoming satisfied with one’s beliefs.  Of relevance to us is the contrast between the third and the fourth methods.  The third, which he calls “the a priori method,” dominates the history of metaphysical philosophy.  The criterion by which ultimate principles are judged is that they should be “agreeable to reason.”  At first this seems useless because what’s agreeable to John’s reason may be very disagreeable to Jane’s reason.  But successful metaphysicians defeat this risk of merely personal preferences, inevitably settling upon preferences of reason that are quite universally felt – in the given intellectual and historical context, of course.  The fatal flaw (says Peirce) is that such preferences are more or less a matter of fashion.  While a given paradigm remains dominant, fashion tends to swing backwards and forwards between the more material and the more spiritual extremes.  When a new paradigm gains control, none of the alternatives that previously seemed agreeable to reason remain so, and new intellectual fashions arise.  Peirce concludes that the method of fixing belief by what seems agreeable to reason cannot succeed.  We need a method according to which our beliefs can be determined “by nothing human, but by some external permanency – by something on which our thinking has no effect” – by reality, that external factor that eventually determines the direction of scientific inquiry.  In other words, metaphysicians must give up the hope that something they can discover about concepts themselves through rational reflection will authorize the claim that in those concepts “the necessity of the thing itself,” of Reality, has been expressed.

    My impression is that Peirce himself was less than faithful to this principle in his later years.  His concept of the community of scientific investigators is very powerful, but he too readily assumed that scientifically literate metaphysicians would and should be accepted as contributors within that community.  For example, his own metaphysics led him to propose that the ultimate constants of physical theory were habits of mind, and that we should therefore find nature to have gradually settled into them in the early stages of the history of the universe.  I like to think that the young Peirce would have recognized that the old Peirce was here using the method of fixing belief by what seemed agreeable to his reason.  Especially now that the question of the origin of constants of nature has become a live scientific issue, we can see that Peirce’s reasons for being attracted to the idea have no useful connection with the scientific motives and methods for exploring it.

    As a scientific realist, I am convinced that metaphysics will be useful in explicating and understanding the nature of reality.  But the basic ideas will all come from science.  That shouldn’t seem implausible today, when the following have become hot topics of scientific investigation, although in no cases have those investigators found anything useful in prior metaphysical inquiry:
     1.  What is mass, and why do some of the fundamental particles have mass?  [Probably because of the interaction of the Higgs boson with other fundamental fields.]
     2.  Are there quanta of space?  [That’s a basic feature of the major alternative to string theory.  Need I point out that no proponents of that alternative have found Zeno’s arguments useful?]
     3.  What is time?  Specifically, is time travel possible?  The consensus that has emerged in physics is that time travel in any significant sense is probably not possible, but that philosophical arguments of impossibility are irrelevant.  It may still turn out that there are physical mechanisms that do make a certain type of time travel possible; and if so, those mechanisms will automatically ensure (in some way not yet understood) that the circumstances leading to the contradictions described by the philosophers simply don’t arise.  (In that way, philosophical attempts to delimit the future possibilities of physics are misconceived.)

    Here, then, are the ideas I’d like to leave you with.  We may hope – I do hope – that basic concepts will eventually be found: concepts that determine our thought in the very patterns by which reality itself is determined.  Once science has established such concepts, I expect that philosophy will prove useful in formulating them and weaving them into a comprehensive and comprehensible system of knowledge.  But philosophy does not have and never will have a clue as to what those concepts are, until science discovers them.  For that reason, we as philosophers must Beware of Basic Concepts – that is, of concepts that seem basic to our rational reflection.  The sad lesson of the history of metaphysics is that reason has no resources for recognizing the concepts that are basic for the thinking of reality.