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GOD exist A Wrst cause, by deWnition, cannot be brought into existence by anything else; so either it just exists or it does not If it does not exist, why does it not? If its existence is possible at all, there is nothing that could cause its non-existence But we have shown that it is possible; therefore it must exist Moreover, it must be inWnite; because there cannot be anything that could limit its power Scotus accepts that an inWnite being is possible only if there is no incoherence in the notion of such an entity It is a weakness, he thinks, in Anselm’s argument that he does not show that ‘that than which no greater can be thought’ is a coherent concept But if there were any incoherence between the notions of being and inWnity, Scotus claims, it would long ago have been detected The ear can quickly detect a discord, and the intellect even more easily detects incompatibilities (Ord 162–3) Even if we concede to Scotus that the notion of God is coherent, his argument seems to fail, by trading on diVerent senses of ‘possible’: logical possibility, epistemic possibility, and real possibility From the mere logical possibility of God’s existence, nothing follows about whether he actually exists An agnostic may admit that perhaps, for all we know, there is a God: that is what is meant by ‘epistemic possibility’ But from logical possibility and epistemic possibility, nothing follows about real possibility, still less about actuality ‘It is possible that there is a God’ is not the same as ‘It is possible for God to come into being’.13 Since the concept of godhead includes everlasting existence, nothing has the power to bring any god into existence If God exists, he must always have existed Nor does anything have the power to prevent a god from existing, or to terminate the existence of a god Such powers are all conceptually impossible, because of the nature of the concept God But the absence of such powers shows nothing at all about whether that concept is or is not instantiated For Scotus, the most important element in the concept of God is inWnity The notion of inWnity is simpler, more basic, than other concepts such as goodness: it is constitutive of divine being, not just an attribute of divinity InWnity is the deWning characteristic of all the divine attributes: divine goodness is inWnite goodness, divine truth is inWnite truth, and so on Each divine perfection ‘has its formal perfection from the inWnity of the essence as its root and foundation’ (Oxon 32) Scotus proves the 13 The diVerence between the two statements is much more obvious in English than in the medieval Latin equivalent 306
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