Thanks, Anselm. Or should I call you "Saint"? I had 17 minutes extra today, since I finished my walk and my cook is LATE preparing my food. (You know how nervous that makes me.) So I thought I would put that extra time to productive use.

Well, let's hope a little time on FB will help your social life, Manny (and, yes, "Anselm" is fine). Your social life can't get any worse, that's for sure. In fact, that's the one thing I'm absolutely certain of—other than the existence of God, of course.

Hold on there just a minute. Make fun of my social life if you like—I don't care. But what's this business about being absolutely certain that God exists? It's not, of course, that I personally doubt God's existence—not for a moment. But it sounds as if you think you can prove this as a fact. Is that right?

That's right, and I can. Very simple. We have the concept of a perfect being, right? You can't deny that we have the concept, at least. And a perfect being is one that has every possible perfection—perfect goodness, perfect wisdom, etc. Now existence is a possible perfection, is it not? Surely it's better for a thing to exist than not to exist. So a perfect being who lacked existence would be a contradiction—like talking about a round square. Therefore, God, as a perfect being, necessarily exists! It's a matter of logic.

Don't take this the wrong way, Anselm, but you need to spend less time on Facebook and more time reading—specifically my writings. You would see that I have utterly demolished this line of reasoning long ago. Your argument depends on supposing that "existence" is a predicate—a property alongside goodness, wisdom, and all the rest. But think of something like a table: let's say it has the properties of being blue and of having four legs. Now the concept of the table is exactly the same, whether or not it exists. Right? We are talking about a four-legged blue thing in either case. And that is to say, existence is not a predicate, not an additional property of a thing; "existence" tells us whether or not a concept is realized, but it is not part of the concept itself. So, there is no contradiction whatsoever in speaking of a nonexistent God. Sorry, God may indeed exist, but your argument fails big time.

Anselm?

Well, that's funny. The king of Facebook himself now seems mysteriously too busy to write anything. I guess even saints don't like to be wrong.

As I believe I've informed you in the past, René, I do not find references to my lack of physical stature humorous. You are free to move on.

Hey, Manny, don't take it like that. I was just making a little joke. Though I must add that I am, in fact, inherently free to move on, whether I have your permission or not. If you had read my Meditations, you would see that I proved the existence of a will that is entirely without limitations.

I am quite familiar with your book, and with your argument for freedom of the will. Count me as unconvinced. After all, you are a scientist yourself and devotee of Isaac Newton. Do you deny that we live in a mechanical universe, as Sir Isaac Newton has demonstrated, a universe in which every event has a cause? Where is there room for this utterly free will you speak of?

Oh, so Immanuel Kant is a hardcore determinist, is he? I don't even need to refer you to my own subtle arguments; you just need to think a little bit. Do you not have a book on ethics—two of them, even? You evidently have not realized that all this talk of the moral law and moral responsibility and all the rest makes no sense without freedom of the will. After all, do we hold a rock morally responsible if it falls on someone's head and kills him? Of course not! You yourself implicitly assume the existence of freedom of the will, even while you claim to deny it.

René, you and your tall friends might be able to whip me on a basketball court, but you're in my court now, baby—the court of philosophy. And on this court, I run circles around you. What you fail to realize is that we must make a distinction between the two realms each of us inhabits—the realm of appearances (the world we normally think of as "reality") and the noumenal realm, the world of things in themselves. The realm of appearances is the realm structured by the mind, the realm described by Newton, where every event is determined. But the noumenal realm is not structured by the forms of the intuition and the categories of the understanding. Since causality and the rest of the a priori structures of the mind do not apply here, then, total freedom holds sway. And it is with reference to ourselves as inhabitants of the noumenal realm that the moral law applies.

Well, isn't that convenient? Just assume a world of freedom to get yourself off the hook. Sorry, but by your own standards, we could never know ourselves as members of this so-called noumenal realm, since, as you yourself admit, it falls outside the cognitive structures that make knowledge possible. I'll show you the impossibility of your position once I give you a moment to absorb this devastating blow.

Save yourself the trouble, buddy, as I'm way ahead of you—as always. We do not know ourselves as members of the noumenal realm, for the reasons you note. But we can still realize ourselves as such beings on a practical level. And we do so whenever we act in accordance with the dictates of morality. Not only do I show how freedom is possible, then, I also show that it is experienced in behaving as a moral being. A true tour de force, as you might put it (though probably won't).

I know there's a problem there, just give me a few days to think about it.

You can have all the time you want. But let's just say I'm not too worried.