Ontological Argument

Question 1

Anselm’s First Form

Answer 1

• God is that than which nothing greater can be thought
• A real, existent being would be greater than an imaginary, illusory being.
• Therefore the concept of God is surpassed by an actual, existent God.

Question 2

Anselm’s Second Form

Answer 2

• God is that which nothing greater can be thought
• Because God is unsurpassable in every way, God must have necessary existence
• Therefore God exists – necessarily.

Question 3

Anselm’s Understanding of God – the difference between contingent and necessary existence

Answer 3

• His argument centres on a definition of God as ‘that than which nothing greater can be thought’ - God understood to be the highest sum of all perfections, where nothing could surpass him in any way.
• Anselm argues that God must exist because a necessary being cannot fail to exist.
• Necessary existence is part of the very definition of God.
• It makes no sense to Anselm to talk of a God who does not exist, because then he would not be God.
• For Anselm the existence of God is not something which needs to be demonstrated by evidence (a posteriori), instead we can know simply by considering the concept of God – a priori.

Question 4

Descartes’ understanding of existence as a perfection which God cannot lack.

Answer 4

• Descartes believed that people were born with innate ideas – that there are some concepts which are imprinted on our minds from birth and which are universally shared by all humanity.
• Amongst these concepts he believed we are born with an understanding of what God is. We understand God to be the supremely perfect being, with all the perfections as his attributes.
• Descartes explained that existence is part of the very essence of God, just as three angles adding up to 180 degrees are part of the essence of a triangle and a valley is part of the essence of a mountain.
• If God has all perfections, and existence is a perfection, God therefore must exist.
• Descartes goes on to say that as God is perfect, he must be unchanging and so he must always have existed and will always continue to exist for eternity.

Question 5

Gaunilo’s Analogy of the Island in On Behalf of the Fool

Answer 5

• Gaunilo argued that someone could imagine something like a beautiful island, and think that this was the most excellent, perfect island.
• Using Anselm’s reasoning, Gaunilo argued that for the island to really be the greatest island it must exist in reality as well as in the imagination.
• However the island does not exist in reality just because we have imagined it to be so. We cannot just define things into existence.
• Anselm replied that ‘a perfect island’ would be contingent and would never have to exist in the way that God as a necessary being would have to.
• God as the greatest thing that can be thought is, by his very nature, in a category of one and is something that cannot not exist or be greater or bettered.

Question 6

Kant’s Challenges to Ontological Arguments

Answer 6

• Kant argued that existence is not a predicate.
• A predicate is something that adds to our knowledge of what a subject is like, for example, such as a thing is big or brown or flat.
• Speaking about existence does not tell us anything about the object that helps us in the identification of that object.
• Therefore to say that ‘God does not exist’ is not a logically contradictory statement.
• For Kant all statements about existence are synthetic – true or false after verification.
• The existence of God needs to be verified externally rather than through internal analysis of the term.