Unlike the other two arguments for the existence of God, which have been around ever since people first looked up at the stars or out over the mountains and thought "Wow!", the ontological argument is quite recent and was invented by a single person. It was first proposed by Anselm of Canterbury, an Archbishop who lived in Medieval England. Anselm came up with the ontological argument after it appeared to him in a dream - a bit like the way Paul McCartney wrote Yesterday.
Anselm's ontological argument was controversial right from the start, because everyone who reads it feels convinced it's wrong but can't explain why. |
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That than which nothing greater can be conceived - Anselm
Rene Descartes was one of the greatest philosophers of the modern era and wrote Meditations on First Philosophy in 1641. Here he puts forward his own version of an ontological argument. Descartes’ version ("Cartesian" means "belonging to Descartes") goes like this:
P1 By “God” we mean “a supremely perfect being” P2 Existence is “a certain perfection” P3 A supremely perfect being will possess all perfections C God must possess the perfection of existence |
It's common for atheists to say that the "burden of proof" rests on theists to prove that God exists and, until there is proof, the reasonable position is to doubt that God exists. Hartshorne's argument flips that on its head. Now the atheist has a much more difficult job: proving that God is IMPOSSIBLE (not just rather unlikely).
If God is very unlikely then it's still POSSIBLE that he exists and the ontological argument shows that if God's existence is possible then God must exist necessarily. |
A 2008 campaign put this poster on London buses. Unfortunately, it's not enough to say there's PROBABLY no God if you want to defeat the ontological argument.
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Another American philosopher and famous defender of Christian beliefs, Alvin Plantinga, developed the ontological argument further in his book The Nature of Necessity (1974). He used a type of thinking called “modal logic” which involves imagining alternative possible worlds.
For example, although our world is a possible world, there is another possible world in which Alvin Plantinga became a farmer rather than a philosopher (similar to the “multiverse” theory you may have come across as a critique of the Design Argument). |
Classic Star Trek: 1968's episode "Mirror, Mirror" takes our heroes to an alternative possible world where there are evil versions of themselves (and Spock has a beard!)
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The ontological argument is currently in a strange place. Most philosophers agree that it is invalid - there's a logical problem in it somewhere. Richard Dawkins calls it "infantile" and a piece of "trickery". There is a general sense that you can't move from statements about definitions (an analytic proposition) to conclusions about what exists in reality (synthetic proposition). However, the exact problem with the ontological argument is hard to pin down and it is still promoted today by religious philosophers like William Lane Craig.
In this video, Craig presents the 'new' version of the ontological argument by Malcolm and Plantinga.
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every philosopher sooner or later comes to the conclusion that the proof is right, but we don't know how, and later comes to the conclusion that the proof is wrong, but we don't know why - Prof. Messick
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