Outlining the Ontological Arguments and Their Success as Proofs of God's Existence

Outlining the Ontological Arguments and Their Success as Proofs of God's Existence

The ontological argument is a perfect example of a priori argument.

For example, it uses logic to prove an initial definition to be

correct. The term refers to a whole series of arguments within a

thought. The arguments aim is to prove God’s existence from the

meaning of the word God. St Anselm was the man who suggested that

deductive reasoning could be used to prove God’s existence - a priory

argument. The ontological argument is a rationalist argument. A

rationalist argument is a view that true knowledge of the external

world does not come through experience. It is through reason alone,

without reference to the external world, that the truth is known. The

argument is also deductive. It uses a method of reasoning by logical

stages to reach a conclusion. Each philosopher who contributed to the

argument though up ‘logical stages’, which lead to a final conclusion.

The Ontological argument can be separated down to three stages. The

first being about the definition of God as that than which no greater

can be conceived, and its suggestions. The second being the logicality

of God not existing at all, and finally why ’the fool’ believes that

which is impossible, to be true. The four philosophers who gave their

views about the existence of God took these three parts into great

consideration, and from them they constructed what they believed to be

a suitable conclusion.

There are four main contributors of the argument arranged into two

groups, the ‘Classical’ Ontological arguments and the ‘Modern’ ones.

Both try to challenge peoples views and try to find ...

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...clusion is that maximal

existence is possible, and therefore God’s existence is possible, and

not actual.

After reviewing the comments of the four philosophers about there

views of the Ontological argument and the existence of God, it seems

that that the argument is generally unsuccessful. One reason why this

could be is because the definitions are extremely limited and

restricted. They don’t look into the situation into enough detail to

make the comments seem extremely believable.

Also, the task of actually defining God is especially difficult, due

to the fact that we are only limited to human terms to describe God,

which proves to be inadequate. Due to the absolute colossal size and

magnificence of God, it is a truly impossible task to describe the

details of him, due to the lack of details we currently have.