For Anselm, God cannot not exist. Descartes supported Anselm in his book ‘meditations’ and developed Anselm’s argument particularly in terms of necessary being. He based his argument for God’s existence on the idea that God is a ‘supremely perfect being’. Descartes believed that we can conclude that God exists, because existence is a predicate of a perfect being; therefore God must exist to avoid being self contradictory.
Hence, it doesn’t exist. Following the above, everything God creates is therefore perfect, hence omnipotent, a quality coherent to the attributes of the god of theism. Again, Augustine attempts to take the blame off God by saying that evil is committed by humanity’s abuse of free will. Yet, God couldn’t have created humans without free will because the point of our existence would be lost, as free will differentiates humans and gives us individuality – it gives our life meaning and purpose. If we were not given free will, the lack of freedom and choice would render us similar to robots.
Outline two key objections to the Ontological Argument and explain the responses made to them. The ontological argument was first introduced by Anselm in the ‘Prosologian’. It is an a priori argument as it is not based on empirical evidence but id deductive and analytic in that it allows one to use logical reasoning to reach a logically necessary conclusion which, in theory, cannot be disputed. Anselm defines God as ‘that than which nothing greater can be conceived’ (TTWNGCBC) and states that everyone, theist or not, can accept this definition. He argues that ‘the fool’ in Psalm 53 can conceive of God but fails to believe he exists.
This does not convince however that God does not exist because evil is necessary for the good. This means evil is needed in a perfect universe. The combination of the convincing arguments for God’s
He then trounces the argument, saying, “If we use the causal argument at all, all we are entitled to infer is the existence of a cause commensurate with the effect to be explained, the universe, and this does not entitle us to postulate an all-powerful, all-perfect uncaused cause. The most it would entitle one to conclude is that the cause is powerful enough and imperfect enough to have created the sort of world we know.”1 He then states that because the world is imperfect, and because we see a great deal of unnecessary evil, if we reason that there is a creator at all, he must be either “a malevolent powerful being or . . . a well-intentioned muddler.”2 It would seem that Mr. McCloskey assumes that the universe as we know it (with its current defects) must be the world as it was created, without considering the theist’s appeal to special revelation as to why this may be so.
In this essay I am going to focus on Anselm ontological argument and comment on its strengths and weakness of his argument to prove the existence of God. Anselm’s ontological argument can be seen as a Reductio ad absurdum, which means it is a logical argument that aims to prove contention by demonstrating that its denial leads to absurdity. Anselm’s argument explains that it is contradictory for someone to accept that God to exist in understanding and not in reality. This is because according to the existence of perfection a doctrine that something is greater if it exists in addition t being thought of, and God is greater than which nothing can be thought therefore He has to exist in both understanding and reality. The argument goes like this: 1.
McCloskey states that one of the major problems is believing in an uncaused first cause. He states that the mere existence of the universe does not constitute for believing in a being (God). While McCloskey has this view, we learn in the readings of Evans and Manis (2009), that the term contingency of the universe is often used to refute the question of what about the universe support the claim that God exists (pg. 69). This merely states that if we look around at the universe we will see things that may or may not have existed if there was not a God or other necessary being.
Bertrand Russell also put forth the argument that the universe is a brute fact and it created itself. He believes that there is no more reason to explain this that there is to explain that God is the prime mover
a) Give an account of the fundamental ideas of the design argument for the existence of God (21 marks) The design argument for the existence of God is also called the teleological argument. The design argument is based on observation on the obvious order in the natural world, to conclude that it’s the result of design not just by chance. The evidence from design indicates that there is a designer and the argument concludes that this designer is God. ‘With such signs of forethought in the design of living creatures, can you doubt they are the work of choice or design?’ Socrates. The design argument is based on the view that the universe has order, purpose and regularity.
* God is perfect being – where did idea come from? Is it a creation of the mind? * Cannot be thought of because we are imperfect beings, and if everything has a cause, when we think of a perfect being, it must have been caused by a perfect being * Cause of anything is at least as real as that thing (if A caused B, A = or > B) * Idea is just as real as cause – cause is just as real as the thing it caused No imperfect being can be the cause of the idea of a perfect being. Cannot know what God is, but can possess a positive idea of what is perfect CARTESIAN CIRCLE * In order to prove God’s existence he has to use the very ideas that God’s existence was supposed to guarantee * God guarantee’s truthfulness of one’s ideas, but my ideas guarantee that God