The Ontological Argument
I. Introduction
In the year 1098, the monk/arch-bishop/philosopher Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) began work on his third text the Prosologium. Though he had written at length before, primarily on interpretative doctrines of religious theology, in the Prosologium he attempted a bold new task. His attempt was to prove the existence of god, through the means just of reason. His efforts produced “the ontological argument” (sometimes referred to as the “argument from perfection” or the “argument from reason”), debated not just during his time, but also for literally a full millennium after. For this noble effort, he is often credited as being “the father of medieval scholastic thought”
To better acquaint the reader with the circumstances of the authorship of the Ontological Argument, it may be worthwhile to engage in a thought experiment. Imagine you are a monk living in the middle of the middle ages. The church is extremely strong, and rarely does anyone publicly state beliefs other then those of orthodox religion. Nevertheless, times are not well and more and more people are losing faith. Besides just debating the intricacies of religious interpretation, a puzzle enters your mind. Perhaps you could construct an argument that would be powerful enough to convince even those damned heretics of the truth of your faith. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Ah but how could one achieve that feat?
The first thought might be to simply read a passage in the Bible that states that god exists. But if somebody is questioning the existence of god, they probably aren’t going to buy that one. What common ground do you then have with them? Well, the heretics claim to be using reason to support their claims. Hmmm, what if you could use their weapon – reason – and fight them on their own turf? This might have been along the lines of what Anselm was thinking in constructing his argument.
In this paper, the author will look first at the properties of Anselm’s Ontological Argument (that it is deductive and a-priori), reflect on the simple historical form and expand that into the full modern form. Then the author will conduct a review by premise, including objections to the soundness of each premise. The links between premises and validity will then be examined. The author will than consider external objections (of which Guanilo’s perfect island argument is an excellent example). Finally, the argument will not be accepted for reasons to be...