Anselm's Ontological Argument for the Existence of God Explained

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  • เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 มี.ค. 2024
  • This video summarizes Anselm's Ontological Argument for God's existence, and explains why the very definition of God might proof that God must exist.
    Have questions? You can reach me at thomascahillquestions@gmail.com.

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  • @RealAtheology
    @RealAtheology หลายเดือนก่อน

    One issue here is that Anselm equivocates between the mere concept of God (as a maximally great being) and the positive instantitation of such a concept. What Anselm wants to say is that the fool is conceiving _"not-really-existing being than which nothing greater can be conceived-"_ which is clearly a contradiction in terms of the part of the fool. But as Mackie points out in _The Miracle of Theism_ :
    _"But the fool can avoid being caught in this trap. His conceiving of a being than which nothing greater can be conceived is just that: it is no more than is involved in his understanding of the key phrase, an understanding which he shares with Anselm and with any other reasonably intelligent person. He does not need to, and presumably does not, include non-existence within this concept. But, separately, he thinks and says that there is no such being, that this concept is not realized or instantiated, whereas Anselm, for example, thinks and says that it is realized and instantiated. The fool's judgement that this concept is not realized does not commit him to reading non-existence back into the content of that concept, which is what would be needed to involve him in incoherence."_ (pg. 52)
    I think Mackie is correct here in that while Anslem wants to hold the fool as conceiving a reductio through his thinking of a maximally great being, and then building non-existence into the concept, we can take a contrary role as seeing the fool distinguishing between the concept and its relation. This point is actually pressed further in a 2004 paper _Anselm's Equivocation_ by David A. Truncellito, which outlines some of the relevant distinctions: _'That is, it is right to claim that the fact that we have a concept of something does not entail its existence. However, this is not, as is traditionally argued, because the domain of conceivability outstrips the domain of existence, so that there are conceivable but nonexistent entities. Rather, it is because concepts and beings are different in kind. Similarly, existence in the understanding and existence in reality are incommensurable. Thus, it is impossible, in principle, for the ontological argument to be sound."_