Discussion Board 3 The Relevance of Anselm
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Discussion Board 3: The Relevance of Anslem
Prompt:
How would you communicate Anselm’s ontological argument to a lay audience? Try to
“translate” his argument in plain language. Imagine what the reaction of your interlocutor
would be. What does the argument tell us or expect us to believe about the being of God?
There have been a lot of intellectuals who attempted to prove the existence of God and its nature
through the very definition and concept of God. Anselm has arrived at what might be considered
two arguments. Both of these “purport to prove, simply from the concept of God as the supreme
being, that God’s existence cannot rationally be doubted by anyone having such a concept of
him.”
1
The second argument “makes the stronger claim that God exists necessarily, or in other
words, God possesses a kind of existence that is possessed by no other thing.”
2
Communicating Anselm’s ontological argument to a lay audience would be hard. Anslem’s
argument basically says that I have an idea of God as a being who is the greatest than can ever be
conceived. Since this being exists in reality, it is greater than if it only exists in the mind.
Suppose for a minute you could choose your perfect parents. They were always happy, never
argued, and looked like they had just stepped out of Cosmopolitan magazine. Wouldn’t that be
great? They always made you the center of their world, buying you gifts, taking you out, and
never imposing punishment on you. Certainly, you would think, “I have the perfect parents.” But
those parents cannot be your perfect parents because they do not exist. Wouldn’t they be more
perfect if they existed? If those parents were even more perfect, if they were real, and you could
live with them, then they would exist. If they did not exist, they could never be your perfect
parents. The ontological argument was inspired by this kind of thinking, except instead of your
perfect parents, the argument is for the existence of God, a perfect being.
My interlocutor might tell me that they do not believe in God, but if you can conceive of God,
even to say you do not believe in him, you concede his existence.
“The ontological argument says that if you can imagine a perfect being, it would be more perfect
if it existed; therefore, it must exist. In other words, the ontological argument alleges that God
exists because if he did not exist, he would not be the perfect being, and if he were not the
perfect being, then he would not be God.”
3
1 Richard Taylor, “Introduction to”
The Ontological Argument: From St. Anselm to the Contemporary Philosophers,
by Alvin Plantinga. (New York, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1965.) vii-ix
2
Ibid., 1965, ix.
3
.
3
Graham
Oppy, “Ontological Arguments.” In
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
, edited by Edward N. Zalta,
Winter 2021. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2021.
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/ontological-arguments/
.
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