1.5.2

Criticisms of the Ontological Argument

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Criticisms of the Ontological Argument

Gaunilo was a monk and a contemporary of Anselm, who argued you could not define things into existence. Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher in the Age of Enlightenment.

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Gaunilo's counter-argument

  • Gaunilo constructed a reductio ad absurdum argument (disproving an argument by showing it's absurd) to show the flaw in Anselm’s argument.
    • Imagine a lost island – the most excellent of all islands.
    • You can form the idea of this island in your mind.
    • So according to Anselm’s logic, the island must exist in reality.
    • But this is absurd, and so is Anselm’s argument.
  • Anselm replied that islands are contingent things and so do not have necessary existence, whereas God does.
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Kant's counter-argument

  • Kant argued that “It would be self-contradictory to posit a triangle and yet reject its three angles, but there is no contradiction in rejecting the triangle together with its three angles."
  • In other words, if God exists he must be necessary, but only if. Definitions can only tell us what God would be like if he existed.
  • Kant says that existence is not a real predicate. It does not give us any information about an object. ‘To exist’ merely means that an object is actual.
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Quotation from Kant

  • Existence adds nothing to a concept: “If we take the subject (God) with all its predicates (eg. all knowledge), and say ‘God is’ or ‘There is a God’, we attach no new predicate to the concept of God…merely posit it as being an object that stands in relation to my concept. The content of both must be one and the same… The real contains no more than the merely possible. A hundred real thalers (German coins) do not contain the least coin more than a hundred possible thalers.”

Jump to other topics

1Philosophy of Religion

1.1Ancient Philosophical Influences: Plato

1.2Ancient Philosophical Influences: Aristotle

1.3Ancient Philosophical Influences: Soul, Mind, Body

1.4The Existence of God - Arguments from Observation

1.5The Existence of God - Arguments from Reason

1.6Religious Experience

1.7The Problem of Evil

1.8The Nature & Attributes of God

1.9Religious Language: Negative, Analogical, Symbolic

1.10Religious Language: 20th Century Perspective

2Religion & Ethics

3Developments in Christian Thought

3.1Saint Augustine's Teachings

3.2Death & the Afterlife

3.3Knowledge of God's Existence

3.4The Person of Jesus Christ

3.5Christian Moral Principles

3.6Christian Moral Action

3.7Development - Pluralism & Theology

3.8Development - Pluralism & Society

3.9Gender & Society

3.10Gender & Theology

3.11Challenges

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