Examine the significant features and strengths of the ontological argument for the existence of god (18 marks)

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Examine the significant features and strengths of the Ontological argument for the existence of god (18 marks)

The Ontological argument aims to prove the existence of God by reason alone. It does this by only focusing on the definition of god thus making it an analytic argument, as well as a prior, as it does not rely of empirical evidence to prove God’s existence. This is strength as it makes the argument universal since no evidence is required to be able to understand or follow it. It is also deductive as the premises contain the conclusion and therefore this also makes it more convincing.
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The theory was developed by Anselm in ‘Proslogian’. In Proslogian 2 Anselm uses a priori and deductive logic to prove God’s existence. Anselm states that the definition of God is ‘that than which nothing greater can be conceived’. He argues that is impossible to think of anything better than God, since by definition, God is perfect and therefore has all good attributes. Existence as an attribute is better than non-existence because what exists in re is better than was exists in intellectu. Therefore since by definition God is perfect, we can deduce that God must have existence as ...

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