By fully understanding the definition of God Anselm came to realise God must exist. His premises stated that God is the greatest conceivable being and only a fool would believe that God exists only in his understanding and not in reality. This is because it is greater to exist in reality than in understanding therefore as the greatest being He must exist both in understanding and reality. Basically Anselm claimed that God’s existence is necessary by the very nature of the definition of God.
Gaunilo of Marmountiers who also lived in the eleventh century, was one of the earliest recorded theologians to criticise Anselm’s argument for God by definition. In Gaunilo’s work entitled ‘On Behalf of the Fool’ he publicly rejected Anselm’s study even though he was a man who believed in God himself. Gaunilo’s argument claimed that Anselm’s method of defining God into existence was poor as it could be used to define anything into existence so long as we include ‘most excellent’ as one of its properties. Without further empirical evidence therefore it was said that Anselm’s argument was useless.
Gaunilo’s most famous counter-example was the perfect island, used to undermine Anselm’s foundations;
We can imagine a perfect island of which it is the greatest that can be conceived, and as it is greater to exist in reality than merely in understanding this island we concocted must exist.
This argument was devastating to the work of Anselm as it proved that being able to conceive the greatest being doesn’t actually imply its existence. It was structured in much the same way as Anselm’s and therefore did reveal a huge flaw in his debate (relying on definition alone). Gaunilo went on to say that the Fool was right in assuming that the concept of the ‘most perfect’ being exists only in understanding).
Anselm claimed that Gaunilo failed in attempting to destroy the argument as he lacked the understanding of Gods attributes, namely that God is a necessary being and therefore cannot be conceived of as not existing. This Anselm believed showed that the very meaning and nature of God entailed his existence in the external world.
St Thomas Aquinas said;
‘Because we do not know the essence of God, the proposition … (God exists)…is not self-evident to us.’
Aquinas did agree that there is knowledge that can be know a priori (for example; that I exist), however he said that in order to hold this self-evident knowledge we must be able to define the subject and predicate. Due to our lack of intelligence when it comes to the ‘supernatural’ Aquinas claimed it would be impossible to define God as we can never really grasp the definition of the greatest conceivable being. Therefore we are not in a position to accept the conclusions drawn from the premises without first defining the indefinable subject and predicate.
Descartes’ Ontological argument was very similar to Anselm’s, however it differed in description but came to the same deduction. Descarte said that God as a supremely perfect being holds the supreme perfection of existence and therefore exists in reality. Anselm’s concept of God differs but both philosophers use existence as a predicate of the argument. It is by definition that God holds all essential perfections that a supremely perfect being would hold and Descarte believed that existence was most definitely a supreme perfection as existence in reality (as it is described in Anselm’s Proslogion.) is more prefect than that of which can only be conceived.
Descarte said in Meditation V;
‘From the fact that I cannot conceive of God without existence, it follows that existence is inseparable from him, and hence that he really exists.’
Therefore it is concluded that a man who questions the existence of God isn’t describing God because of the necessity of Gods’ existence.
Immanuel Kant is another Christian Philosopher, who lived a century after Descarte, to criticise the Ontological argument. The proposition ‘God necessarily exists’ is said to be analytic by both Anselm and Descarte, Kant however said that it does not necessarily follow, even thought the proposition is true by definition (that God exists). Kant argues that it is possible to accept that a proposal is true by definition (the subject and predicate of the proposition are inseparable) and yet the subject doesn’t refer to anything in this world. There are inseparable predicates that when taken from the concept of the subject cease to exist as we know them; for example, when we separate the horn from the Unicorn the subject of which we are discussing is no longer the subject we were discussing i.e. the Unicorn. Therefore horn forms part of our definition of a Unicorn but of course it does not follow that any Unicorns do exist. Kant concluded that although we cannot deny the inseparability of the subject and predicate we can deny the existence of both the subject and predicate altogether. So we can only know for sure that if God exists he must necessarily exist. God therefore does exist by definition but the word God doesn’t reveal whether he exists in reality or not.
Kant’s second criticism says that existence isn’t a real predicated and therefore it can’t form part of the definition of God. Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege agreed with Kant when criticising the Ontological argument. Russell said that ‘Existence is quite definitely not a predicate’. This proposition was based on the idea that it doesn’t describe a property of the subject. Frege argued that ‘existence’ is just another way of saying there is something in the world that corresponds to the concept of this subject. For example when we say ‘a moon-jumping cow’ we are not describing anything new simply a four stomached ruminate which jumps over a moon and exists. The ruminant which jumps over the moon corresponds to an object in the world. But whilst the predicate describes the cow it doesn’t prove the existence of the jumping-ruminate. Therefore when we say something exists we don’t describe it or make observations about it we simple state that there is such a thing in the world. Therefore when we say God exists we are only saying there is something in the world which corresponds to God. This damages the Ontological argument because it means for us to say God exists we must be able to find something in the empirical world that corresponds to God which means we cannot rely on definition alone and the a-priori argument certainly isn’t sufficient to prove the existence of God.
In conclusion Anselm’s first version of the Ontological argument is very weak and can be refuted easily. However, Norman Malcolm, an English theologian, believed that St Anselm’s second version of the Ontological argument and Descartes version claiming that ‘God’s existence is necessary’ is correct, even though it is ambiguous. This means that the proposition ‘God exists’ is necessary in the same way that 5 + 5 = 10 is a necessary truth. Even though this ambiguity of a ‘necessary existence’ is a possible criticism against Malcolm some find it more convincing than the arguments which state that God’s existence is necessarily and contingently false. This is because some believe that it is more possible for God to exist than for God not to exist even with the criticisms previously raised.
