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Running head: ANSELM'S ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT Anselm's Ontological Argument May 27, 2009 Anselm's Ontological Argument Anselm's Ontological Argument is the argument for the existence of God, presented by famous theologian of the 11 th century, Anselm. Basically, it implies the following. According to Anselm, God is the greatest thing ever that can be conceived, and if assuming that God did not exist, some other thing, greater than God would inevitably exist. These two axioms are followed by the assumption that no greater thing than God can be conceived (to a certain extent, this is the first axiom, reformulated and repeated). Finally, Anselm concludes that as far as the second assumption contradicts to the first one, it is false; therefore, God must exist.
To put it differently, while describing how this argument is supposed to work, it is important to understand the following. Anselm considers that any person who would put into doubt Gods existence, knows about God and agrees that the God is the greatest thing that can be ever conceived. As it is greater to exist outside the mind, the person (even when putting into doubt the existence of God) would agree that something greater can be thought of than God. However, as this assumption contradicts to the very definition of God, it appears to be false. Therefore, God exist. Also, to describe how Anselm's Ontological Argument works, we can revert to the example of falling dominoes for Aquinas's Argument from Motion.
The world exists and people exist in the world. It sounds valid that the world we exist in is the effect of something else that happened earlier. Something should be the cause of the worlds existence, and this something should appear well before the world, causing the world to exist. It is difficult to find out the exact earlier cause of the worlds existence, as it can be merely anything (for example, the explosion of the sun that hurled dust into the space, this dust could then thickened into a mass, gained enough weight to orbit a heavier object in the universe, or any other thing that could cause the existence of the world). Yet, it is obvious that the world was caused by something that came before it. In its turn, there should be something that caused the thing which caused the world to exist, and this chain is endless.
This infinite regression is explained in Aquinas's Argument from Motion. The philosopher asserts that there should be an end somewhere, as something should obviously had to be this first cause. If imagine a raw of dominoes, where all dominoes are falling down in order, there should be the first domino that started the series. The same holds true for Aquinas's Argument from Motion, as there should be the first cause that began a chain reaction. Although this violates all notions and laws of physics, it sounds very logical and proves the validity of Anselm's Ontological Argument.
However, it should be noted that it is quite difficult to prove that Anselm's Ontological argument is sound and valid, as this method hardly can prove the matter of existence. It is obvious that the validity of the argument for existence of God is in mind. Anselm obviously confuses physical necessity and logical necessity and there is no valid interference and logical reasoning from the concept (or the thought of being) to the real existence of God. Although Anselm's conclusion of the existence of God is valid, it is still not sound because Anselm's premise can be easily questioned (and it was questioned by various philosophers).
In such a way, Anselm's Ontological argument works only for God.
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