The Ontological Argument makes me think of Alice's cry of "curiouser and curiouser!" from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", for it is a different sort of argument for God's existence. So let's take a look at the most basic formulation of it.
Anselm of Canterbury, an 11th and early 12th century Christian theologian, developed what is commonly called "St. Anselm's Ontological Argument". He wrote "God is that than which a greater cannot be conceived". If you want to go back and read that again, I'll wait here for you. So according to Anselm, God must have the property of existence. For if God did not exist, it would be possible to conceive of something greater - a God that did exist.
The Ontological Argument is an attempt to prove that God exists by definition. But just because a definition of something infers that it must exist doesn't mean that it exists.
For example, if I say:
- Unicorns are the most wonderful beings; and
- It is more wonderful to exist than to not exist
that does not prove, therefore, that unicorns exist. This argument - and the Ontological Argument - begins with the presumption that its subject exists.
Anselm's argument has led to no small amount of head scratching. For instance, what does he mean by "greater"? I would think a greater God would be a God that created a perfect. world, a world that is only good and is without evil, as God is said to be. A God that would not need or allow suffering, a God that would overcome any logical reason for having suffering - that God would seem to be greater than a God that did create and/or allow suffering (unless one is a masochist or a sadist and, therefore, likes suffering). But nearly all of us would agree that our world contains suffering. Therefore, we can show that God - at least by Anselm's definition - does not exist.
Anselm's argument would also suggest that God could not have existed before It supposedly created the universe. "Huh?",. you might reasonably say. Well, let's think about this - before God supposedly created our universe, it could be argued that a God that has created a universe would be greater. than a God who has not created a universe. So by Anselm's reasoning, since we can conceive of a greater God than something that hasn't even created a universe (tsk, tsk), there could be no pre-universe God. And, therefore, the universe was not created by God, since before the universe existed there was no God to create it.
And as the Ontological Argument gets curiouser and curiouser, we might add that it is also a circular argument:
The Ontological Argument does not prove a God exists because it offers no evidence or, as we've seen above, any workable logic showing that God exists. It is an assumption based upon a wish to believe in God, without any evidential or logical basis.
Now that's a pretty dry way to end this section, so let's end it with a verse from "The Ballad of St. Anselm". (author unknown), sung to the tune of "Waltzing Matilda".:
Once a jolly friar got himself an argument
And couldn't get it out of his mind.
He thought that he could prove the existence of the Deity
Because of the way that the words are defined.
