The Ontological Argument

Anselm’s Original Argument

This ontological argument is so named after the Greek word for “being” (ontos). It was made famous by Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109). The whole thing is a meditation in prayer to God. Some have cited this fact to suggest that it is not much of a formal demonstration after all. Others join the meditative element to the fact that begins with Scripture. And that he does. “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Ps. 14:1). “But,” Anselm thought, “Even the fool has in his mind the idea of what I mean when I speak of a being than which none greater can be conceived” [1]. This is Anselm’s working definition of God.

And what makes the FIRST PREMISE is this: We all have this idea of such a being. Now the first objection to this argument comes naturally from the fool. Anyone can simply say, “No. I don’t have any such idea! And I certainly reject yours!”

On a slightly more sophisticated level, this objection will say, “You are just defining God that way up front. How convenient! In fact this is a circular argument. Your definition of God is ‘One who must exist,’ and then you argue from there that such a one does exist. Well of course!” And so the early question we have to wrestle with is this: Why should any of us accept Anselm’s definition?

The key word that really captures the idea is ‘limitless.’ By Greatest Conceivable Being we mean a being without limitation in what some philosophers have called “great making properties.” Now this is a bit of a misleading phrase, but I think we can make it work. Craig elaborates on this in simple terms: “God is the greatest conceivable being. This is true by definition, for if we can conceive of something greater than God, then that would be God” [2].

Unlike the other famous arguments for God’s existence, this is what we call an a priori argument: an argument from principles of the mind prior to (or independent of) any experience in the world. In other words, it doesn’t depend on any evidence of the senses, but rather proceeds by pure logic. The very definition of the idea of God in the mind is then followed by a series of inferences to a conclusion. So is this idea of God an intuition or demonstrable? We must balance out the notion that this is “purely” deductive. No amount of discursive reasoning will be purely deductive, as our premises are always of some-thing (whether perceived via the senses or else contemplated as an immaterial entity). To say that what I am contemplating is a “pure definition” is certainly a strange claim. A pure definition of what? But let us get back to the argument.

Our SECOND PREMISE is that it is greater to exist outside of the mind than merely inside. Anselm continues,

And assuredly that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, cannot exist in the understanding alone. For suppose it exists in the understanding alone: then it can be conceived to exist in reality; which is greater.… Therefore, if that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, exists in the understanding alone, the very being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, is one, than which a greater can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible. Hence, there is no doubt that there exists a being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality [3].

We could map things out in a proof of deductive logic. There are two obvious premises: the first very controversial and the second not so much. But let’s pause over these, so we get can make use of Anselm’s idea, even if he did not quite put things this way.

1. There is a Greatest Conceivable Being.

2. Mind-independent existence is greater than mind-dependent existence.

∴ The Greatest Conceivable Being exists independent of our minds.

No one doubts that premise two and the conclusion are exactly what Anselm meant. The controversy is really over premise one. Must we say that “There is the idea of the GCB” or may we say that “There is a GCB” from which the idea is derived? Is this really ontology or conceptualism? Let me leave that aside for a moment, and proceed to follow through with the proof. This strong version can be demonstrated by a form of proof called reductio ad absurdum. We take our conclusion (3) and state the opposition in an additional line 4. In the lines that follow, we derive a contradiction. That means that the opposing position (from 4) is inherently illogical, namely:

1. There is a Greatest Conceivable Being.

2. Mind-independent existence is greater than mind-dependent existence.

3 The Greatest Conceivable Being exists independent of our minds.

4. The Greatest Conceivable Being does not exist independent of our minds.”

Now remember that we said there were “obvious” premises here, but then there are also hidden premises. For example, premise 2 really assumes the following: If a being greater (G) than the one being conceived (C) can be conceived, then the being presently conceived (C) is not the greatest conceivable being.

Even once we clarify such things, the task of translating the best form of Anselm’s argument into symbolic logic exceeds our study. For our purposes, the upshot is this. Within the skeptic’s own logic is the punchline of the reductio ad absurdum: the contradiction. If we allow both that extra-mental existence is greater than merely mental, and if at the same time we insist that this being exists only in the mind, then notice what follows.

The Greatest Conceivable Being exists independent of our minds and does not exist independent of our minds.

Thus to deny the existence of the Greatest Conceivable Being violates the law of noncontradiction. The original conclusion of Anselm is thus established. God has so designed the mind with his logic that we cannot conceive of his non-existence: though the sinner will do his best to pretend to. 

Now the most infamous modern objection to the argument came from Immanuel Kant. He examined this step of the argument and said that Anselm was assuming what he should not have: that existence is a perfection, or that it is a predicate at all. But existence isn’t a thing which can be possessed in greater or lesser degrees. One either is or is not. A being cannot have being, he reasoned, but a being is a being [4]. To many people this criticism has made sense. But as a matter of fact, Kant could not have been further from the truth. Anselm wrote again about this proof. And he added to this concept of existence independent of the mind the all-important concept of necessary existence. “For example, if x necessarily exists, then its existence does not depend on the existence of any being (unlike contingent human beings whose existence depends, at the very least, on the existence of their parents). And this seems to entail that x has the reason for its existence in its own nature” [5].

Gaunilo’s Reply and Evaluation

The first competent objection to Anselm’s argument came from a fellow monk in his own day. A man named Gaunilo wrote a letter “On Behalf of the Fool.” And his criticism was fairly clever at first glance. Essentially he said, “Anselm, that is like saying that there is an island than which none greater can be conceived. And since it is greater to exist outside of the mind than merely inside, well, then the greatest conceivable island must exist!” In other words, he is saying that “Anselm slyly moves from the existence of an idea to the existence of the thing that corresponds to the idea. He is defining God into existence!” Now hopefully we can spot the logical fallacy in Gaunilo’s reasoning. There is a total difference between a particular being like an island, which by definition has a limited essence (shoreline, etc.) as opposed to a Being whose very essence is to exist without limitation. “But,” again we might ask, “isn’t this still cheating?” There is a great statement in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy about intrinsic maximums:

Properties like knowledge, power, and moral goodness, which comprise the concept of a maximally great being, do have intrinsic maximums. For example, perfect knowledge requires knowing all and only true propositions; it is conceptually impossible to know more than this. Likewise, perfect power means being able to do everything that it is possible to do; it is conceptually impossible for a being to be able to do more than this [6].

Anselm didn’t follow through here. Or at least, he didn’t use the language of logical contradiction as precisely as we might like. The Reformed Classical response to this is “So what?” and “Let’s cross that last T for him!” Thomas Aquinas actually rejected the ontological argument because he got hung up on the whole “fool” part of it. He thought, “Wait a minute, plenty of people do not understand ‘G-O-D’ by this idea, and so forth.” An unfortunate red herring. This idea of self-evidence is simply not a necessary component to this argument, and Anselm’s exact approach didn’t help here. Centuries later, the French rationalist, René Descartes, articulated his own version of the ontological argument. He made the same mistake as Anselm in starting with the necessity of our concept of God, and so I won’t rehearse his rendition. But Thomas had another objection to Anselm which will set us up to strengthen the case. Aquinas said that even if we concede that the argument is valid, the first premise is still unsound because the concept of infinity in “Greatest Conceivable” far exceeds our grasp.

Subsequent Development

Jonathan Edwards gives us a clue to a better path. What Edwards did was to more explicitly shift the focus from the idea of this being to the reality of this being, so that when we speak of the impossibility of this being’s non-existence, we are no longer speaking of our capacities to conceive but of the necessity of the reality per se. The problem is that Edwards never wrote anything formal about the subject. All that we know comes from two isolated statements: one almost a parenthetical footnote in The Freedom of the Will and the other from a notebook of what became called the Miscellanies, many of which were written when he was still a teenager [7]. So we can only guess how he would have tied up all the loose ends. Now Edwards does begin with the idea of being, pointing out that we cannot have the idea of non-being, very colorfully commenting that, “To think of nothing belongs to sleeping rocks.” But he then moves beyond our mind, saying that, “it would be, in itself, the greatest absurdity to deny the existence of being in general, or to say that there was absolute and universal nothing” [8].

The authors of Classical Apologetics summarized the improvement that Edwards’ made in this way: “Anselm … shows that we cannot not think of being. Edwards shows that we cannot think of nonbeing. Anselm shows that being must be; Edwards that nonbeing must not—cannot—be … Therefore, we cannot think of being not being ever or anywhere:

Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! (Ps. 139:7-8). And then here comes the real takeaway: “Consequently, this eternal, infinite being must necessarily exist because we cannot think of it not existing; and the only ultimate proof of the existence of anything is that we cannot think of it not existing, ever” [9].

In the twentieth century, theistic philosophers have attempted to improve in ways that I do not think are improvements at all. The aforementioned Norman Malcolm, Charles Hartshorne, and Alvin Plantinga have each incorporated more recent philosophical categories to form ontological arguments. Modal logic in particular has been added. Thus, for example, a “maximally excellent being” must exist in all possible worlds. A final way to state the argument in the most succinct way was by one who followed in Edwards’ theology a century later. According to the Reformed theologian, W. G. T. Shedd,

“The human mind possesses the idea of an absolutely perfect being, that is, of a being than whom a more perfect cannot be conceived. But such perfection as this implies necessary existence; and necessary existence implies actual existence, because if a thing must be, of course it is “[10].

The classical formulation of the ontological needs advancement (including fine-tuning), but it does not need an overhaul. As we said before, since the non-existence of necessary being violates the law of noncontradiction, therefore God necessarily exists.

Edwards’ next step is instructive for how natural theology begins to inform theology proper, and we will have a few Scriptures to back it up.

Therefore, the only way that any thing that is to come to pass hereafter, is or can be necessary, is by a connection with something that is necessary in its own nature, or something that already is, or has been [11].

In other words, absolutely nothing has the power to exist except the God who is Necessary Being. Edwards became convinced, early on, that if God did not uphold all of his effects by his word, then all of them would, in the most literal sense, disintegrate. He was a few centuries ahead of our theoretical physicists who give us an analogy of the situation by their work with infinitesimally divisible particles. What all is really there? What we see is only the surface. Even the subatomic realm is only the surface. Only one being has a nature which is simply to be; only one who has the power to be, in his whole being. Everything else is made up of nothing but attributes that are effects and thus cannot keep themselves in existence, moment by moment. Now, does the Bible teach this?

If he should set his heart to it and gather to himself his spirit and his breath, all flesh would perish together, and man would return to dust (Job 34:15).

and he upholds the universe by the word of his power (Heb. 1:3)

And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together (Col. 1:17).

This is central to God’s naming of himself to Moses: “I AM that I AM” (Ex. 3:14). God is the one being whose essence is to exist. With every other being we are dealing with things that are possible to be or not to be. But there must be one being whose existence is not possible to take away without “pulling the rug out” of all contingent beings. If at any point this “rug was pulled out,” then all else would cease to be. If such a being at any point did not exist, then nothing else could exist. It could be considered that Thomas Aquinas’ own third way was at least partly an ontological argument, in that it appealed to the necessity of a necessary being, though clearly a different form than that of Anselm [12].

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1. Anselm, Proslogion, ii.

2. William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith (Wheaton: Crossway, 1994), 79.

3. Anselm, Proslogion, ii

4. Norman Malcolm, who formulated his own ontological argument, agreed with Kant’s criticism.

5. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Ontological Argument for God’s Existence”

6. ibid.

7. The particular essay in which this is found is called “On Being.”

8. Edwards, The Freedom of the Will, 20.

9. Sproul, Gerstner, Lindsley, Classical Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984), 106

10. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 202.

11. Edwards, The Freedom of the Will, 20.

12. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica. Part I. Q.2. Art. 3