One of the famous arguments for the existence of God is the ontological argument. And, as is well known, of all the versions of the ontological argument, it is Anselm’s argument for God’s existence that stands out the most.
What is common among these versions of ontological argument, including Anselm’s argument for God’s existence, is the claim that it is self-contradictory to deny the existence of a greatest possible being. In other words, for the adherents of the ontological argument, the existence of a greatest possible being is necessary, and He is God. Therefore, God exists.
On a side note, according to Norman Melchert (1999), the term “ontological” comes from the ancient Greek word onto, which means being. The term “ontological argument” was given such name in the eighteenth century by one of its critics, namely, Immanuel Kant. This is because, unlike the argument of St. Thomas Aquinas, it does not begin from facts about the world from which the term “cosmological arguments” was derived. Instead, it goes straight from the idea of God to the conclusion about his being and his necessary existence.
According to Melchert, many thinkers find it important to distinguish two, or even more, distinct arguments because at least one form of the argument is pretty obviously invalid. In his version of the ontological argument, Anselm does not do so. Many thinkers interpret Anselm’s argument as one argument. Let us now briefly sketch Anselm’s argument for God’s existence.
Anselm’s Argument for God’s Existence: A Brief Sketch
For Anselm, God does not just exist, but God “truly and necessarily” exists so that it is impossible for us to think that He does not exist. According to Melchert, this apparently simple, yet deeply perplexing argument is called in the history of philosophy as ontological argument.
Anselm’s ontological proof of God’s existence, which he developed in his famous work titled Proslogium, begins with a definition of God. But the idea of definition here does not necessarily refer to the “idea” of something as produced by experience. By “definition” Anselm means our rather abstract conception of God when we utter the word God.
For Anselm, God is a being in which nothing greater can be thought of or, in Anselm’s own words, “than, that which no greater can be conceived” (Melchert, p. 270). According to Melchert, Anselm used this convoluted phrase for two reasons. On the one hand, Anselm does not want the idea of God to be limited by what we may be able to conceive. On the other hand, Anselm does not want to suggest that a positive conception of God can be entirely comprehensible by us. Suppose we are thinking or conceiving of a certain being. According to Anselm, if the mind can still conceive of something greater than what we have just thought, then it is not yet God that we have conceived. This is because it is not yet “that, than which no greater can be conceived”. Hence, as we can see, Anselm’s ontological proof of God’s existence rests entirely on the conception of a being in which nothing greater can be thought of or, again, in Anselm’s own words, “that, than which no greater can be conceived”.
It is important to note that this line of thinking was framed in terms of the Augustinian notion of a Great Chain of Being. As we may already know, the Great Chain of Being is a hierarchical structure of all matter and life, which, in medieval Christianity, has been understood as being decreed by God. This means that the world is ordered by the degrees of being and value (or greatness) in its various parts. For example, the tree is higher than the stone, while humans are higher than the trees, and so on. Now, if we move up and down the chain, it would appear pretty obvious that we can easily conceive of lesser and greater beings; and in doing so, we are inevitably led to think of an idea of something that is not only greater than other beings, but of an idea of something that we cannot even think of a greater. As Anselm would have us believe, this being, which is at the highest point of the Great Chain of Being, is God.
Now, if God is a being in which nothing greater can be conceived, is there such being in reality? Of course, it might be the case that this being in which nothing greater can be thought of exists only in the mind, like the idea of a golden mountain or a unicorn. As we can see, this calls to mind the contention of the atheists that “There is no God”.
In response to this, Anselm argues that the claim that God does not exist in reality is absurd because while we can utter the words “There is no God” or “God does not exist”, we cannot clearly think what we mean without falling into the pit of contradiction. This is because the idea of God appears to be self-evident. If we think of the Great Chain of Being, we cannot help but affirm the existence of a being in which nothing greater can be conceived. God, therefore, necessarily exists.
As we can see, the atheists are wrong, at least for Anselm. Indeed, for Anselm, the statement “There is no God” or “God does not exist” is absolutely false. Hence, as Anselm argues, it follows not only that God exists but also that it is impossible that He does not exist. Melchert (p. 273) puts Anselm’s argument for God’s existence this way:
Anselm’s argument for God’s existence, as we can see above, moves from God’s essence to God’s existence. In other words, it moves from our understanding of what God is to the fact that God is. “In certain clear sense, the argument is a claim that the existence of God is self-evident. What that means is that it is enough to understand the conception of God to know that God must exist. Nothing else is required. God’s essence entails God’s existence.” (Melchert, p. 273)