Ontological Argument By Philosopher St. Anselm Of Canterbury

The Ontological argument, written by philosopher St. Anselm of Canterbury in his book the Proslogion in the eleventh century, is a metaphysical argument for the existence of God in reality. In this essay I will discuss the validity of this argument.
In this text Anselm states that the concept of God has the necessary and sufficient condition of being maximally perfect- ‘that than which a greater cannot be thought’- and that, since existing in reality is greater than existing only conceptually, God must exist in reality as well. Thus, if you understand the concept of God, you must agree that he is the greatest and that he exists, since these are written into the framework of the concept.
Many philosophers have tried to disprove this theory and …show more content…
He exemplifies his claim with ‘the Lost Island.’ ‘There are those who say that somewhere in the ocean is an island, which, because of the difficulty- or rather, impossibility- of finding what does not exist, some call ‘the Lost Island’. This island, (so the story goes) is more plentifully endowed than even the Isles of the Blessed with an indescribable abundance of all sorts of riches and delights. And because it has neither owner nor inhabitant, it is everywhere superior in its abundant riches to all otherlands that human beings inhabit’. Since the concept of the island can be understood, it should also be accepted that it can exist. Anselm proves this wrong by saying that, this logic can only be applied to the maximally perfect God. First of all, the description given is not enough to prove is perfectness; the island can be faced with temporal, environmental and other consequences, unlike the concept of God. Also, there can be only one maximally perfect concept, that of God, hence that is the only concept this reasoning for existence can be applied