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The Ontological Argument And Pascal's Wager Argument

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The Ontological Argument and Pascal’s Wager The “Ontological Argument” was created by Saint Anselm; this argument is in support of God’s existence. His argument is one based on observation and reason not on empirical evidence and is spit in to three parts. The parts include why god exists, why god cannot be thought to not exist, and lastly why atheists are able to think that God does not exist. In the first section he begins with a definition of God that he believes everyone would be accepting of and that cannot be disputed. His definition is “something-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought” (Pg.15) or in simpler terms the greatest conceivable being. Anselm uses reductio ad absurdum to prove that the contrary to his belief would be absurd. …show more content…
This begins again with a hypothetical situation in which there is an island with people living on it that has no contact with the outside world. Some elders do tell stories where at one point in time the island was part of an empire ruled by an emperor. One day a ship arrived confirming the stories and said the emperor had a message for them. The message said that he wanted them the village to send their allegiance to him. The emperor is called the “hidden emperor” because he has never been seen or perceived. Three people from the island speak out about the belief of whether or not they believe this emperor exists. The first is a bearded man who is skeptical because of the lack of evidence for this emperor and does not believe that he actually exists because he is hidden. The second person is the believer and believes his hiddenness is to give us a choice in whether to believe or not. The final person is the tentative believer who acknowledges the fact that the hiddenness is strange, but feels that the fact he is hidden means he does not care whether or not we believe in his existence. If this is true and God does not care if you believe or not Pascal’s “Wager” falls apart because his entire theory is based on God caring if you believe and rewarding or punishing based on if you

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