The question of whether God exists or not is a difficult question to answer because there is no definite proof to prove He exists. It has been such a controversial topic that to this day there is still no universally accepted answer. A scientific point of view and a religious point of view, both have their own reasons and speculations and although some points are mutually accepted, there is no mutual answer to this question. A great majority in the scientific side will believe God does not exist while the religious side disagrees and vice versa as long as both sides have no solid proof. By a solid proof, I mean something where people can clearly see that it is in fact proof of God’s existence. Words, speculations, and …show more content…
Essentially, if you understand and accept that God is the greatest thing possible, that means God exists in your understanding. Anselm uses the example of a painting to explore this concept. He says that a painting which a painter wants to create exists in his understanding as the painter knows what he wants to paint. If the painter didn’t know what he wanted to draw, then that painting would not exist in his understanding. However when faced with something that exists just in your understanding and something that exists in reality, which one is greater? If we think about a million dollars, would it be greater to have it in real life or just to imagine about it? Regardless of one’s response, the answer of “both” would contains their response. Therefore having both would be greater. Anselm applies this logic to his argument where God existing only in your mind is not as great as a God that exists in your mind and in reality. If God only existed in your mind, then God would, in fact, not be the greatest thing. There would be some other thing existing both in reality and in your mind and therefore that thing would be greater than God. Therefore, as Anselm’s second premise, God has to exist in both the mind and in reality to not contradict our definition of God. Following the two …show more content…
His argument looks at the broad sense of what God is and disregards your individual opinion on what God is if you have one. Someone can argue with the argument by saying something not completely relevant to the argument such as saying we have not actually proved the existence of God because we still do not know if he is the creator of the universe is. However, that has nothing to do with our argument. We have proved the definition and therefore existence of God; not whether or not he is the creator. Through the use of deductive argument, the strong premises have persuaded me that God does in fact