How does st anselm defines god

Theorem 2: If something is God-like, then the property of being God-like is an essence of that thing. Given a sufficiently generous conception of properties, and granted the acceptability of the underlying modal logic, the listed theorems do follow from the axioms. This point was argued in detail by Dana Scott, in lecture notes which circulated for many years and which were transcribed in Sobel and published in Sobel It is also made by Sobel, Anderson, and Adams.

So, criticisms of the argument are bound to focus on the axioms, or on the other assumptions which are required in order to construct the proof. Some philosophers have denied the acceptability of the underlying modal logic. And some philosophers have rejected generous conceptions of properties in favour of sparse conceptions according to which only some predicates express properties. But suppose that we adopt neither of these avenues of potential criticism of the proof. What else might we say against it?

At most, the various axioms which involve this concept can be taken to provide a partial implicit definition. I is the property of having as essential properties just those properties which are in the set.

G 1 , G 2 , … are further properties, of which we require at least two. The creatures are distinct because each has a different set of essential properties. Then consider the following argument:. Under suitable assumptions about the nature of accessibility relations between possible worlds, this argument is valid: from it is possible that it is necessary that p , one can infer that it is necessary that p.

Setting aside the possibility that one might challenge this widely accepted modal principle, it seems that opponents of the argument are bound to challenge the acceptability of the premise. They cannot, perhaps, be said to prove or establish their conclusion. So God exists. So God does not exist. While there is room for dispute about exactly why all of this is so, it is plausible to say that, in each case, any even minimally rational person who has doubts about the claimed status of the conclusion of the argument will have exactly the same doubts about the claimed status of the premise.

Some commentators deny that St. Anselm tried to put forward any proofs of the existence of God. Even among commentators who agree that St. Anselm intended to prove the existence of God, there is disagreement about where the proof is located.

Some commentators claim that the main proof is in Proslogion II , and that the rest of the work draws out corollaries of that proof see, e. Other commentators claim that the main proof is in Prologion III , and that the proof in Proslogion II is merely an inferior first attempt see, e. In what follows, we ignore this aspect of the controversy about the Proslogion. Instead, we focus just on the question of the analysis of the material in Proslogion II on the assumption that there is an independent argument for the existence of God which is given therein.

Here is one translation of the crucial part of Proslogion II due to William Mann , —1 ; alternative translations can be found in Barnes , Campbell , Charlesworth , and elsewhere :. There have been many ingenious attempts to find an argument which can be expressed in modern logical formalism, which is logically valid, and which might plausibly be claimed to be the argument which is expressed in this passage.

To take a few prime examples, Adams , Barnes and Oppenheimer and Zalta have all produced formally valid analyses of the argument in this passage.

We begin with a brief presentation of each of these analyses, preceded by a presentation of the formulation of the argument given by Plantinga , and including a presentation of some of the formulations of Lewis Chambers works with the analysis of Adams From 1 and 2.

It is false that a being greater than God can be conceived. Hence, it is false that God exists in the understanding but not in reality. Each thing which exists in reality is greater than any thing which exists only in the understanding. If a person can conceive of something, and that thing entails something else, then the person can also conceive of that other thing.

If a person can conceive that a specified object has a given property, then that person can conceive that something or other has that property. Hence the being than which no greater can be conceived exists in reality.

From 1 - 6 , by a complex series of steps here omitted. From 1, 2, 3. For any understandable being x , there is a world w such that x exists in w. For any understandable being x , and for any worlds w and v , if x exists in w , but x does not exist in v , then the greatness of x in w exceeds the greatness of x in v. There is an understandable being x such that for no world w and being y does the greatness of y in w exceed the greatness of x in the actual world.

Hence There is a being x existing in the actual world such that for no world w and being y does the greatness of y in w exceed the greatness of x in the actual world.

From 1 - 3. Hence There is in the understanding a unique thing than which there is no greater. Hence There is in the understanding something which is the thing than which there is no greater. From 2 , by a theorem about descriptions. Hence There is in the understanding nothing which is greater than the thing than which there is no greater. From 3 , by another theorem about descriptions. If that thing than which there is no greater does not exist in reality , then there is in the understanding something which is greater than that thing than which there is no greater.

Since they also provide a clear reason for thinking that this new version of the argument is not persuasive, it won't be considered further here.

Considered as interpretations of the argument presented in the Proslogion , these formulations are subject to various kinds of criticisms. And that is surely a bad result. Second , the Meinongian interpretations of Barnes , Adams and Oppenheimer and Zalta produce arguments which, given the principles involved, could easily be much simplified, and which are obviously vulnerable to Gaunilo-type objections.

Consider, for example, the case of Oppenheimer and Zalta. It would surely be absurd to claim that Anselm is only committed to the less general principles: what could possibly have justified the restrictions to the special cases? But, then, mark the consequences. So, by the first claim, there is at least one existent perfect being in the understanding. And, by the second claim, any existent perfect being is existent.

So, from these two claims combined, there is—in reality—at least one existent perfect being. This argument gives Anselm everything that he wants, and very much more briefly.

The Proslogion goes on and on, trying to establish the properties of that than which no greater can be conceived. After all, when it is set out in this way, it is obvious that the argument proves far too much. Third , some of the arguments have Anselm committed to claims about greatness which do not seem to correspond with what he actually says.

The natural reading of the text is that, if two beings are identical save that one exists only in the understanding and the other exists in reality as well, then the latter is greater than the former. But Barnes , for example, has Anselm committed to the much stronger claim that any existing thing is greater than every non-existent thing.

Given these kinds of considerations, it is natural to wonder whether there are better interpretations of Proslogion II according to which the argument in question turns out NOT to be logically valid. Here is a modest attempt to provide such an analysis:. Now, entertaining this idea or possessing this concept requires the entertainer or possessor to recognise certain relationships which hold between given properties and the idea or concept in question. For example, given that you possess the concept of, or entertain the idea of, a smallest really existent Martian, it follows that you must recognise some kind of connection between the properties of being a Martian, really existing, and being smaller than other really existing Martians, and the concept or idea in question.

In other words, we must be able to have the concept of, or entertain the idea of, a smallest really existing Martian without believing that there really are any smallest Martians. It will be useful to introduce vocabulary to mark the point which is being made here. We could, for instance, distinguish between the properties which are encoded in an idea or concept, and the properties which are attributed in positive atomic beliefs which have that idea or concept as an ingredient. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to entertain the idea of a being than which no greater can be conceived—and to recognise that this idea encodes the property of real existence—without attributing real existence to a being than which no greater can be conceived, i.

Of course, the argument which Anselm actually presents pays no attention to this distinction between encoding and attributing—i. And then the reductio argument is produced to establish that that than which no greater can be conceived cannot exist only in the understanding but must also possess the property of existing in reality as well and all mention of the Fool, and what it is that the Fool believes, disappears.

As it stands, this is deeply problematic. How are we supposed to regiment the references to the Fool in the argument? Is the reductio argument supposed to tell us something about what even the Fool believes, or ought to believe?

Are the earlier references to the Fool supposed to be inessential and eliminable? How are we so much as to understand the claim that even the Fool believes that that than which no greater can be conceived exists in the understanding?

Following the earlier line of thought, it seems that the argument might go something like this:. Hence Even the Fool believes that that than which no greater can be conceived exists in the understanding. No one who believes that that than which no greater can be conceived exists in the understanding can reasonably believe that that than which no greater can be conceived exists only in the understanding.

Hence Even the Fool cannot reasonably deny that that than which no greater can be conceived exists in reality. While this is not a good argument, it could appear compelling to one who failed to attend to the distinction between entertaining ideas and holding beliefs and who was a bit hazy on the distinction between the vehicles of belief and their contents.

When the Fool entertains the concept of that than which no greater can be conceived he recognises that he is entertaining this concept i. Conflating the concept with its object, this gives us the belief that than which no greater can be conceived possesses the property of existing in the understanding.

Now, suppose as hypothesis for reductio , that we can reasonably believe that that than which no greater can be conceived possesses the property of existing only in the understanding. Ignoring the distinction between entertaining ideas and holding beliefs, this means that we when we entertain the idea of that than which no greater can be conceived, we entertain the idea of a being which exists only in the understanding.

But that is absurd: when we entertain the idea of that than which no greater can be conceived, our idea encodes the property of existing in reality. So there is a contradiction, and we can conclude that, in order to be reasonable, we must believe that that than which no greater can be conceived exists in reality. But if any reasonable person must believe that that than which no greater can be conceived exists in reality, then surely it is the case that that than which no greater can be conceived exists in reality.

And so we are done. However, the point of including it is illustrative rather than dogmatic. In the literature, there has been great resistance to the idea that the argument which Anselm gives is one which modern logicians would not hesitate to pronounce invalid. But it is very hard to see why there should be this resistance. Certainly, it is not something for which there is much argument in the literature.

For a more complex analysis of Proslogion II that has it yielding a valid argument, see Hinst Many recent discussions of ontological arguments are in compendiums, companions, encyclopedias, and the like. So, for example, there are review discussions of ontological arguments in: Leftow , Matthews , Lowe , Oppy , and Maydole While the ambitions of these review discussions vary, many of them are designed to introduce neophytes to the arguments and their history.

Given the current explosion of enthusiasm for compendiums, companions, encyclopedias, and the like, in philosophy of religion, it is likely that many more such discussions will appear in the immediate future.

Some recent discussions of ontological arguments have been placed in more synoptic treatments of arguments about the existence of God. So, for example, there are extended discussions of ontological arguments in Everitt , Sobel , and Oppy His analyses are very careful, and make heavy use of the tools of modern philosophical logic.

There has been one recent monograph devoted exclusively to the analysis of ontological arguments: Dombrowski Szatkowski is a recent collection of papers on ontological arguments. A significant proportion of papers in this collection take up technical questions about logics that support ontological derivations. Those interested in technical questions may also be interested in the topic taken up in Oppenheimer and Zalta and Gorbacz The most recent collection is Oppy Finally, there has been some activity in journals.

The most significant of these pieces is Millican , the first article on ontological arguments in recent memory to appear in Mind. Needless to say, both the interpretation and the critique are controversial, but they are also worthy of attention.

Among other journal articles, perhaps the most interesting is Pruss , which provides a novel defence of the key possibility premise in modal ontological arguments. Without asserting that God exists, Anselm asks what is it that we mean when we refer to the idea of "God.

Within your understanding, then, you possess the concept of God. As a non-believer, you might argue that you have a concept of unicorn after all, it is the shared concept that allows us to discuss such a thing but the concept is simply an idea of a thing. After all, we understand what a unicorn is but we do not believe that they exist. Anselm would agree. Two key points have been made thus far:.

When we speak of God whether we are asserting God is or God is not , we are contemplating an entity whom can be defined as "a being which nothing greater can be conceived. When we speak of God either as believer or non-believer , we have an intra-mental understanding of that concept, i. Anselm continues by examining the difference between that which exists in the mind and that which exists both in the mind and outside of the mind as well. What is being asked here is: Is it greater to exist in the mind alone or in the mind and in reality or outside of the mind?

Anselm asks you to consider the painter, e. Anselm contends that the painting, existing both within the mind of the artist and as a real piece of art, is greater than the mere intra-mental conception of the work.

Let me offer a real-world example: If someone were to offer you a dollar, but you had to choose between the dollar that exists within their mind or the dollar that exists both in their mind and in reality, which dollar would you choose? Are you sure At this point, we have a third key point established:. It is greater to exist in the mind and in reality, then to exist in the mind alone. Have you figured out where Anselm is going with this argument? If God is that than greater which cannot be conceived established in 1 above ; B.

And since it is greater to exist in the mind and in reality than in the mind alone established in 3 above ; C. Then God must exist both in the mind established in 2 above and in reality; D. In short, God must be. God is not merely an intra-mental concept but an extra-mental reality as well. But why? Because if God is truly that than greater which cannot be conceived, it follows that God must exist both in the mind and in reality.

If God did not exist in reality as well as our understanding, then we could conceive of a greater being i. But, by definition, there can be no greater being. Thus, there must be a corresponding extra-mental reality to our intra-mental conception of God. God's existence outside of our understanding is logically necessary. In an RAA, you reduce to absurdity the antithesis of your view. Since the antithesis is absurd, your view must be correct. Anselm's argument would look something like this:.

Either [God exists] or [God does not exist]. Assume [God does not exist] the antithesis of Anselm's position. If [God does not exist] but exists only as an intra-mental concept , then that being which nothing greater which can be conceived, is a being which a greater being can be conceived. This is a logical impossibility remember criterion 3 ;. Therefore, [God does not exist] is incorrect;. Therefore [God exists].

The argument is not that "If you believe that god exists then god exists". That would be too ridiculous to ask anyone to accept that if you believe that X exists and is real then X exists and is real. The ontological argument does not ask a person to assume that there is a deity or even a GCB. Look at it this way: Anselm invites people to think about a certain conception of the deity,i.

What Anselm did was to place into the concept itself the idea that the being must exist outside of the mind and in the realm of the real and not just inside the mind in the realm of imagination. You must think that the GCB exists outside of the mind and in the realm of the real and not just inside the mind in the realm of imagination.

Why must you think that? Because it you did not think that, then you would not be thinking of the GCB as defined by Anselm. It is like this: Think of a triangle. If you do you must think of a three sided figure lying on a plane with three angles adding up to degrees.

Because if you are not thinking of a three sided figure lying on a plane with three angles adding up to degrees then you are not thinking of a triangle. Because if you are not thinking that the being must exist outside of the mind and in the realm of the real and not just inside the mind in the realm of imagination then you are not thinking of the GCB.

In all of this it is only thinking. A variation of this argument by Alvin Plantinga exists. So any such argument presupposes the existence of the subject it talks about. See also the related logical problem of existential import of statements in Aristotelian logic. If the existence of something is implied by a statement, then the statement is said to have "existential import.

Note that Anselm's argument is similar in form to Socrates' defense in the Apology against the charge that he is an atheist: he argues he is not an atheist because his accusers recognize he believes in divine things. Anselm's Reply: No, not at all—Anselm believes he is not just comparing ideas.

The comparison is between existing in the mind alone and existing in the mind and in reality. Both of these are thought of as they are, not thought of as in the mind. Note: Yet how can this objection be phrased without the notion of "the thought or idea" of existence… If Anselm is wrong here, it would seem to follow that deductive arguments i. Instead, this kind of rationality only shows the relations of ideas to other ideas.

Further Reading: Anselm of Canterbury. Wikipedia 's reprint from the scholarly Encyclopedia Britannica on Anselm's life and works. Ontological Arguments. A good discussion with extensive links to the history, classification, and classic objections to various versions of the ontological argument by Graham Oppy in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. As before, the argument includes a premise asserting that God is a being than which a greater cannot be conceived.

But this version of the argument, unlike the first, does not rely on the claim that existence is a perfection; instead it relies on the claim that necessary existence is a perfection. This latter claim asserts that a being whose existence is necessary is greater than a being whose existence is not necessary. Otherwise put, then, the second key claim is that a being whose non-existence is logically impossible is greater than a being whose non-existence is logically possible.

This second version appears to be less vulnerable to Kantian criticisms than the first. To begin with, necessary existence, unlike mere existence, seems clearly to be a property. Notice, for example, that the claim that x necessarily exists entails a number of claims that attribute particular properties to x. 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. But these latter claims clearly attribute particular properties to x. And only a claim that attributes a particular property can entail claims that attribute particular properties. While the claim that x exists clearly entails that x has at least one property, this does not help. We cannot soundly infer any claims that attribute particular properties to x from either the claim that x exists or the claim that x has at least one property; indeed, the claim that x has at least one property no more expresses a particular property than the claim that x exists.

This distinguishes the claim that x exists from the claim that x necessarily exists and hence seems to imply that the latter, and only the latter, expresses a property. Moreover, one can plausibly argue that necessary existence is a great-making property. To say that a being necessarily exists is to say that it exists eternally in every logically possible world; such a being is not just, so to speak, indestructible in this world, but indestructible in every logically possible world — and this does seem, at first blush, to be a great-making property.

As Malcolm puts the point:. If a housewife has a set of extremely fragile dishes, then as dishes, they are inferior to those of another set like them in all respects except that they are not fragile. Those of the first set are dependent for their continued existence on gentle handling; those of the second set are not.

There is a definite connection between the notions of dependency and inferiority, and independence and superiority. To say that something which was dependent on nothing whatever was superior to anything that was dependent on any way upon anything is quite in keeping with the everyday use of the terms superior and greater.

Nevertheless, the matter is not so clear as Malcolm believes. It might be the case that, other things being equal, a set of dishes that is indestructible in this world is greater than a set of dishes that is not indestructible in this world. But it is very hard to see how transworld indestructibility adds anything to the greatness of a set of dishes that is indestructible in this world.

From our perspective, there is simply nothing to be gained by adding transworld indestructibility to a set of dishes that is actually indestructible. And the same seems to be true of God. Suppose that an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, eternal and hence, so to speak, indestructible , personal God exists in this world but not in some other worlds. It is very hard to make sense of the claim that such a God is deficient in some relevant respect. It is simply unclear how existence in these other worlds that bear no resemblance to this one would make God greater and hence more worthy of worship.

From our perspective, necessary existence adds nothing in value to eternal existence. There have been several attempts to render the persuasive force of the ontological argument more transparent by recasting it using the logical structures of contemporary modal logic. One influential attempts to ground the ontological argument in the notion of God as an unlimited being.

As Malcolm describes this idea:. God is usually conceived of as an unlimited being. He is conceived of as a being who could not be limited, that is, as an absolutely unlimited being. In this conception it will not make sense to say that He depends on anything for coming into or continuing in existence.

Nor, as Spinoza observed, will it make sense to say that something could prevent Him from existing. Lack of moisture can prevent trees from existing in a certain region of the earth. But it would be contrary to the concept of God as an unlimited being to suppose that anything … could prevent Him from existing. The unlimited character of God, then, entails that his existence is different from ours in this respect: while our existence depends causally on the existence of other beings e.

Here is his argument for this important claim. A very similar argument can be given for the claim that an unlimited being exists in every logically possible world if it exists in some possible world W ; the details are left for the interested reader. Since there are only two possibilities with respect to W and one entails the impossibility of an unlimited being and the other entails the necessity of an unlimited being, it follows that the existence of an unlimited being is either logically necessary or logically impossible.

The existence of an unlimited being is logically impossible only if the concept of an unlimited being is self-contradictory. Rather, as we saw above, Malcolm attempts to argue that there are only two possibilities with respect to the existence of an unlimited being: either it is necessary or it is impossible. And notice that his argument does not turn in any way on characterizing the property necessary existence as making something that instantiates that property better than it would be without it.

In particular, Premise 2 is not obviously correct. To defend this further claim, one needs to give an argument that the notion of a contingent eternal being is self-contradictory. Indeed, there are plenty of beings that will probably never exist in this world that exist in other logically possible worlds, like unicorns. Plantinga begins by defining two properties, the property of maximal greatness and the property of maximal excellence, as follows:.

Accordingly, the trick is to show that a maximally great being exists in some world W because it immediately follows from this claim that such a being exists in every world, including our own. There is no logically possible world in which a square circle exists given the relevant concepts because the property of being square is inconsistent with the property of being circular.

Here is a schematic representation of the argument:.