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Ontological Argument

1. Philosophers

   1. Original

      1. Avicenna (980-1037)

         1. Argument

            The first recorded ontological argument for the existence of God was proposed by Avicenna (980-1037) in the Metaphysics section of The Book of Healing[2][3] which is known as the contingency and necessity argument (Imakan wa Wujub). Avicenna initiated a full-fledged inquiry into the question of being, in which he distinguished between essence (Mahiat) and existence (Wujud). He argued that the fact of existence can not be inferred from or accounted for by the essence of existing things and that form and matter by themselves cannot interact and originate the movement of the universe or the progressive actualization of existing things. Existence must, therefore, be due to an agent-cause that necessitates, imparts, gives, or adds existence to an essence. To do so, the cause must be an existing thing and coexist with its effect. [4] According to Avicenna, the universe consists of a chain of actual beings, each giving existence to the one below it and responsible for the existence of the rest of the chain below. Because he deems an actual infinite impossible, the chain as a whole must terminate in a being that is wholly simple and one, whose essence is its very existence and therefore is self-sufficient and not in need of something else to give it existence. Because its existence is not contingent on or necessitated by something else, but necessary and eternal in itself, it satisfies the condition of being the necessitating cause of the entire chain that constitutes the eternal world of contingent existing things.[4] Thus, Avicenna's ontological system rests on the conception of God, that is the First Cause, as the Wajib al-Wujud (necessary existent). There is a gradual multiplication of beings through a timeless emanation from God as a result of his self-knowledge.[5][6] This was the first attempt at using the method of a priori proof, which utilizes intuition and reason alone. Avicenna's proof of God's existence is unique in that it can be classified as both a cosmological argument and an ontological argument. "It is ontological insofar as 'necessary existence' in intellect is the first basis for arguing for a Necessary Existent". The proof is also "cosmological insofar as most of it is taken up with arguing that contingent existents cannot stand alone and must end up in a Necessary Existent."[7]

      2. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109)

         1. Argument

            A modern description of the argument Anselm's Argument may be summarized thus: God is, by definition, a being greater than anything that can be imagined and is the cause of all things, but is not bound causally by anything (otherwise God would be ontologically dependent on something else which would in turn undermine "its" greatness). Existence both in reality and in imagination is greater than existence solely in one's imagination. Therefore, God must exist in reality: if God did not, God would not be a being greater than anything which can be imagined. This is a shorter modern version of the argument. Anselm framed a reductio ad absurdum, wherein he tried to show that the assumption that God does not exist leads to a logical contradiction. The following steps follow more closely Anselm's line of reasoning: God is that entity than which nothing can be greater. The concept of God exists in human understanding. God exists in one's mind but not in reality. The concept of God's existence is understood in one's mind. If God existed in reality, it would be a greater thing than God's existence in the mind. Therefore, God in reality must exist.

      3. Aquinas (1225-1274)

         1. Argument

            Aquinas believed that the existence of God is neither obvious nor unprovable. In the Summa Theologica, he considered in great detail five reasons for the existence of God. These are widely known as the quinquae viae, or the "Five Ways." Concerning the nature of God, Aquinas felt the best approach, commonly called the via negativa, is to consider what God is not. This led him to propose five statements about the divine qualities: 1. God is simple, without composition of parts, such as body and soul, or matter and form.[51] 2. God is perfect, lacking nothing. That is, God is distinguished from other beings on account of God's complete actuality.[52] 3. God is infinite. That is, God is not finite in the ways that created beings are physically, intellectually, and emotionally limited. This infinity is to be distinguished from infinity of size and infinity of number.[53] 4. God is immutable, incapable of change on the levels of God's essence and character.[54] 5. God is one, without diversification within God's self. The unity of God is such that God's essence is the same as God's existence. In Aquinas's words, "in itself the proposition 'God exists' is necessarily true, for in it subject and predicate are the same."[55] In this approach, he is following, among others, the Jewish philosopher Maimonides.[56]

            1. The 5 ways- Quinquae viae

      4. al-Din Suhrawardi (1155-1191)

         1. Argument

            Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi(1155-1191) uses apagogical argument to show it is impossible that all of the existences are contingent beings. Due to the fact that this hypothesis means that the Set of all the things should be contingent. Then this contingent set needs a cause and that cause shouldn't be contingent beings or a member of that set. Because a member of the set can not be the cause of the set which itself is one of its members.[9]

      5. Descartes (1596-1650)

         1. Argument

            Descartes wrote in the Fifth Meditation,[10] But if the mere fact that I can produce from my thought the idea of something that entails everything which I clearly and distinctly perceive to belong to that thing really does belong to it, is not this a possible basis for another argument to prove the existence of God? Certainly, the idea of God, or a supremely perfect being, is one that I find within me just as surely as the idea of any shape or number. And my understanding that it belongs to his nature that he always exists is no less clear and distinct than is the case when I prove of any shape or number that some property belongs to its nature (AT 7:65; CSM 2:45). The intuition above can be formally described as follows: Whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive to be contained in the idea of something, is true of that thing. I clearly and distinctly perceive that necessary existence is contained in the idea of God. Therefore, God exists.

   2. Revisionists

      1. Mulla Sadra (1571-1640

         1. Argument

            Mulla Sadra (c. 1571–1640) put forward a new argument which is known as Argument of the Righteous (Arabic: Al-Burhan al-Siddiqin‎). This is an argument to prove the existence of God through the reality of existence, and to reach belief in God's pre-eternal necessity. In this argument, a thing is demonstrated through itself, and a path is identical with the goal. In other arguments, the truth is attained from other than itself, for example from the possible to the necessary, from the originated to the eternal origin, or from motion to the unmoved mover. But in the argument of the righteous, there is no middle term other than the truth.[24]

      2. Leibniz

      3. Norman Malcolm

      4. Charles Hartshorne

      5. Kurt Godel

      6. Alvin Plantinga

         1. Argument

            Alvin Plantinga has given another descriptive, initial version of the argument, one where the conclusion follows from the premises, assuming axiom S5 of modal logic. A version of his argument is as follows[26]: 1. It is proposed that a being has maximal excellence in a given possible world W if and only if it is omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good in W; and 2. It is proposed that a being has maximal greatness if it has maximal excellence in every possible world. 3. Maximal greatness is possibly exemplified. That is, it is possible that there be a being that has maximal greatness. (Premise) 4. Therefore, possibly it is necessarily true that an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good being exists. 5. Therefore, it is necessarily true that an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good being exists. (By S5) 6. Therefore, an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good being exists.

2. Philosophers

   1. Western

      1. Gaunilo of Marmoutiers (11th Century)

         1. Counter-Argument

            One of the earliest recorded objections to Anselm's argument was raised by one of Anselm's contemporaries, Gaunilo of Marmoutiers, who invited his readers to conceive of the greatest, or most perfect, island. As a matter of fact, it is likely that no such island actually exists. However, his argument would then say that we are not thinking of the greatest conceivable island, because the greatest conceivable island would exist, as well as having all those other desirable properties. Note that this is merely a direct application of Anselm's own premise that existence is a perfection (point 5 in the previous section). Since we can conceive of this greatest or most perfect conceivable island, it must exist. While this argument seems absurd, Gaunilo claims that it is no more so than Anselm's. Such objections are known as "Overload Objections"; they do not claim to show where or how the ontological argument goes wrong; they simply argue that, if it is sound, so are many other arguments of the same logical form that we do not want to accept, arguments that would overload the world with an indefinitely large number of necessarily-existing perfect islands, perfect lizards, perfect pencils and the like.[21]

      2. David Hume (1711-1776)

         1. Counter-Argument

            David Hume claimed that nothing could ever be proven to exist through an a priori, rational argument by arguing as follows:[20] 1. The only way to prove something a priori is if its opposite implies a contradiction. 2. If something implies a contradiction, then it is inconceivable. 3. Everything can be conceived not to exist. 4. Nothing can be proven to exist a priori, including God.

      3. Kant (1724-1804)

         1. Counter-Argument

            Immanuel Kant put forward a key, and influential, refutation of the ontological argument in the Critique of Pure Reason (first edition, pp. 592-603; second edition, pp. 620-631).[23] It is explicitly directed primarily against Descartes but also against Leibniz. His criticism was anticipated in Pierre Gassendi's Objections to Descartes' Meditations. Kant's refutation consists of several separate but inter-related arguments. They are shaped by his central distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments. In an analytic judgment, the predicate expresses something that is already contained within a concept and is therefore a tautology; in a synthetic judgment, the predicate links the concept to something outside it that is not already logically implied by it. New knowledge consists of synthetic judgments. Kant first argues that it is not at all clear that the idea of an absolutely necessary being even means anything at all, i.e. "whether I am still thinking anything in the concept of the unconditionally necessary, or perhaps rather nothing at all." [23] Second, Kant argues that if we include existence in the definition of something, then asserting that it exists is a tautology. If we say that existence is part of the definition of God, in other words an analytic judgment, then we are simply repeating ourselves in asserting that God exists. We are not making a synthetic judgment that would add new information about the real existence of God to the purely conceptual definition of God. Third, Kant argues that "'being' is obviously not a real predicate" [23] and cannot be part of the concept of something. That is, to say that something is or exists is not to say something about a concept, but rather indicates that there is an object that corresponds to the concept, and "the object, as it actually exists, is not analytically contained in my concept, but is added to my concept". For objects of the senses, to say that something exists means not that it has an additional property that is part of its concept but rather that it is to be found outside of thought and that we have an empirical perception of it in space and time. A really existing thing does not have any properties that could be predicated of it that differentiate it from the concept of that thing. What differentiates it is that we actually experience it: for example, it has shape, a specifiable location, and duration. To give an example of Kant's point: the reason we say that horses exist and unicorns do not is not that the concept of horse has the property of existence and the concept of unicorn does not, or that the concept of horse has more of that property than the concept of unicorn. There is no difference between the two concepts in this regard. And there is no difference between the concept of a horse and the concept of a really existing horse: the concepts are identical. The reason we say that horses exist is simply that we have spatio-temporal experience of them: there are objects corresponding to the concept. So any demonstration of the existence of anything, including God, that relies on predicating a property (in this case existence) of that thing is fallacious. Thus, in accordance with the second and third arguments, the statement "God is omnipotent" is an analytic judgment that articulates what is already contained in and implied by the concept of God, i.e. a particular property of God. The statement "God exists" is a synthetic judgment of existence that does not assert something contained in or implied by the concept of God and would require knowledge of God as an object of that concept. What the ontological argument does is attempt to import into the concept of God, as though it were a property, the synthetic assertion of the existence of God, thereby illegitimately and tautologously defining God as existing. In other words, it "begs the question" by assuming what it purports to prove. But, fourth, Kant argues that the concept of God is in any case not the concept of one particular object of sense among others but rather an "object of pure thought", of something that by definition exists outside the field of experience and of nature. With regard to unicorns, we can specify how we could determine that unicorns exist, i.e. what spatio-temporal experience of them would look like. With regard to the concept of God, there is no way for us to know it as existing in the only legitimate and meaningful way we know other objects as existing. And we cannot even determine "the possibility of any existence beyond that which is known in and through experience" [23].

      4. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

         1. Counter-Argument

      5. Douglas Gasking (1911-1994)

         1. Counter-Argument

            Another rationale is attributed to Melbourne philosopher Douglas Gasking (1911–1994),[22] one component of his proof of the nonexistence of God: 1. The creation of the world is the most marvelous achievement imaginable. 2. The merit of an achievement is the product of (a) its intrinsic quality, and (b) the ability of its creator. 3. The greater the disability (or handicap) of the creator, the more impressive the achievement. 4. The most formidable handicap for a creator would be non-existence. 5. Therefore if we suppose that the universe is the product of an existent creator we can conceive a greater being — namely, one who created everything while not existing. 6. Therefore, God does not exist.

   2. Islamic

      1. Al-Ghazali (1058-1111)

         1. Counter-Argument???

            Haven't been able to find any of the specific Arguments made by these Philosophers. However, I did find some Lecture notes from a Medieval Philosophy class at Macquarie University covering AL GHAZALI AND AVERROES.

      2. Averroes (1126-1198)

         1. Counter-Argument???

            Haven't been able to find any of the specific Arguments made by these Philosophers. However, I did find some Lecture notes from a Medieval Philosophy class at Macquarie University covering AL GHAZALI AND AVERROES.

      3. Mulla Sadra (1571-1640)

         1. Counter-Argument

            Among Muslim philosophers Mulla Sadra (c. 1571–1640) has criticized Avicenna's argument and discussed that it's not a priori argument. He also rejects that argument on the basis of Existence precedes essence. Then put forward new argument.[19]