Prove the Existence of God

¶ … Existence of God

This report has the difficult task of trying to prove the existence of God. But there is a silver lining in this challenge -- we have ancient philosophy to help. By using the beliefs, works and philosophies of Saint Anselm and Descartes, this report will have the benefit of using ontological argument to assist in the task. The main idea of the paper is to prove that God exists by trying to use the opinions of the philosophers Saint Anselm and Descartes. Descartes has been credited with one of the most interesting but also one of the least understood arguments in regard to the existence of god. Fascination with his argument comes from the fact that his effort to prove God's existence was a very simple premise. Saint Anselm's goals was to prove the existence of God with logical and philosphical understanding which in modern times has often been interpreted as an attempt to replace 'faith' side of the argument. By digging deeper into each of these philosphies we can interpret if they actually achieved their goals.

An argument used to support the existence of God is called an ontological argument. There are various models of ontological arguments but the majority of them are different versions or interpretations of the Saint Anselm argument. Saint Anselm's ontological argument that supported the existence of God was from the "Proslogion of Saint Anselm." Saint Anselm was the Archbishop of Canterbury around 1030 A.D. Historians have credited the concept of Ontology to Immanuel Kant who was an eighteenth century philosopher in what is now modern day Germany. Ontology is considered a type of metaphysics or a philosophy that studies the nature and cause of things. "Clearly, this distinction between the ontological argument employed to defend the validity of metaphysics and the same argument employed to demonstrate the necessity of theism, is one of profound importance. Plato centuries before Anselm, and Hegel centuries later, both used the argument in the former sense." (Langmead, 64) In this case Ontology tried to define what was real or not. Saint Anselm's proof therefore was his attempt to demonstrate if God was real or not. Saint Anselm proofs defined his idea of the divine nature, sin, and redemption.

Saint Anselm defined God by first saying that there could be nothing greater than God. Saint Anselm used the argument that all things in existence existed through one thing and that every existing thing exists either through something or through nothing. Since nothing can exist through nothing, every must exists through something. That something was God. "Thus Christian philosophy for Anselm does not mean a dialectical process which begins with everyday, external and common-sense things, whose reality is accepted at their face value by all mankind, and then proceeds to demonstrate certain less evident, or perhaps even entirely unknown, truths. Rather it discovers one experience, our inward experience of God given in and through our self-consciousness, to be supremely revealing and significant among all other experiences, and then goes on to interpret all other experience in terms of it. God is not known through nature but nature is known in God."(Langmead, 59)

From that he generated list of possible divine attributes. In other words, God equates to perfection and is the greatest thing possible. From this supposition, Saint Anselm showed that there are some consequences because of the definition. For example, God is basically omnipotent so can he break basic rules such as can he create a round square. If basic problems exist in this type of reasoning, could God exist therefore? If some assumed functions or powers of God are questioned, should the definition of God be curtailed? In other words, God would be omnipotent but could only do 'almost' anything. Since Saint Anselm was basically proving that God did exist, he worked on the assumption that God was omnipotent and could do all things if needed and therefore existed.

Descartes was therefore not the only or even the first philosopher to attempt to formulate an ontological argumentm, but his may be the most prominent. There were many versions of the Ontological arguments before his both supported and critized by the religious oligarchy. At that time Saint Anselm's argumetn was heavily criticized by one of Saint Anselm's contemporaries who was a monk by the name of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas' critique held much weight in those times and therefore condemed the ontological argument to be black listed for several centuries. Historians have shown that Descartes claimed tht he knew nothing about this earlier Saint Anselm version and his objective was to draft a new argument. Descartes mentioned his ontological argument in his writings known as the "Principles of Philosophy" which were publically criticized. He had to defend the argument in his First, Second, and Fifth Meditations.

Descartes was said to have compared his ontological argument to geometry. His thinking went on the line that God's existence was as obvious as any basic mathematical truth and that any ordinary reasoning should deduce this truth. The basic tenet from his Fifth Meditation followed earlier mentions of the existence of God in the First thorugh Third Meditations. "There are many matters which remain to be investigated concerning the attributes of God and the nature of myself, or my mind; and perhaps I shall take these up at another time. But now that I have seen what to do and what to avoid in order to reach the truth, the most pressing task seems to be to try to escape from the doubts into which I fell a few days ago, and see whether any certainty can be achieved regarding material objects." (Dicker, 147)

In these works, Descartes used a mediaval concept that was about a things essence that was supposed to prove its existence. Historians have learned that at the time it was believed that the essence could determine if something was real whether or not it proved it existed. "When, for example, I imagine a triangle, even if perhaps no such figure exists, or has ever existed, anywhere outside my thought, there is still a determinate nature, or essence, or form of the triangle which is immutable and eternal, and not invented by me or dependent on my mind." (Dicker 148)