THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT (5 of 8 notes)

Part Three
Theology Proper: 16 PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
A DISPENSATIONAL THEOLOGY
By Charles F Baker

What then is this argument which Anselm enunciated and over which there has been so much disagreement? Flint says that Anselm reasoned thus:

The fool may say in his heart, There is no God; but he only proves thereby that he is a fool, for what he says is self-contradictory. Since he denies that there is a God, he has in his mind the idea of God, and that idea implies the existence of God, for it is the idea of a Being than which a higher cannot be conceived. That than which a higher cannot be conceived cannot exist merely as an idea, because what exists merely as an idea is inferior to what exists in reality as well as in idea. The idea of a highest Being which exists merely in thought, is the idea of a highest Being which is not the highest even in thought, but inferior to a highest Being which exists in fact as well as in thought.¹³

13          Robert Flint, Theism (Edinburg and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1886), p. 278.

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