Today we shall be looking at the last in a series of arguments in favour of the existence of God, and it can be a particularly hard one to grasp so that is why I saved it for last, and that is the Ontological argument for the existence. According to this argument, the mere logical possibility of God's existence entails His actual existence.
This argument was first devised by Anselm of Canterbury, who phrased the argument in terms of the greatest conceivable being. Today, philosophers utilise the language of 'possible worlds' in their phraseology instead.
To say that something is possible is to say that there is a possible world where that something is actual. So, if God's existence is logically possible, He exists in some possible world. That should, hopefully, be relatively easy to grasp at this point so far.
Now, God is, by definition, maximally great and metaphysically necessary. Part of what that entails is necessary existence, which means existing in every possible world. If something that exists in every possible world exists in at least some possible world, then it exists in every possible world and, by extension, the actual world.
So, in other words, God's existence is either logically possible and He therefore exists, or His existence is logically impossible. There is no middle ground. This argument can be summed up as follows:
1. If it is possible that God exists, then there is some possible world where God exists.
2. If God exists in some possible world, God exists in every possible world.
3. If God exists in every possible world, then God exists in the actual world.
4. If God exists in the actual world, then God exists.
5. It is possible that God exists.
6. Therefore, God exists.
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