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Abstract

The ontological arguments for the existence of God infer God’s existence not from empirically gathered material, but from the very idea of God. They are constituted only of analytical and a priori premises, that lead to the conclusion about God’s necessary existence. They were quite popular throughout the history of Western thought (being formulated by Saint Augustine, Anselm, Descartes, Leibniz, Gödel, Plantinga, Malcolm et al., and critiqued by Gaunilo, Thomas Aquinas, Okham, Gassendi, Hume, Kant, Millican et el), and, although they haven’t lost their significance (on the contrary, evolving in the argumentation structure, the formal apparatus, and the philosophical levels of debate), it cannot be said that they have been successful in convincing the ones that have not been in the first place their advocates. And although they can be critiqued as non-valid, non-convincing, too versatile, or not versatile enough, the impression remains that it is much easier to claim that there is something wrong with them, than to actually identify the thing that is wrong, and thus give constructive objections. Also, the fact remains that the lack of a concrete, non-destructible proof for a thing’s existence does not entail that thing’s non-existence.