Existence Of God Analysis

Title: Critical evaluation of existence of god

Name: Lokesh Singh

Roll No. : 13110054

Word Count: 1010

Critical evaluation of existence of god

There are many theories and explanations on the concept of god. God is a word which has different meanings for different persons, for example, for an atheist god is just an idea or concept which is evolved by time. But for others this is far greater than that. Many philosophers thought about the definition of god. St. Anselm is the one of the great philosopher who clarified the definition of god and gave an argument about existence of god.

This argument seems logical and builds logic like a math equation. For instance, suppose

“A” is true, if “A” then “B” should be true, but “B” cannot be true by definition.

Anselm says that God is the being which nothing greater can be conceived. This is the base of the argument. He says let’s assume God exists as an idea in the mind, there is a possibility that God exists only in our understanding. On the other hand, one can imagine that God is exists in our understanding as well as in reality. St. Anselm’s theory also says that a being which has all the properties of God and exists also in reality then this would be greater than the being which exists only in our understanding. So, we end up getting the point that one can conceive or imagine a being which is greater than God.

But the conclusion of this whole process leads to a contradiction because the basic assumption is that God is a being which nothing greater can be conceived. So we cannot imagine something which is greater than

In this argument we already assumed that there may be possibility that God exist and finally we reached where we started. So this argument does not give us the exact information about existence of God. There are many objections on this argument but still it is a powerful argument. In my opinion, this argument is not much satisfactory. It describes that existence is greater than imagination. That is right but here we are only imagining two situation one is just idea of God and another is idea plus reality. But how can we assume that God exists in reality even we don’t know about God’s existence. It seems just a logic which is self-contradictory. We can also apply this logic to other things, maybe this logic will not work. Let’s imagine that electricity is not available in a room, so fan, which is hanging there, is not working. Then we cannot say that fan is not working because electricity is not available. There may be some other problem with the fan. So reverse is not always true. So this argument is ambiguous.

There is also a famous argument on the non-existence of God by Douglas Gasking. He says that the universe is the most amazing achievement imaginable. The merit or value of an achievement is the product of its intrinsic quality and ability of its creator. If we think about God who has no hands even he created universe then