Critical Analyses of St. Anselm’s argument for the Existence of God and Douglas Gasking’s argument for the Non-Existence of God.
Arguments against St. Anselm’s Ontological Argument for the Existence of God
St. Anselm begins with a definition of God, argues that an existent God is superior to a non-existent God and concludes that God must exist in reality, for his non-existence would contradict the definition of God itself.
The argument does not seem plausible to an unbiased person, even at the very first reading. It seems as if not all aspects of the question under scrutiny have been considered. The basic assumption, on which the entire argument stands, that God is a being than which none greater can be imagined can seem doubtful to a person who doubts the existence of God, for if one doubts that there is a being than which no greater can be conceived, then he may also be skeptical if any person has thoughts about the same being, whose existence itself is doubtful. The argument seems to “beg the question”. Moreover, St. Anselm’s idea of existence is not very clear.
It is not very clear what a physical object is, what it means to say that a physical object exists and what it means to say that a non-physical object exists.
St. Anselm’s argument is based on the superiority of an existent God over a non-existent God. But as Kant argues, existence is more of a description of the real world, whether a thing exists in it or not, rather than the property of an object. Hence