A Critical Examination Of The Ontological Argument For God's Existence

Anselm (1033-1109)stated the ontological argument in an explicit way for the first time. On account of the apriority of the argument, i.e. It argues for God's existence merely from the conception of God without other conditions, Kant named it the ontological argument. This conception has been used as a special term ever since.With the development of the theory of philosophy and the conception of religion, there have been many versions of the ontological argument which has been renovated ever since. On the whole, the ontological argument has gone through three main stages of development-First, Anselm established the ontological argument in the middle ages. Second, in the eighteenth century Kant struck what seemed to be the death knell of the argument. Third, in the middle decades of the twentieth century, several thinkers—most notably Charles Hartshorne (1887-2000), Norman Malcolm (1911- ) and Alvin Plantinga(1932-)—put forward the modal ontological argument.The ontological argument is the most philosophical and fascinating argument in all of the theistic proofs. This is because the ontological argument contains a lot of disputable philosophical problems which are very important. Over the past thousand years, people have different opinions about the ontological argument. On the one hand, many philosophers and theologists offered many versions of the ontological argument; on the other hand, almost all these arguments encountered refutation in different degree. Today there are still some people who defend the ontological argument, such as Hartshorne, Norman Malcolm and Alvin Plantinga. It makes the ontological argument plentiful, and also brings the study of the ontological argument fascinating and intractable. It is difficult to make an ultimate and definitive conclusion.This article is based on the three main stages of the development of the ontological argument. It chooses representative philosophers' views about the ontological argument of each stage and makes a critical examination of the ontological argument systematically. Then it offered a summary of these theories of the ontological argument. This paper pays attention to contemporary era, discusses several vital problems of the ontological argument by logical analysis and linguistic analysis. These problems are the nature of the concept of existence, the nature of necessity and God's existence the nature of proposition of "God's existence" and the relation between the view about God and theistic proofs. Finally, this paper focus on discuss the relation between the ontological argument and belief in God. This part contains three aspects, namely, the necessity of argumentation for the existence of God, the criterion for judge theistic proofs, the nature of the ontological argument. At last, this paper made an evaluation of the significance of the ontological argumentThe ontological argument is of value to practical faith. The argument proposes the rationality, seeks the consistency of faith and human reason, gets red of the intellectual barriers for theists, shows the rationality of faith. The study of the ontological argument is the motive power of the emergency and development of the Logic of existence. Up to now, when we evaluate any of existence theory, we regard it as a most basic standard if It can solve the problem of the ontological argument. It can solve the problem of the ontological argument is a most basic standard. The ontological argument also has great influence on linguistic analysis, especially on the semantics and reference theory.