Ontological-Argument

“Does God exist?” is perhaps the oldest and most persistent question in philosophy. It has accompanied Western thought from the earliest Presocratics — when Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 570–c. 475 BC) criticized the anthropomorphism of Homer’s gods — to contemporary analytic debates on modal logic and Bayesian probability. And yet, posed in these terms, the question conceals a trap. For before asking whether God exists, one must ask what it means, for God, to exist. Here a decisive distinction opens up — one that separates philosophically rigorous theism from conceptual idolatry: the distinction between existing (existere) and being (esse). ...

Anselm of Canterbury Born in Aosta, in the Alps, in 1033, Anselm entered the famous Benedictine monastery of Bec, in Normandy, where he became an admired master, and later became Archbishop of Canterbury, amid harsh conflicts with the English kings over the authority of the Church. He is called “the father of Scholasticism” for having inaugurated the systematic effort to use reason to penetrate the contents of faith. His motto sums up the whole medieval program: “fides quaerens intellectum” — faith seeking understanding. In the Proslogion he radicalizes it: “I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand” — a formula that gathers up the “crede ut intelligas” of Saint Augustine. ...