Ontological argument facts for kids

The ontological argument is an idea in religious philosophy. It is supposed to show that God exists.

There are different versions, but they all argue something like: because we can imagine a perfect being, there must be a god. The idea is that existing makes a good thing better than one that's only imaginary. So the perfect thing we're imagining must exist. Then we call the perfect thing God. The earliest objection was that an argument like that could prove wrong things. You could prove that a perfect island must exist, for example. But no real island is perfect.

Because it starts with imagination, not what you can see or experience, this is a kind of a priori reasoning. David Hume didn't like that way of thinking. He believed that knowledge had to come from experience and called everything else "nothing but sophistry and illusion".

Other versions of the argument start with the idea of the universe, and from that argue that there must be a god.

Images for kids

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  Anselm of Canterbury was the first to attempt an ontological argument for God's existence.

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  French thinker René Descartes proposed several arguments that could be termed ontological.

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  German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz attempted to prove the coherence of a "supremely perfect being".

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  Alvin Plantinga criticized Malcolm's and Hartshorne's ontological arguments and proposed a variation of his own.

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  David Hume reasoned that an ontological argument was not possible.

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  Immanuel Kant proposed that existence is not a predicate.

See also

In Spanish: Argumento ontológico para niños