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A more recent ontological argument came from Kurt Gödel, who proposed a formal argument for God's existence. Norman Malcolm also revived the ontological argument in 1960 when he located a second, stronger ontological argument in Anselm's work; Alvin Plantinga challenged this argument and proposed an alternative, based on modal logic.
In 1960 he argued that the argument originally presented by Anselm of Canterbury in the second chapter of his Proslogion was just an inferior version of the argument propounded in chapter three. [4] [5] His argument is similar to those produced by Charles Hartshorne and Alvin Plantinga. Malcolm argued that a God cannot simply exist as a matter ...
In The Only Possible Argument, Kant questions both the ontological argument for God (as proposed by Saint Anselm) and the argument from design. Kant argues that the internal possibility of all things presupposes some existence: [1] Accordingly, there must be something whose nonexistence would cancel all internal possibility whatsoever.
Other arguments for the existence of God have been proposed by St. Anselm, who formulated the first ontological argument; Thomas Aquinas, who presented his own version of the cosmological argument (the first way); René Descartes, who said that the existence of a benevolent God is logically necessary for the evidence of the senses to be meaningful.
There are many notable contributors to the development of various ontological arguments. In the 11th century C.E., Saint Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) reasoned in his work Proslogion about the existence of God in an ontological argument based on the idea that there is a 'being than which no greater can be conceived'. [11] [1] [12]
Gödel's ontological proof is a formal argument by the mathematician Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) for the existence of God. The argument is in a line of development that goes back to Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109). St. Anselm's ontological argument, in its most succinct form, is as follows: "God, by definition, is that for which no greater can ...
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Plantinga has expressed a modal logic version of the ontological argument in which he uses modal logic to develop, in a more rigorous and formal way, Norman Malcolm's and Charles Hartshorne's modal ontological arguments. Plantinga criticized Malcolm's and Hartshorne's arguments, and offered an alternative. [48] He argued that, if Malcolm does ...