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Anselm's Ontological Argument and the Philosophers


Saint Anselm of Aosta, Bec, and Canterbury, perhaps during a moment of
enlightenment or starvation-induced hallucination, succeeded in formulating an
argument for God's existence which has been debated for almost a thousand years.
It shows no sign of going away soon. It is an argument based solely on reason,
distinguishing it from other arguments for the existence of God such as
cosmological or teleological arguments. These latter arguments respectively
depend on the world's causes or design, and thus may weaken as new scientific
advances are made (such as Darwin's theory of evolution). We can be sure that
no such fate will happen to Anselm's Ontological Argument (the name, by the way,
coined by Kant).
In form, Anselm's arguments are much like the arguments we see in
philosophy today. In Cur Deus Homo we read Anselm's conversation with a skeptic.
This sort of question-and-answer form of argumentation (dialectic) is very......

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Approximate Pages: 8 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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