The Ontological Argument

1. God, by definition, is a perfect being. 2. It is better to exist than not to exist.

Therefore, God exists.

In an argument, one may define terms however one wishes, and premise 1 just reports one aspect—indeed, I have argued, the central one—of the theistic definition of God. So if anything goes wrong with the argument, then it must be in premise 2. But premise 2 looks pretty obviously right as well. Consider the question: which of these would be better for you: that you be vaporized now with a ray gun and thus that you cease to exist or that you continue to exist? However small an amount of benefit or enjoyment you’re receiving from

reading this, I doubt if you’ll really think you’d be better off if you didn’t exist. Of course, we can all imagine a situation where someone’s life was so bad that it would be better for them if they ceased to exist—maybe the Spartan boy I told you about in an earlier chapter was in such a situation. However, if the person in question was in all other ways well off, it would certainly be better for him or her if he or she existed rather than not; and God is obviously going to be maximally well off in all other respects, so it’s obviously going to be better for him (and indeed us) if he exists. The claim that it’s better to exist than not to exist seems then—minor and irrelevant quibbling aside—right. Both the premises of the Ontological Argument seem to be obviously true; taken

together they seem to lead in an obviously deductively valid way to the conclusion that God exists, which was something not so obviously true. If God’s by definition perfect, then of course—given that it’s better to exist than not to exist—he’ll have to exist. It’s impossible for the premises to both be true and yet the conclusion false and it’s obvious that both the premises are true. So it seems as if we’ve got a deductively sound argument for the existence of God the soundness of which is more obvious than is the existence of God. The Ontological Argument then seems to satisfy our criteria for being a good argument. It seems to, but does it?