So others aren’t tempted to think along these same lines, let’s look at what’s wrong with the ontological arguments.
These arguments are nothing but lies. They pretend that we come to an idea (in this case the idea of God) by a way that we do not in fact come to them. How does anyone have this idea of God? Someone told them about it; they were born into a culture with deep historical factors of pushing a certain religious mindset and telling children that this “God” thing exists and has such and such properties and aspects. But religion stays silent on the logic of why such a God should exist, so the medieval philosophers stepped in to try and justify it.
Problem is, you can’t justify an idea you have simply by appealing to something about that idea itself, as idea. Do I believe in cheese because there is something about the “idea of cheese” that requires what I think of as cheese to exist? No, I believe in cheese because I am having an experience of something that has been given the name “cheese”. The ideatums of our ideas, the objects about which our ideas are ideas, are not equivalent to the ideas we have about them. Nor does the idea by itself cause itself to exist, nor does the actual reasons why we believe in the existence of an object come from the idea we have of those objects… In fact, it’s more interesting because our ideas come from, in part, both the object itself which the idea represents/names as well as from that idea’s participation in much larger idea-universes of meaning-- contextual relation.
To pick any idea and try to derive the existence of its supposed object merely out of the idea itself, not looking at either the actual real reasons in our experience for why we hold the idea nor looking at the larger contexts and connections between the idea and other ideas, is really stupid. We don’t believe in triangles because the idea of a triangle somehow gives necessarily the fact that triangles must exist, we believe in triangles because we can draw them and we can define them clearly. Defining the idea of a triangle (a two-dimensional object with three straight lines for sides, lines connected at the ends, with interior angles adding to 180 degrees) comes from how this idea 1) relates to other ideas such as lines, points, angles, and dimensions, and 2) can be demonstrated by simply using a piece of paper and a pencil.
Ideas that are more abstract, like say “justice”, are the same way but constitute more complex experiences and contexts. The idea of justice does not self-derive itself, nor does the mere idea of justice act as sufficient cause for us to declare that the object of this idea in fact exists. Even if we can take the idea and construct an argument from necessity for its object’s existence, this is never in fact how the idea came about. The idea of justice came about because we have experiences with things that we decided to include under the label/name “justice”, we had these experiences already and the idea or concept only abstractly gathered there together and provided further context and meaning to them. The idea extracts something from the experiences of which it is an idea. The idea serves to clarify, define, expand and explain. It is not necessary that any object or existence must produce a certain idea of itself, much less that such an idea would thereby be the rational justification for that object or experience’s existence let alone the in fact reason for why we had the experience, perceived the object, or thought the idea.
The ontological argument is saying that the very idea of God itself, because this is the “greatest” idea (whatever that means… what is “greater” and why, about it?) must therefore exist. The logically necessary implication on which the argument is based is that there is no possible way we humans could have come up with the idea of God unless God actually exists: problem is, that’s not true. It’s quite easy to understand how we could come up with the idea of God, and indeed humans have been having numerous different ideas about God and gods since there have been humans. One easy example of how to arrive at the idea of God, an example other philosophers have used, is to simply take a human being as we experience it, and abstract away all its limitations; limits of duration in time, extension in space, limits of ability to understand and know, moral limits to our goodness, limits of our ability to act (life heavy object, create things, etc)… once you take the idea of a human being and create a new idea of it without any of the limitations common to a human being, you arrive at the template for the idea of a god/gods.
Another example of how to arrive at the idea of God/gods is to look at the bicameral model of the human consciousness and the theory that in the past at a certain point humans started experiencing an inner voice, the inner monologue of language that we all experience today. Once symbolic language developed and became commonplace, at a certain point the experience of having an inner linguistic thought process whereby we can spontaneously talk to ourselves in our own head must have been new and probably overwhelming. Since one of the most basic functions of language is to name things, early humans may have experienced something like looking at things and suddenly had the names of those things appearing in their self-experience as if talking to them… the old pagans could easily have associated this experience with those objects themselves, thus believing that every object has a “God” associated with it or that every experience was a god since each discernible object appeared to speak to them. Objects of greater meaning and forcefulness on their perception would naturally be assumed to be more powerful gods, like the sun, moon, rain storms, and other people.
Ancient peoples believed that certain people among them were gods, and they also believed in gods of the sun, moon, rain, plants and trees, animals, etc. Our ideas about God have been many and evolved over time.
So the premise of the ontological argument is not only stupid but is simply wrong. You can’t derive the existence of something simply by looking at properties contained in your idea of it. Cheese doesn’t exist because the idea of cheese contains the aspect of being yellow, no matter how much “greater” the color of yellow or any other aspect of the idea might be or I might want to imagine it to be.