Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig. Today, an excurses

on Natural Theology, Part 23. For more resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

In our excurses on natural theology, we've talked about a number of arguments for God's existence,

such as the argument from contingency, the kalam cosmological argument, the argument from

the fine tuning of the universe, the moral argument. Today we turn to a new argument and the last

that we'll be surveying in our class, and this is the ontological argument for God's existence.

And we have a handout available for this. If you need it, raise your hand, and Marian will get a handout to you forthwith.

In the year 1078, a Benedictian monk by the name of Anselm, who later

became the Archbishop of Canterbury, formulated a new and bold argument for the existence

of God, which has now fascinated philosophers for a millennium.

A year earlier in 1077, Anselm had finished writing a treatise called the Monologium,

in which he presented cosmological and moral arguments for God's existence.

But Anselm was dissatisfied with the complexity of the case for theism that he had developed,

and he wanted to find a single argument which would prove that God with all

of his attributes in all of his greatness exists and he had pretty much given up on the task

when he came upon the definition of God, ah, thank you, Mirian, the definition of God in Latin as

aliquid quo nihilmius cogitari posit. The Latin is so great. See, you can learn this phrase and impress your friends when they ask you for a definition of God.

Aliquid quo nihil mayos cogitari posit. That is to say, God is something than which nothing greater can be conceived.

Or in more idiomatic English, God is the greatest conceivable being. And Enselm argued that once in his treatise then that followed,

the proslogium, that once you understand the definition of God, once you understand what God is, then if you've

really understood it, we'll see that God must exist.

Because if God did not exist, he would not be the greatest conceivable being.

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