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

on Natural Theology, Part 25.

For more resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

We've been talking about the ontological argument, and I hope today to bring our discussion of that

argument to a close. The last time we saw that the crucial premise in the argument is the

first one. If you grant that premise, then the rest of the argument just follows automatically.

If it's possible that a maximally great

being like God exists, then it follows necessarily that God does exist, and therefore God

exists in the actual world. So the question is what warrant there is for that first premise?

And I argued that we can see that the concept of a maximally great being, that is, say, a

being that is maximally excellent, omniscient, omnipotent, morally perfect, in every possible world

is a coherent concept. It's not like a square circle or a married

bachelor. This is a coherent notion that could possibly be instantiated and therefore we have

a prima facie warrant for thinking that that first premise is true, that it's possible that a maximally great being

exists. And then we looked at a number of objections to this premise. For example, we looked

at attempts to parody the argument by saying, well, wouldn't it also lead to the existence

of a maximally great pizza or the existence of a necessary lion or things of that sort which are obviously absurd?

And I think we saw clearly in each case that these were actually incoherent concepts, that idea of a maximally great peats or necessarily

existent lion are incoherent concepts and therefore not possibly instantiated and therefore

quite different from the concept of a maximally great being.

Finally, we close by looking at the suggestion that maybe it's possible

that a quasi-maximally great being exists, a being who is very, very great, perhaps omnipotent

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