The Ontological Argument

In Our Time: Philosophy

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 27 September 2012

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Ontological Argument. In the eleventh century St Anselm of Canterbury proposed that it was possible to prove the existence of God using reason alone. His argument was ridiculed by some of his contemporaries, but was analysed and improved by later thinkers including Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. Other philosophers have been less kind, with the Enlightenment thinker David Hume offering one possible refutation. But the debate continued, fuelled by interventions from such heavyweights as Immanuel Kant and Kurt Gödel; and it remains one of the most discussed problems in philosophy. With: John Haldane Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews Peter Millican Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford Clare Carlisle Lecturer in Philosophy of Religion at King's College London Producer: Thomas Morris.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for down learning the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk.
0:10.0	I hope you enjoy the programme.
0:12.0	Hello, in the late 11th century a man called Anselm, an Italian prior at a monastery in Northern
0:17.7	France who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093, started to wrestle with a philosophical problem. He wanted to prove the existence of God.
0:26.2	In a revelation of inspiration at Matins one morning, he saw the solution and wrote it down in a work
0:31.0	known today as the discourse. It's the ontological argument.
0:35.0	And some believed he had found a single argument which demonstrate that God exists.
0:39.0	It's a simple line of reasoning which has proved enduring,
0:42.0	although in the last 900 years many philosophers
0:44.4	have had a go to disprove it. They kart, human cat all wrote important works about it and the
0:50.3	young Bertrand Russell experience a philosophical epiphany on a trip to the tobacconists
0:54.5	declaring great God in boots the ontological argument is sound.
0:59.3	We need to discuss the ontological argument are John Haldane, Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews,
1:05.2	Peter Milliken, Professor of Philosophy at Hartford College, Oxford, and Claire Carlisle,
1:09.1	lecturer in philosophy of religion at King Kings College London.
1:12.6	Peter Milliken, philosophers as I understand it,
1:14.6	recognize three main types of argument
1:17.0	for the existence of God.
1:18.3	Would you begin by outlining what these three are?
1:21.4	Yes, certainly. These are the three sort of most famous. what these are.
1:22.8	are the three sort of most famous kinds there are others but they're the ontological
1:27.9	argument, the cosmological argument and the design argument. The design argument is probably the most familiar one that
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