The Ontological Argument
In Our Time
BBC
4.6 • 9.9K 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 downloading the in our time podcast for more details about in our time and for our terms of use |
| 0:05.4 | Please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for I hope you enjoy the program |
| 0:12.2 | Hello in the late 11th century a man called Anselm an Italian prior at a monastery in northern France who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093 |
| 0:21.3 | Started a wrestle with a philosophical problem. He wanted to prove the existence of God and in revelation of inspiration at Matins one morning |
| 0:28.5 | He saw the solution and wrote it down in a work known today as the discourse. It's the ontological argument |
| 0:34.6 | Anselm believed he had found a single argument which demonstrates that God exists |
| 0:38.9 | It's a simple line of reasoning which is proved enduring although in the last 900 years many philosophers |
| 0:44.2 | I've had a I've had to go to |
| 0:46.4 | Disprove it. They can't human can't all wrote important works about it and the young Bertrand Russell experience a philosophical |
| 0:52.4 | Epiphany on a trip to the tobacco list declaring great God in boots the ontological argument is sound |
| 0:58.9 | We need to discuss the ontological argument are John Holden professor of philosophy at the University of St Andrews |
| 1:04.9 | Peter Milliken professor of philosophy at Hartford College Oxford and Clare Carlisle lecturer in philosophy of religion at King's College |
| 1:12.0 | London Peter Milliken philosophy design the senate recognize three main types of argument for the existence of God would you begin by |
| 1:19.6 | Adlining what these three are yes, certainly and these are the three sort of most famous kinds |
| 1:25.1 | There are others, but they're the ontological argument the cosmological argument and the design argument and the design argument is probably the most familiar one |
| 1:36.0 | That's look around the world see how wonderfully designed it is all these animals plants |
| 1:42.3 | Maybe the laws of nature beautifully attuned to produce this kind of world |
| 1:47.2 | They're all signs of intelligent design. So that's the design argument also called the teleological argument |
| 1:54.1 | Then the cosmological so there must be a designer in that argument excited. There's intelligent design. There must be a designer exactly |
| 2:02.1 | Then there's the cosmological argument, which is relies on much sparser premises about the world like just that there is anything the fact that there is |
| 2:11.7 | Anything at all rather than nothing requires an explanation |
| 2:16.0 | Or an original cause we find everything has a cause if we trace back the chain of causes then ultimately we must come to |
... |
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