This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In 1078, the monk Anselm of Canterbury proposed an argument that has never quite left philosophy alone: God, he wrote, is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, and a being that exists only in the mind is not as great as one that exists in reality, so the very concept of God requires that God exist. Critics attacked it almost immediately. A fellow monk, Gaunilo, objected that the same reasoning would prove a perfect island must exist simply because we can conceive of one, which seemed to prove too much. Centuries later Kant offered the more lasting objection: existence, he argued, is not a property that makes a concept greater the way wisdom or power would, so packing existence into the definition of a perfect being does not actually add anything to be greater by. The argument is called ontological because it tries to move from a concept straight to a claim about what exists, without appeal to evidence or observation, which is exactly what makes it so unusual among arguments for God: every other classical argument, cosmological, teleological, moral, starts from some feature of the observed world and reasons toward a cause or explanation. The ontological argument starts from an idea alone. That is also why it keeps returning. Each time philosophy develops sharper tools for reasoning about concepts, meaning and possibility, someone tries the argument again, most famously Alvin Plantinga's twentieth century modal version, which recasts greatness in terms of possible worlds rather than mere conception. Whether any version succeeds remains a live, unsettled dispute, which is itself instructive: an argument nearly a thousand years old, refined and attacked in every century since, is a working example of what philosophy of religion actually is, the sustained, technical testing of whether reason alone can reach a conclusion that matters enormously to how people live.