ASSIGNED to Rosie November

Field: Philosophy

Part 1: Read the attachments!
Which argument for the existence of God is better? You don’t have to think either one is particularly good; I am just asking you to explain which one is better *and* why. This requires you to tell me why the one you didn’t select as superior is worse than the one you did.

Examples 1: 
Has anyone ever believed in God? In Philosophy field, St. Anselm and Rene Descartes explain their points of view about God existence clearly. However, if looking at two analyses, I find the explanation of St. Anselm is better than the other one for third reasons. First, St. Anselm depict the full of the premises. Through those premises, he makes me understand the reason why God exists. God represents the power that is stronger than anything. Second, St. Anselm concludes what he argues. Since people often cannot define the huge impacts or mystery which happened around in the world, the existence of god answers all that questions. Third, I quite disagree with the view of Rene Descartes for perfection and infinite are only goals and wishes that human always expect to reach. Hence, I thought that perfection and infinite cannot use to reason for the God existence. All in all, the argument of St. Anselm helps me to have an overview and to gain the reason of God existence.

Example 2.
After reading both arguments, I believe that St. Anselm’s argument is better than Rene Descartes’ argument of Gods existence, although both arguments have their own flaws and different approaches. St. Anselm’s argument was simple and straight to the point, he starts off his argument with an analytical proposition, proving that God does exist and uses ontology (the study of being and existence) throughout his argument. Where Descartes’ uses cosmology, which is the clarification of existence of God through the created universe, and uses perfection and infinity. Descartes’ assumes that everything has a cause in the world but we as the audience cannot claim this to be true because it is not analytic and many of his premises throughout his argument are vastly subjective, making it hard for him to prove. Although I think St. Anselm’s argument was better, different views about what a concept means, in this case God’s existence, does not show that a concept does not exist.

Part 2: Write the rebuttal for this argument:

Descartes’s argument is valid however, it is unsound because not all its promises are true, or at least cannot be proven true, as is the case with the promise, “An effect must be at least as real as its cause” , or the assumption that everything has a cause, but automatically contradicted by the Quantum Mechanics law. Descartes left us with unresolved questions about what type of statements he was using, and as a result that often leads the reader to assume and therefore interpret it in a way that fits their argument or claim. Because synthetic statements are the opposite of analytic statements, there is more freedom to create and classify something as synthetic since it can be anything not proven as true by linguistic meaning alone, such as Descartes own words, “I find within myself the idea of perfection” which automatically turn into a statement. This is the total opposite to the analytic statements used in Anselm’s argument which can be easily proven false by almost anyone, simply by performing general research. As a person who is not familiar at all with the field of philosophy, Anselm’s argument is much more logical to me. The use of conceptual claims and the application of the rule Modus Tollens is used to makes his argument much easier to understand and justifying per say. However, in terms of philosophy it is not the “best” because of the use of analytic propositions as its clearly stated in the second reading, “In the highly technical field of philosophy, common usage is insufficient. Common uses are often loose and sloppy. Philosophers are trying to avoid that sort of thing”. This is why I choose Descartes’s Cosmological Argument as better over Anselm’s Ontological Argument .