A Consideration and Critique of Ontological Arguments from Graham Oppy’s perspective

Document Type : The Quarterly Jornal

Authors

department of islamic theology, faculty of islamic philosophy and theology

Abstract

In the history of philosophy, very few arguments have grabbed the attention of intellectuals as strongly as ontological arguments have. Graham Oppy, the contemporary Australian philosopher of religion, is an atheist who has considered different versions of ontological arguments in order to uncover their weakness. In this paper, we deal with how Oppy has formulated ontological arguments and what his objections to them are. The paper deploys an analytic method in order to elaborate Oppy’s classification and objections. It turns out that there are several versions of what might be called the “ontological” argument. For Oppy, these arguments are characterized by a priority. The most general objections leveled by Oppy at his 8 versions of the argument consist in: question begging, lack of epistemic value, denial of possible contradictions in case God does not externally exist, and inconceivability of an entity with infinite attributes. We conclude that given challenges of ontological arguments for the existence of God, they fail to serve as arguments for God, although Oppy’s atheism and his conception of God and His attributes are not acceptable.

Keywords

References

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