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Leonard Angel’s proposal6 that God would have to either, first, assume our imperfections or, second, humans would have to rise to “perfect status”, each alternative suffering its consequences. If God assumes our imperfections, then God is not a Supreme Personal Being who is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. If we assume God’s perfection, then we delude ourselves with false perfection claims and we would enter Theseus’ labyrinth: how can evil exist in perfection unless perfection includes evil?
Unlike the Teleological and Cosmological arguments, St. Anselm’s Ontological Argument provides the earliest attempt by a yearning intellectual to prove by logic the actual existence of God. According to St. Anselm, God exists by analyzing the idea that God is a “being of which nothing greater can be conceived.”7 Such a being, St. Anselm asserts, exists either in both our imagination and reality or just in our imagination. Since it is greater for a being to exist in imagination and reality
6 Angel, Leonard. Cosmological and Ontological Arguments. p. 67. Angel adds clauses to this argument in order to prove the existence of a Supreme Personal Being. Of relevance are (d) moreover, every cause has at least as much reality, has at least as rich a set of properties as the effect. (e) the universe today includes persons (f) by (d) and (e), the first cause has as much reality, has an rich a set of properties as persons do (g) therefore, the first cause has properties as rich as the properties of personhood: perception, believing, desiring, planning, willing, acting (h) but there are no properties as rich as properties of personhood which are not properties of a person (i) therefore, the first cause has properties of personhood. (j) and the first cause, we may call “God.” 7 Peterson, M., Hasker, W., Reichenbach, B., Basinger, D. Reason & Religious Belief.
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. 77-106
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