anselm

Therefore, God exists in reality Anselm's second argument Anselm in his Proslogion 3 made another a priori argument for God, this time based on the idea of necessary existence.

To go a step further, Anselm merely assumed the possibility of God, whereas Godel actually proved it.

The developer, Anselm Garbe, gave a talk about Stali (among other things) at last year's Suckless conference...

My biggest point of contention with your claim is that Anselm didn't make a contingent/necessary distinction.

Disclaimer; I've only read Anselm and Leibniz, and am just trying to piece together the discrepant sources around.

This proof is a mix between Anselm and a little bit of math.

S5[2] (what Godel used) has those properties, whereas Anselm didn't even have the notion of soundness or completeness, let alone a logical system that would satisfy them.

The person who administered the last sacraments to him - Father Anselm Strittmatter - said that he was so terrified of dying that he did his best to distract himself from that prospect.

> Godel used not only modern notation, but also modal logic (which would not exist until the mid-20th century) Formal modal logic wasn't invented until the 20th century, but Anselm is using modal logic nonetheless.

Now, the worst conceivable argument for theism clearly "exists in the understanding", as St Anselm put it.

Anselm defined God as "that than which nothing greater can be conceived", and then argued that this being could exist in the mind.

Funny you mention it, because when I hear "obsession with formal proofs" I immediately think of Anselm and Plantinga.

Anselm's logic uses the operators "actual-truth" and "conceptual-truth".

The difference between Anselm's original ontological argument and modern ones like Goedel's or Plantinga's is that while Anselm's is full of terrible reasoning, Goedel's reasoning is (unsurprisingly) watertight and all the terribleness is concentrated in the axioms.

Anselm's, and most of the centuries of criticism of the latter can be applied to the former.

Anselm's argument is: the best thing in the world would have to exist, since existence is better than non-existence.