20. Doomed to Fail: The Sad Epistemological Fate of Ontological Arguments

For beings like us, no ontological argument can possibly succeed. They are doomed to fail. The point of an ontological argument is to enable nonempirical knowledge of its conclusion, namely, that God exists. But no ontological argument could possibly enable us to know its conclusion nonempirically, and so must fail in that sense. An ontological argument will fail even if it is perfectly sound and begs no questions. 1. Definition I begin by defining key terminology. An ontological argument’s nonempirical character distinguishes it from other theistic arguments. The principal goal of presenting or rehearsing an ontological argument is to promote the acquisition of inferential nonempirical knowledge that God exists, via acceptance of the conclusion based on competent deduction from the premises, which are themselves either nonempirically known or knowable. I will argue that, at least for beings like us, all ontological This is a draft of a paper to appear in Ontological Proofs Today (Ontos Verlag), ed. Miroslaw Szatkowski. Comments welcome. Please don’t cite,