Kant's Criticisms

• Immanuel Kant background: writing during enlightenment, both a rationalist and empiricist, likes logic and proof. Work focus on morality. Rejects emotion.
• Kant book - religion in bounds of bare reason. rejects external rituals and a church order. favors a living life according to reason as pleasing to god.
• Kant Criticisms: focus on second part of ansel, that a being nothing greater than which can exist must exist as part of its definition. Says when an object exists you must accept its predicates - a triangle exists and its predicates are 3 sides and angles that add to 180.
• Kant criticisms (2): if there is no triangle in the first place the predicates do not exist. there must be an object for the predicates to apply to. if there is no object then there is no predicate. Cant create a predicate to make the object exist.
• Kants critisism is that the predicate of existance used in anselms ontological only applies if god actually exist.
• Issues with perfection: existence does not make something more perfect. If a ford car exists and an audi car doesnt, you cannot say the ford is better. This challenges anselms claim that existence is perfection, meaning a perfectly supreme being does not need existence to reign supreme.
• Existential (exists in reality) propositions are claims that certain things exist. "John exists" is an existential proposition, must be checked with sence experience. Kant argues all existential propositions must be checked a posteriori (cannot be proved apriori). 'god exists' is an existential proposition.
• 'god exists' is an existential proposition and therefore must be proved a posteriori. Therefore kant argues that trying to prove gods existence using an apriori argument (ontological) is futile.
• Kants critisms are very strong
• Kant says anselm should have used the word 'if' - if god exists, he is the greatest being that can be thought of.