God and Immortality

Anselm attempts to address this concern with references to things in one place and the inability of those things to be anywhere else at the same time – the actuality of those things. Saint Anselm’s God is the greatest thing imaginable. Anselm reminds us that understanding this statement alone does not necessarily mean that we have total knowledge of God. fillment through believing and understanding God’s greatness. Anselm provides “if that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought can be thought not to exist, that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought is not the same as that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought, which is absurd. Saint Anselm describes God as both merciful and impassible in Chapter VIII, but that sets the stage for critics to call God merciless, savage, and changing. To me calling God savage would be a very difficult thing to do, yet for a non-believer this may be an easy thing to do and evidence. This leads to the ontological argument where St. This can lead to statements of God being limited or ephemeral. Anselm’s giving positive attributes of God: simply that whenever you have a concrete example of a positive attribute it is all the easier to come up with the negative attribute. Instead it means that God is greater than any idea we have about him; this does not mean that the argument is false, only that it is always possible to comprehend something greater than we already can comprehend.