The idea that because we can *say* we can conceive of a perfect being doesn’t mean anything. To say that perfection requires actuality isn’t true – who says existence is perfection? Only our human judgement, which last time I looked rules nothing.

This whole argument is a chain of Say What?’s. “So (*hah!) if what you’re thinking of is really so great, it must exist!” How about: “Or not, as the case may be.” Or: “I guess you’re not capable of thinking of something so great it must exist because you thought of it, are you?”

This kind of exercise in sophistry reminds me of Xeno’s so-called Paradox, which is stated in such a way as to wrap itself in its own linguistic knot, overloading terms so that it appears to create a paradox where none exists. (If you divide an ‘infinite’ number of halfways of distance into an infinite number of halves of time remaining, you get ’1′ — which is to say, the turtle reaches his destination, and only your failure to notice the halves of time and of distance cancel each other out creates the pretense at a paradox.)

If you conceive of a being so perfect that its perfection requires its existence, and it doesn’t actually exist, then you failed at your pretense of conceiving of such a being. Which is hardly surprising.

And in almost all cases, I can – if I imagine myself to be sufficiently ignorant (or deranged). That’s good, because from that understanding I can see what’s lacking, and where to start from.

What scares me about the Ontological Argument is that there’s no perspective from which I can make it “add up.” That worries me not because that might make it valid (how?) but because I can’t understand the failures in the proponent’s view.

My only consolation is the strong suspicion that the reason I can’t understand it is because it doesn’t make sense. It appears so blatantly flawed, on the face, that I hesitate out of fear of simplification: ‘perfection’ is subjective (what would be ‘most perfect?’), and the fact that one imagines a thing does not necessitate objective existence. Reductio ad absurdum.

Is that really all there is to it? How is that even an argument? o.^