Christopher Hitchens on The ontological argument
Hitchens dismissed the ontological argument as a verbal trick that attempts to think God into existence.
Hitchens had less patience for the ontological argument than for most theistic arguments, regarding it as philosophy at its most self-parodying. The notion that you can prove the existence of a being by defining it as existing struck him as transparently sophistical — the kind of argument that gives philosophy a bad name.
In his debates and public lectures, Hitchens typically disposed of the ontological argument quickly, noting that the same logic could be used to 'prove' the existence of any maximally great thing — a maximally great island, a maximally great pizza, or a maximally great evil being. If the argument works for God, it works for anything you care to define into existence, which means it works for nothing.
His deeper criticism was that the ontological argument reveals something unflattering about the theological enterprise. When the best argument for God's existence is a word game that has convinced almost no one in a thousand years of discussion, it suggests that the case for God has always been more emotional than rational — which is precisely what Hitchens believed.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”