Julia Sweeney on The ontological argument
Sweeney found the ontological argument baffling rather than compelling, an exercise in wordplay that has nothing to do with reality.
Julia Sweeney's encounter with the ontological argument is described with the bewildered humour that characterises her best work. She found the argument genuinely confusing — not because it was too sophisticated for her to grasp, but because it seemed to be doing something intellectually illegitimate: defining God into existence through a clever manipulation of the concept of 'greatness.' Her instinct was that you cannot think something into being, and no amount of philosophical refinement could shake that intuition.
Sweeney has noted that the ontological argument was never a factor in her belief or disbelief. She did not become a Catholic because she found Anselm's proof compelling, and she did not leave because she found a refutation of it. The argument seemed to her to exist in a purely academic register, disconnected from the lived experience of faith and doubt that actually drives belief.
Her treatment of the argument is useful as a corrective to the assumption that formal philosophical arguments play a central role in religious belief. For most people — including most believers — the ontological argument is at best a curiosity. Sweeney's honest bewilderment serves as a reminder that the arguments philosophers find most interesting are not always the ones that matter most to real people grappling with real questions about God.