Lawrence Krauss on The ontological argument
Krauss dismisses the ontological argument as philosophical wordplay that has no connection to how the real world works.
Lawrence Krauss has little patience for the ontological argument, which he regards as a textbook example of how philosophy can go wrong when it becomes disconnected from empirical reality. The idea that you can prove the existence of a being through pure conceptual analysis — without any reference to observation, experiment, or evidence — strikes Krauss as not just wrong but absurd. In physics, nothing is established by definition alone; everything must be tested against reality.
Krauss's objection is less sophisticated than a philosopher's might be — he does not engage with the modal logic of Plantinga's version or the detailed responses to Kant's objection. His point is simpler and, in its way, more devastating: the ontological argument has convinced virtually no one who did not already believe in God. Its role in the history of philosophy is as a curiosity, not a serious proof — and the fact that it keeps being trotted out in debates says more about the poverty of theistic arguments than about the strength of this one.
For Krauss, the ontological argument exemplifies a broader problem: the tendency to mistake linguistic or logical manipulation for genuine insight about the world. The universe does not care about our definitions or our syllogisms. It simply is what it is, and the only way to find out what that is, is to look.
“You can't define things into existence. If you could, physicists would be out of a job.”