St. Anselm's Argument For The Existence Of God

The main difference between St. Anselm and St. Aquinas, is that while they both believe that there is a “God”, who is the creator of everything, Aquinas focuses more on proving factors that he is real and that he does exist. However, not only does Aquinas go on to prove that God is real, he has five different theories on his existence, most of which have been taken directly from Aristotle’s arguments for a Prime Mover. Anselm based his argument on the assumption that everything in our world exists but does not necessarily have to. In other words, we can just conceive them as not existing in the first place, since we do not need them to be real. However, Anselm’s argument does not apply to the existence of the Ultimate Reality, which is also

Later on, he then added two addition arguments that further proof God’s existence, making that a total of five arguments that he gave people to think about, and also wanted people to know that contingency also meant dependency (Chaffee pg. 380). The first argument was from motion; we can see perceive motion by seeing how things act on each other, and how one thing can affect the other. Through this, we can conclude that the thing that is moving is moved by something else, which in turn has a First Mover that makes this event happen in the first place, that mover being God. The second argument is from Efficient Cause, meaning that nothing can cause itself to cause something; because if there were no original cause, then everything that precedes this action, would not have been caused, and that First Cause would be named as God. The third cause is the Necessary Being, there has to be an original being, because nothing can come from nothing, and that original or necessary being is God. The fourth cause is Gradation, we cannot say something is good or better than something else, because we do not have anything that is better to compare it to. However, if we had a God, which would be labeled as a perfect being, we would then be able to compare things to others, because we should believe that God is better than everything that we can ever think of. The fifth and final