1. we have the concept of god, and in that sense god exists "in the understanding."
2. the concept of "god" is the concept of the greatest conceivable being.
3. real existance is greater than mere existance in the understanding.
4. therefore, god must exist in reality, not just in the understanding.
this of course is just the book's summation of anslem's actual argument, which was long and confusing.
ok, now what i think is that this anslem guy is just spouting a bunch of rubbish. why? because by saying that god is greater than anything we can ever think of, aren't we thinking that god is greater than anything we can ever think of? so does that mean that god is greater than the idea that god is greater than anything we can ever think of? 
and hey! wouldja look at that, we just thought of god being greater than the idea of god being greater than anything we can ever think of! so does that mean that god is greater than the idea that god is greater than the idea that god is greater than anything we can ever think of? this process of thought could go on and on infinitely, so how does this prove that god exists? 
doesn't this just prove that the human mind is infinite in itself? so how can god be greater than something infinate; what is greater than infinity? i'm not trying to prove that god doesn't exist, i'm just trying to prove that anslem's argument can't prove shit. when i voiced this opinion in class i heard somebody behind me say "woah!" which was pretty funny, but the teacher misunderstood me and thought i was saying something along the lines that the human mind is finite ane cannot conceive the idea of god, which is an argument that some people have made before. 
no, quite the opposite, after all, we just conceived that god could be greater than what the human mind can comprehend, so how is it we cannot conceive the idea of god?there was another argument we went over briefly that said that god was perfect, and existence is perfection; therefore god exists. ok, here's what i gotta say about that one: the reality in which we reside is imperfect. so assuming that we exist we must conclude that existance is imperfect.
you can't define perfect, there's no such thing (universally there isn't anyway). going back to where i stated that we're assuming that we exist; do we really exist at all? how can we define what is in existance and what isn't? where does fantasy end and reality begin? what if we're just somebody's idea or dream? for example, i'm writing a story. who's to say that the characters in my story aren't real? what if they think they're real, just as we think we're real. and for that matter, are we real? 
in my story people can do magic, but in our reality people cannot do magic. so what if we're in a story that somebody wrote in a reality where people can't walk? does that make our ability to walk real? does that make my character's ability to do magic real? if something doesn't exist in the creator's world, can it truly exist in the world of their creation? strange, no?and now on to other matters. this morning in oral interp. we were divided into groups. these are the groups
in which we will be critiquing each other's work and stuff, so the teacher had us share our "why do i write" explanations with each other, and in my explanation i told them about how i used to make up stories for my dolls and that one time some of the dolls got caught smoking in the girl's bathroom. this made them all laugh. ^^ then we were supposed to introduce our group to the rest of the class, each of us had to say something about our group. one girl introduced us individually and said that our group's name (we had to choose names) was on hiatus (literally, but it ended up being our actual group name because of it). 
then i said that all of our interest in writing stemmed from an early interest in reading. i can't remember what the other girl said, but the only guy in our group said that one of us used to make up stories for their dolls, and the first girl, sarah added that one time the dolls got caught smoking in the girls bathroom. i was cracking up as they both said this. it was funny, especially the look on the teacher's face. i made up strange things as a child. i was probably around 10 when i made up the said story, but when i was in pre-school i wrote a book in which our dog ran away and my dad spilled his beer 
(he was drinking the beer as he was walking the dog). i was 3-years-old at the time, and the teacher even drew a lil' caldecott medal on my book cover (which was made of wallpaper from one of those sample wallpaper books).so anyway, as soon as i got back to my dorm i started reading my groups' manuscripts. coincidentally, two of the other three group memebers also wrote something fantasy/sci fi. the only difference is that theirs was modern sci fi/fantasy and mine, well, isn't. now all i have to do is critique them.
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