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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Mulla Sadra's Seddiqin Argument For the Existence of God Chapter III: The Differences between the Ontological Argument and the Seddiqin Argument The ontological argument has a strange history. On the one hand, it attempts to show that the proof for the existence of God is an evident fact which does not need to use a real fact in the external world to help us reach to the existence of God.

On the other hand, some philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer assert1 that the ontological argument is a "charming joke," a kind of ontological sleight of hand, because it assumes the existence of God and then pretends to arrive at it in the conclusion: the rabbit was in the hat all the while. Or, to use Schopenhauer's own illustration, the chicken was already in the egg the theist was brooding over.

Whatsoever the ontological argument will be, it is an argument that attempts to prove the existence of God through a scrutiny of the meanings of existence and necessary existence without any reliance on a special fact in the world, like motion, contingency, etc. The conclusion is that the very meaning of necessary existence or most complete being necessitates its real existence. Has this argument been successful or not?

The answer needs another survey that is not related to this research, but the attempt to prove the existence of God not through a special incomplete fact but through the meaning of God makes this argument an attractive one. This means that the argument is so evident that everybody, even a fool, must accept it2.

Therefore, the argument makes the bridge between faith and reason to be very short, not a bridge which is incomplete and weak in which poor facts make us to reach to a most complete being, nor in the least from believing in Him. St. Anselm, himself, did not want to introduce an argument for believing in God, but an argument for manifesting his belief.

He sees his endeavor in ontological argument as the following3: "I do not endeavor, O Lord, to penetrate thy sublimity, for in no wise do I compare my understanding with that; but I long to understand in some degree thy truth, which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand.

For this also I believe, -that unless I believed, I should not understand." These beautiful words can be said only through an ontological attitude, not through cosmological argumentation.