m.s wk 5 disc

Please pick one of the following questions to answer for the forum this week:

• With reference to Pike’s article, how could it be said that Divine Omniscience challenges the idea that humans have free will?
• With reference to Anselm’s Ontological Argument for the existence of God, evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of his argument as well as his response to Gaunilo.
• Evaluate Aquinas’ argument(s) for God’s existence from efficient causality and/or from motion and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses.

Discussion Guidelines

• Three posts minimum.
• The initial forum response is due by Thursday at 11:59 p.m. EST and should be a substantive response to the Discussion prompt.
• For peer replies, respond to at least two of your classmates by Sunday at 11:59 p.m. EST and give meaningful replies that advance the Discussion.

Before you post, please thoroughly edit your writing to ensure it is professional and academic. For more details about how the initial post and peer replies are graded, see and the linked .

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Rubrics

• RAMP LD Discussion V.4 Rubric [APR 2025]

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Week 5 Landon Morris

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• Landon Morris posted Feb 3, 2026 7:30 PM
• In the article Divine Omniscience, it states “, God cannot in anything be mistaken” which is takes as, if God believes something will happen then it is set in stone and cannot change. It is also considered that the “essence” of God is omniscient which means that God is never wrong and knows what is to happen before it happens. This clearly challenges the idea that humans have free will. If we were to actually have free will then the future could always change at any given moment. This idea shows that we may think we have free will, but in reality, our entire lives has already been set and all we can do is just live through what has been given to us. In divine omniscience it also states “This is to say that any person who is not omniscient could not be the person we usually mean to be referring to when using the name God”. In other words, if you believe that your “God” is all powerful and any other typical traits of what someone would consider a “God” if they are not omniscient then they are not truly a “God”.
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ENGIE LAGROW WEEK 5 DISCUSSION

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• ENGIE LAGROW posted Feb 3, 2026 10:01 PM
• Anselm’s Ontological Argument for the existence of God has the same mindset as what we spoke about last week with Leibniz because they both believe in “priori”. They both have a rationalist, preloaded belief. In Anselm’s Ontological argument, he argues that the very concept of God proves his existence, and that there is no greater. Anselm defines God as “than than which nothing is greater can be conceived”, meaning we can conceive of a being that is the greatest possible thing (God). He sees it as, existing in reality is better than not existing at all or existing in the mind. The argument relies on reason or the rationalist mindset vs experience or the empiricism belief.
• The strengths of his argument in my opinion is, as mentioned in the reading material when he argues “existence must also be thought of as pure perfection since a being that exists is obviously greater than one that does not exist and since it is unqualifiedly better to be than not to be. Therefore, for a greatest-possible being not to exist would contradict the very idea of a greatest possible being, i.e. thinking of God as non-existent is not to think about ‘God’ in the strict sense at all.” This logical thought is what drives the argument. The logic and certainty of, if we do not believe in God, then we would be not believing we exist, it is contradicting. Another strength is that it matches the perfect view of God and emphasizes his perfection. It is more than just believing in something that created us but believing in perfection.
• The weakness is simply what Gaunilo mentioned in his argument. Gaunilo saw Anselm’s argument like pulling a bunny out of a magician hat. He doesn’t think that just because we imagine something, all of a sudden it exists. Basically we cannot just say something “exists” and all of a sudden it is 100% true. That is what he argued, saying it is true JUST solely because “it exists” is like saying unicorns, fairies, and vampires exist. Gaunilo mentioned, at that point say anything mythical exists. It truly could be seen as slippery slope reasoning. THAT is the weakness, and that is exactly the weakness that Gaunilo talked about, as to why he does not necessarily disagree that God exists just not fully agreeing with Anslem’s reasoning.