Ontological argument in the context of "Intentionality"

In philosophy, metaphysical necessity, sometimes called broad logical necessity, is one of many different kinds of necessity, which sits between logical necessity and nomological (or physical) necessity, in the sense that logical necessity entails metaphysical necessity, but not vice versa, and metaphysical necessity entails physical necessity, but not vice versa. A proposition is said to be necessary if it could not have failed to be the case. Nomological necessity is necessity according to the laws of physics and logical necessity is necessity according to the laws of logic, while metaphysical necessities are necessary in the sense that the world could not possibly have been otherwise. What facts are metaphysically necessary, and on what basis we might view certain facts as metaphysically but not logically necessary are subjects of substantial discussion in contemporary philosophy. In Islamic philosophy, it is called "ayan-ı sabite" (The immutable knowledge of beings), assumed to exist in God's knowledge before they exist was; thus defended as immutable in God's knowledge, just as in his body.

The concept of a metaphysically necessary being plays an important role in certain arguments for the existence of God, especially the ontological argument, but metaphysical necessity is also one of the central concepts in late 20th century analytic philosophy. Metaphysical necessity has proved a controversial concept, and criticized by David Hume, Immanuel Kant, J. L. Mackie, and Richard Swinburne, among others.

The existence of God is a subject of debate in the philosophy of religion and theology. A wide variety of arguments for and against the existence of God (with the same or similar arguments also generally being used when talking about the existence of multiple deities) can be categorized as logical, empirical, metaphysical, subjective, or scientific. In philosophical terms, the question of the existence of God involves the disciplines of epistemology (the nature and scope of knowledge) and ontology (study of the nature of being or existence) and the theory of value (since some definitions of God include perfection).

The Western tradition of philosophical discussion of the existence of God began with Plato and Aristotle, who made arguments for the existence of a being responsible for fashioning the universe, referred to as the demiurge or the unmoved mover, that today would be categorized as cosmological arguments. Other arguments for the existence of God have been proposed by St. Anselm, who formulated the first ontological argument; Thomas Aquinas, who presented his own version of the cosmological argument (the first way); René Descartes, who said that the existence of a benevolent God is logically necessary for the evidence of the senses to be meaningful. John Calvin argued for a sensus divinitatis, which gives each human a knowledge of God's existence. Islamic philosophers who developed arguments for the existence of God comprise Averroes, who made arguments influenced by Aristotle's concept of the unmoved mover; Al-Ghazali and Al-Kindi, who presented the Kalam cosmological argument; Avicenna, who presented the Proof of the Truthful; and Al-Farabi, who made Neoplatonic arguments.

The Proslogion (Latin: Proslogium, lit. 'Discourse') is a prayer (or meditation) written by the medieval cleric Saint Anselm of Canterbury between 1077 and 1078. In each chapter, Anselm juxtaposes contrasting attributes of God to resolve apparent contradictions in Christian theology. This meditation is considered the first-known philosophical formulation that sets out an ontological argument for the existence of God.

The original title for this discourse was to be Faith Seeking Understanding.

The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism is a 2013 book by the English philosopher and humanist A. C. Grayling, in which he counters the arguments for the existence of God, and puts forward humanism as an alternative to religion.

Grayling is concerned with tone. He states that he wrote the first half of the book "thoroughly and calmly to examine all the arguments offered in support of religious beliefs", such as the ontological argument for the existence of God, which he argues against in the first half of the book.