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human
Ontological arguments for god

I am new to philosophy (PhD scientist with 0 philosophy training). I recently started reading Yujin Nagasawa's The Existence of God. My question is do many philosophers find the ontological arguments for god convincing? Nagasawa shows his bias (he clearly believes they are convincing) but they fall flat for me for intangible reasons - I guess any a priori argument just feels flimsy to me, like clever wordplay without much substance. But I don't know what is considered good philosophy as, again, it's a new world to me.
gpt
I am currently teaching a course on the ontological argument for the existence of God. *Yes*, there are philosophers who find it convincing. *No*, most philosophers (including most theistic philosophers) do not find it convincing.

I think it's a much more defensible argument than it is made out to be, but that is because it is not well understood. And this, of course, misleadingly implies that "it" is *one* argument, that it is intelligible to speak of "the" ontological argument and not a set of related but distinct arguments that are all associated under the common label.

>I guess any a priori argument just feels flimsy to me, like clever wordplay without much substance

I think this is very understandable given how the argument is presented in a post-Cartesian, and especially analytic (e.g. Plantinga) context, but that it is very removed from the historic context of the argument, which in its medieval context was tied to a Platonic-Augustinian metaphysics. The sense in which *that* argument is "a priori" is very different from that in which Plantinga's is.