Doomed to Fail: The Sad Epistemological Fate of Ontological Arguments

Turri, J. (2013). Doomed to fail: the sad epistemological fate of ontological arguments. In Ontological proofs today (pp. 413–422). Ontos Verlag.

For beings like us, no ontological argument can possibly succeed. They are doomed to fail. The point of an ontological argument is to enable nonempirical knowledge of its conclusion, namely, that God exists. But no ontological argument could possibly enable us to know its conclusion nonempirically, and so must fail in that sense. An ontological argument will fail even if it is perfectly sound and begs no questions.