The ontological arguments for God’s existence amount to establishing a God from imagination, sparking a comparison to “hoisting oneself by one’s own bootstraps.” The two major problems are:
1. It is not a given that the human mind should be capable of thinking what the Creator is or is like.
2. It is not a given that the human idea of goodness, will correspond to the Creator’s idea of goodness.
A basic fault is attempting to call the Creator “good,” before it has been established that man is “good.” That is to say, attempts to call God “good,” only reflect the mind of the human. God’s actual goodness, or lack thereof, is not ascertainable from the human mind. As you argue that God must be good, in fact you are only arguing that God should be good your way. If He appears and insists He is good His way instead, you say it isn’t God.
This is the secret meaning of the Garden of Eden Fable, that man eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, was only a way of saying men would make themselves the standard and ignore God’s advice. This was the nature of the snake’s temptation of Eve, that if she ate of the fruit she’d share God’s authority. But really, when men eat of this fruit they only believe themselves equivalent to God, i.e. they usurp God’s role as guide.
Unfortunately this isn’t a choice of men, but an existential description. A strong piece of evidence for this is the paucity of the religious revelations, where only meager suggestions appear. God did not even point men to their best political system, explain the causes of war and how to avoid it, show how best to preserve the planet, or give a clear mechanism to immortality. Jesus spoke in vague parables, few and far between, instead of flooding the world with written words, as if men would only accept a God they thought they could control, instead of one standing in the way of greed everywhere they turn.
