Is the Ontological Argument the Worst?

Dr. Craig responds to parodies of the Ontological Argument.

OBJECTION: And what he did was say, look bro’, we can just replace the word “the greatest possible being” – the term “the greatest possible being” – with “the greatest possible island” and then we're going to have the greatest possible island. If you now think of an island and it's perfect for you – you’re thinking it's got cookies, it's got Seth Andrews narrating your life, whatever it might be – but you don't have existence as part of the island's definition then, well, I can think of a greater island, namely the one you've just described but with the addition of existence. It's better to exist than not exist. That's the general thrust of course, and it works just as much for an island. It also works for an evil being – the greatest possible evil being would be one that necessarily exists. If you read the Bible, I actually think that evil being is a better description of God than a good being. Or this is my favorite one. We can say that we can conceive of the worst possible argument (and quite frankly the ontological argument competes for that).

DR. CRAIG: What he's providing here are parodies of the ontological argument where you apply it to things like a presentation, an evil being, an island, and so forth and try to show that if the ontological argument is sound then you would prove these other things as well. The problem with these parodies is that they posit incoherences. There is no such thing as a greatest possible island. An island isn't the sort of thing that has intrinsic great-making properties. These are relative to your interests. Do you prefer an island that is a desert island with palm trees? Or do you prefer to have an island that's chock full of first-rate resort hotels? There isn't any objective great-making properties for greatness of islands. Similarly, with respect to an evil being, it is, I think, metaphysically impossible for there to be a greatest conceivable evil being because a greatest conceivable being has as one of its properties moral perfection, and in the absence of God there wouldn't even be any sort of standard to define objective moral values. Similarly, there isn't any such thing as the worst possible argument. If an argument is logically invalid and has false premises then that's as worst as it can get and there just is no such thing as the worst possible argument. So these attempts to have parodies just show that the person offering them hasn't really grasped the concept of God as a maximally great being and ask the question: Is it possible that such a being exists?