Various modal formulations of the ontological argument do lead to an interesting and I think correct conclusion that falls short of God’s existence. That is the

Various modal formulations of the ontological argument do lead to an interesting and I think correct conclusion that falls short of God’s existence. That is the conclusion that God must either necessarily exist or necessarily fail to exist. Anything that merely happened not to exist would not, if it did exist, be worthy of worship (as it would be something that merely happened to exist). I am just stating the result here rather than arguing for it. Norman Malcolm expressed it very clearly in a 1960 paper. The original paper is on JSTOR, but there’s a decent summary of it here: https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3-euw1-ap-pe-ws4-cws-documents.ri-prod/9781138690394/metaphysicsofgod/malcolms_ontological_argument.docx https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3-euw1-ap-pe-ws4-cws-doc... Malcolm wanted to go all the way and show that God does indeed exist. I think that’s where the argument runs into problems.