According To Douglas Gasking's Arguments Against The Existence Of God

Douglas Gasking gave his arguments against the existence of God. Premise 1 of his argument looks fine. World is a greatest creation. If there is no world, then there is no human life. Premise 2 is also reasonable. The creation of a thing merely depends upon the two things- quality of the creation and ability of the creator. Because when we see any creation, first we talk about it’s quality. Premise 3 is logical in some sense. Let us take the example of a painting. There is a painter who is normal and healthy. He creates a painting. And there is another painter who has no hands. He creates painting only using his legs. Then whose creation is greater? Obviously the creation of second painter is big achievement than the first one because he created the painting
without his arms. So there is no problem with this premise. Premise 4 does not seem reasonable. He said the most formidable handicap for a creator to be non-exist. In the above example of painting both of the painter exist in the world. If a being does not exist, then how can he create something. It is just nonsense statement. We can not even think about that. Non- existing is not any kind of handicap.
So premise 4 is false. An existing handicap can only be possessed to an existing being, but premise is all about non-existing being. Therefore premise 5 will also fail. World is the creation of a existent being, we can think a greater being that does not exist. But it is not possible for a non-existing being to create a world. No one can think about that. Premise 5 and premise 6 are co-related. So if 5 is not true then 6 will also be false. We can’t think about a creation created by non-existing being. Although some points of this argument make sense but premise 4 is absolutely incorrect. So this argument is not good against the God existence. There are also some problems about the words used in this argument like- marvellous, incredible, formidable, merit etc. He should use words like greatness, greatest etc. We can give the example- let us take the premise 1 and use greatest in place of marvellous. World is the greatest achievement imaginable is more plausible than world is the marvellous achievement imaginable. So Douglas’s argument does not seem parallel to Anselm’s argument. So it is just wrong to say Douglas’s argument provides a contradiction to Anselm’s
argument. Douglas’s argument is logical in some sense but it does not seem sound because of it’s false promises.