Question

Hello Rabbi!
I’m starting to study your Faith Notebooks, and I’d be very grateful if you could answer a few questions that came up for me during the beginning of the first notebook:
I understood that Anselm’s ontological argument, simply put, goes like this:
Starting point: God is the greatest being that can be conceived. It is impossible to conceive of a greater being. Addition from Wikipedia: Anselm holds, similarly to Plato, that concepts (such as “red” or “beautiful”) have real existence outside the human imagination. According to this view, if something can be conceived (such as the concept of God), that is a sign that the thing has some reality in the world.
Now Anselm makes an assumption that leads to a contradiction in order to show that it is impossible: Assumption A: God does not exist in reality. Assumption B: Existence in reality is greater than existence in thought alone. Assumption C: A being that has all the divine characteristics and also exists in reality is a being that can be thought of (you simply think of something with those same characteristics and that also exists). Conclusion 1: A being that has all the characteristics of divinity and exists in reality is greater than God. Conclusion 2: A being greater than God is a being that can be thought of. Conclusion 3: There is a being greater than God.
It turns out that Conclusion 3 contradicts the definition of God, since God by definition is the greatest being that can be thought of. If so, Assumption A has led us to a contradiction and must therefore be rejected. It cannot be that God exists only in thought and not in reality. Final conclusion: God exists in reality.
First of all—I included here the addition from Wikipedia about Anselm’s Platonic view as part of the starting point from which he proceeds. It didn’t appear when you explained the argument in Truth and Unstable (which is what I used to help me understand it). I think it’s hard to understand the argument without that addition. I wanted to ask: did you intentionally omit it in the book? In other words, is it not critical to the argument? (I think it is critical, because if it isn’t there, then what does it matter that a person can think of a being greater than God? That doesn’t say anything about reality.)
Back to the point:
If so—I hope I understood correctly that Anselm’s starting point (and that of society in general in the Middle Ages) is that God exists and that it is impossible to conceive of anything greater than Him. Meaning, the novelty in his argument is not the belief itself but God’s actual real existence in reality, which is derived from the belief: if you follow Plato in saying that what can be conceived has some sort of reality, and you believe in “God” (= the greatest being that exists), and that what exists in reality is greater than what exists only in thought—then that requires Him also to exist concretely in reality, because only then would that fit the definition of Him as the greatest being (otherwise one could conceive of a being with divine attributes that also exists in reality, which according to the Platonic view would teach us that it has some sort of existence, and it would count as greater—and there would be a logical failure in the starting-point assumption that God is the greatest). Belief in God already exists, but now we have shown rationally that God’s existence in reality is necessary for the believer. That’s what I’ve understood so far.
And now the questions:
1. What about someone who believes in God but doesn’t agree with Plato? (I can think of whatever I want, but that doesn’t mean it has any reality whatsoever… Actually, I’m not even sure I understood what Plato is saying, since I can think of lots of things that I think are very unlikely to have any reality at all, such as a flying spaghetti monster that decides when rain will fall—a nice example from an atheist Facebook group I came across on Facebook.)
2. As a continuation of the previous question about the Platonic view—even if I agree with all the assumptions (or even if just Plato’s approach is enough), why not simply prove it by saying that one can conceive of a being with divine characteristics that exists in reality, and according to Plato this would indicate some degree of reality—and just call that God?
3. What about someone who believes in God but doesn’t agree that matter is greater than spirit? (“Maybe God is so exalted that He has no inferior material embodiment?”).

And a general question בעקבות all these specific questions—I didn’t understand the distinction the Rabbi made when he explained that the above argument is based not on facts but on definitions. Because the Rabbi said that one cannot disagree with a definition, only with a fact, and it seems there is plenty here to disagree with in this argument, as I showed above.
In addition, one cannot ignore the fact that this is based on the fact that there is some divine being. (The argument proves that God exists in reality; it may be directed at someone who already agrees that there is such a thing as God, and convinces him that if so, then He must exist in reality through various definitions—but in the end, the fact that there is such a thing as God is a decisive fact in the argument. If so, this argument too is based on a fact. Isn’t it?)
It came out a bit messy; I hope the Rabbi understood what I was trying to say.
Thank you very much!