Colin McGinn on theism

If you’ve got half an hour to kill, you could do worse than watch Jonathan Miller and Colin McGinn discussing theism. You can link to the next two sections from the first one, which can be found here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=U51JT8dTHTs

I especially like the bit where McGinn trashes the argument which says that God must exist because if he didn’t human life would be meaningless. But he’s rubbish on the the ontological argument: surely the definition of God as ‘the most perfect being that can be conceived’ is inessential to the argument, because we can simply list God’s attributes as including existence, omnipotence, omniscience, and so on. Thus, questioning the meaningfulness of the description ‘the most perfect being that can be conceived’ does nothing to diffuse the argument. (And, by the way, Anselm wrote in the eleventh, not the fifthteenth, century! McGinn needs to do a bit of history of philosophy…) Anyone have any ideas why McGinn doesn’t just repeat the mantra, ‘existence is not a property’?