In 1078, Anselm of Canterbery proposed an argument that explained how the existence of God (the Christian God specifically, AKA Yahweh) was self-evident in his personal meditations. His argument has since been examined over the years, criticisized, reformed, and so on. His original quote looks like this:

God is defined as a "being than which no greater can be conceived". Even "the fool" can understand this concept, and this understanding itself means that the being must exist in the mind. The concept must exist either only in our mind, or in both our mind and in reality. If such a being exists only in our mind, then a greater being—that which exists in the mind and in reality—can be conceived. Therefore, if we can conceive of a being than which nothing greater can be conceived, it must exist in reality. Thus, a being than which nothing greater could be conceived, must exist in reality.

Ansel of Canterbury's "Proslogion" ch2.

My first time encountering this argument was from a friend who had not yet himself become an atheist (though he would years later). We both shared a hobby of playing D&D, and the argument was presented a bit subtly as a discussion on crossbows. The train of thought started with "imagine a crossbow." "OK." "Now imagine a better crossbow." "OK." "Imagine the best possible crossbow." "OK." "Now, which is better, a crossbow you can imagine, or a real crossbow?" "A real one." "So if the best crossbow you can imagine were real, it would be even better?" "Sure."

I forget the exact transition, but I think he attempted to define "God" as "perfect in all ways" and we sort of ran into a disagreement from that point. I was not convinced God was ultimately perfect, nor that that was an appropriate definition for the word "God."

There are other counters to the basic argument. It seems to make the assumption (which I somewhat erroneously agreed to when the topic was a crossbow) that "existence" is something which would impact the perfection of a thing, and it creates the absurd situation where anything we could imagine exists because existing things are better than non-existing things, and we can imagine perfect things which would, therefore, have to exist. All things, in perfect form, must exist by this logic.

I've since heard a transformation of the Ontological Argument which attempts to incorporate the multiverse theory. I am going to put this version in my own words, as I don't recall specifically whom it was I heard speak it, thus cannot properly quote them verbatim. It was not their original creation either, and they were paraphrasing someone else. So keep in mind, we may be losing something in the translation, though I don't think so.

Among the infinite possible universes, a "maximally great" being is possible. Therefore in at least one or some of the multiple universes, a maximally great being exists. Existing in all universes is greater than existing in only one or some. Therefore a maximally great being exists in all universes, including ours. Therefore a maximally great being exists in our universe. And "God" is that maximally great being.

My paraphrasing of the modal logic version of the Ontological Argument.

One of the criticisms of all forms of the Ontological argument is that such a being self-contradicts. The old "can God create a rock too heavy for even himself to lift?" Omniscience and Omnipotence within the same being is also self-contradictory because knowing all things through all time prevents the creation of beings with free will, thus is a limit on omnipotence. (this is itself a thing which has been argued and debated, so feel free to request clarification if you're not comfortable simply accepting that at face-value. Even if you disagree with or resolve this contradiction, I'll grant it to you. I'm not basing my conclusion on it. Just noting that it has been brought up by others.

What I haven't really seen others do is grant, for argument's sake, the Ontological Argument, then proceed further with it other than to parody it. The self-contradictory (two or more traits which are perfect, but mutually exclusive to other perfect traits) nature of "maximally great" or "perfect being" or "omnipotent being" gets us started on the path I am imagining, but I feel we can go further with it.

A maximally great being is tentatively proven to exist in our universe. The logic that got us there examines one trait of that being: existence. We have, with this argument, stated that not existing would be lesser than existing, and existing geater than non-existance. Perfection, or maximal greatness, is a bit like my original mention of the crossbow and can be seen as a scale of all possible magnitudes of quality we can imagine. This maximally great being having the greatest possible magnitude of that quality. So it sets forth the framework we can use to imagine other qualities of this being.

While we can imagine internal-contradictions to this being, a maximally great being would, somehow, lack these contradictions. Because not being self-contradictory is better than being self-contradictory. So, again, not using this as my point.

We can also agree that evidence which is compelling is greater than evidence which is not compelling. Compelling evidence removes our doubt about the truth of a claim. The uncompelling evidence fails to remove our doubt. There is a clear scale of better than or worse than. And a maximally great being would have compelling evidence for its existence. Indeed it would have maximally compelling evidence for that existence. The evidence for the existence of God, therefore, should be so compelling that it leaves us with not even a shred of doubt, and does so in a manner which does not abrogate our free will. In spite of any contradiction that we could imagine against this, the maximally great being is capable of this anyway. Whatever limited understanding we have on the workings of free will do not extend to the sort of maximally compelling evidence for which must exist for a maximally great being.

I don't know about you, but I personally doubt the existence of God. I have found no evidence that is remotely compelling. Indeed, it has been said that it is hardly possible to even prove you or me exist.

Our universe is a universe in which no maximally compelling evidence for the existence of God can be presented, otherwise, we would all be doubtless. Therefore, no maximally great being exists within our universe. As a maximally great being would exist in all universes, such a being exists in no universes. Since one would exist in at least one universe if it were possible, we can conclude that a maximally great being is not possible.

The Ontological Argument attempts to prove God exists by granting the power of creation to our imagination, yet the power of our doubt prevails and reassures us that the monsters imagined by long-dead savages can never be real.

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Among the infinite possible universes, a "maximally great" being is possible. Therefore in at least one or some of the multiple universes, a maximally great being exists.

I would point out that this doesn't necessarily follow. Even in an infinity, possible doesn't become guaranteed; very, very likely in some cases, but never guaranteed. There's a similar problem when someone brings up the multiverse hypothesis and uses it to conclude that there are an infinite number of Earths playing out every possible history. That would be fun to consider, and given an infinite universe or a multiverse, it's possible, but it's also possible that the infinity consists of everything except other Earths; or once you go far enough away stuff stops happening altogether, leaving an empty infinite expanse; or the universe/multiverse turns into an infinite ocean of 1960's Beatles albums.

To simplify it, imagine you flip a perfect coin (one that has exactly a 50/50 chance with no possibility of edge landings or other shenanigans). You won't know whether you'll get heads or tails until it lands.

Now flip that perfect coin ten times in a row. What are the chances that it will land on heads every time? .5^10, or 0.0009765625 out of 1. That's a pretty small number, but you wouldn't dismiss it as an impossibility, because it isn't; it's unlikely, but still possible. How about half of the coins landing on heads, and half landing on tails? That's the combinations of 5 heads and 5 tails [10! / (5! * 5!) = 252] over all possible combinations [2^10 = 1024]; this comes to 0.24609375 out of 1. This is the most probable outcome, sitting at just under one fourth chance.

How about flipping the coin ten million times? The chance that it will land on heads every time is .5^10,000,000, or approximately 1.1 * 10^(-3010300) out of 1. This is an absolutely tiny chance, but still possible, because it isn't zero. But it's instructive to look at the most probable outcome, too, which would be half heads and half tails (five million heads and five million tails). This comes out to around .00025 out of 1, which is substantially higher than the chance of getting all heads, but clearly a downward trend from the most probable outcome of ten flips.

This trend continues on to infinity: The outcome of all heads, along with the outcome of all tails, becomes infinitely small at a very fast rate… but so does every other single possible outcome. The chance of any particular distribution is highly unlikely, but always possible, even at infinity. There being exactly one Earth in an infinite multiverse may be unlikely, but it cannot be ruled out. I say may be, because we don't actually know the chance of Earth existing, so any more concrete calculations would be impossible.

In short, infinity can do funny things with probability, but it does not magically make chance happenings guaranteed.

Edit: Accidental early submit; rest of the comment incoming. Edit edit: Rest of comment posted.

Also, there's some pretty big sleight of hand in that first sentence. That definition of God isn't actually universally accepted; and even if it is, it defines a God that doesn't necessarily share any qualities of the God described in the Bible.

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Yeah, this is my immediate objection to the proposition. There's also the unsubstantiated claim that there are infinite universes; we don't even have proof that there are a nonzero finite number of universes other than we one we're experiencing, much less that there's an infinite number.

It's a similar issue I have with the fine-tuning argument. Sure, if the gravitational constant were much different, life as we know it could not exist. But before you can argue about some intelligence selecting the value for the constant, first you need to demonstrate that it's possible for a universe to form in which the gravitational constant is something else.

When our sample size of "universes" is one, there are a lot of things you can't say about it.

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Definitely some interesting parallels between my thoughts and the progression of events in Darkmatter's video. I'd hear your thoughts on them though.

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There are indeed quite a few problems with the Ontological Argument. Rather than stop right at the start of it, I was interested in seeing it through to at least one end I came up with. So far you're all regurgitating pre-existing faults with the argument, rather than discussing where I went with it. Is that just not interesting? Or are you unable to grant, even tentatively, those parts of the argument to see this end?

I am not asserting the Ontological Argument lacks those flaws you mention, nor is it compelling argumentation in and of itself. I am toying with the idea that if we set aside those criticisms that are commonly levied against it, does it contain further flaws? I am interested in hearing if the one I found is particularly novel or original. I am interested in hearing if it successfully, in and of itself, debunks the argument or not. In order to see if it does, we have to at least temporarily set aside those earlier criticisms which also debunk it.

In particular, the "infinite/probability doesn't work that way" counterargument I feel is a somewhat weak counter. I agree we cannot say for certain that things work the way the Modal Ontological Argument described. You both agree though that the "possibility" still exists, which is where the theist latches on doggedly, and ignores that possibilities that their God doesn't exist. I feel my counter removes even that possibility. It cuts back to the original intent of the argument, which was never to present "proof" of the existence of God, merely to describe one man's thought processes to which he described "self-evident" to. Much like you, it feels like Ansel stopped his argument at an arbitrary point and attempts to declare victory there. I feel continuing the argument to the conclusion I've reached renders even the possibility of God logically impossible.

I am an anti-theist, in addition to being atheist. I am interested in merely the neutral or agnostic position, but I am also interested in demonstrating proof that the lack of Gods can be shown and deduced. Even self-evidently.

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You both agree though that the "possibility" still exists, which is where the theist latches on doggedly,

And latching onto it like that just further demonstrates that they don't understand probability. It's not a weak counter to point out that an argument that requires an absolute fails to establish that absolute. Frankly, I rarely see people pointing out the flaw with this sort of abuse of infinity; I see it coming from atheists making arguments about parallel universes just as often as religious people trying to use it to prove God.

Perhaps what you mean by a weak counter is something that fails to hit somebody like a ton of bricks; that fails to obviously, intuitively be wrong. I would counter that with the observation that reliance on the ‘obvious’ and the ‘intuitive’ is exactly what gets people making the Ontological Argument in the first place. Reality isn't amenable to our intuition all the time, so a good argument or counterargument should not be measured on how intuitively obvious it is.

As for whether your counter is a novel approach: I can't say I've seen that particular argument brought up to specifically counter the Ontological Argument, but the generalized version is common: God is all knowing, so he would know exactly how to convince each of us that he is real. God is all powerful, so he would be able to perform whatever would be required to convince each of us. God wants us to know him, so he would have already convinced all of us of his presence with said perfect knowledge and infinite power. Since some people don't know that he exists, at least one of the above (omniscience, omnipotence, wanting to be known) must be false for God to exist.

The problem with this angle, either the above or your version, is that Christians will typically refuse to agree to one of our premises; that is, the claim that there are people that don't already know that God is real. They can just hold that you and I know perfectly well that God is real and are just in denial, and the argument falls apart because they've refused to accept a foundational premise. As such, it fails at being a slam-dunk disproof of an omni(scient+potent+benevolent) god. It just forces believers into taking the position that we're actively lying about our own position, which is unhelpful, at best.

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You both agree though that the "possibility" still exists

On the contrary, I don't blindly grant the possibility of the first premise of the argument. If you want to make a sound logical argument, as the apologists always seem to want to try to do, then every single premise of the argument needs to be true. If the very first premise is rejected for having zero evidence, the entire argument falls apart before even attempting to get off the ground.

Granting premises for the sake of argument can be done in order to examine the argument's validity; an argument is valid if the conclusion follows from the premises when the premises are true, but an argument is sound if it's valid and the premises are in fact true.

Premise 1: All ponies are Pokemon.
Premise 2: All Pokemon are vacuum cleaners.
Conclusion: Therefore, all ponies are vacuum cleaners.

That's a valid form, but it should be obvious that it's not sound. Similarly, when the first premise is something to the effect of "There exist an infinite number of parallel universes", you can immediately discard the argument as unsound. I don't generally find value in arguing over validity, and an unsound argument has no real power, ergo an objection to the first premise ends the argument.

Now, if I object to a premise because of a lack of evidence and the person presenting the argument wants to present the evidence to show the premise is true, that's a different story. But if someone's got evidence for the existence of an infinite number of parallel universes, they should be talking to the Nobel committee, not to me.