Jester, great paper. I think your argument is flawed, though, based on the idea that perfection is subjective. By saying that a perfect being would have all possible perfections attributed to it, you are assuming that a Catholic Priest would attribute his own idea of perfection to God, as well as Billy Graham's, my own, yours, Adolf Hitler's, Saddam Hussein's, Muhammad's . . . I think you get where I'm going. What you are doing is confusing a person's opinion on perfection (subjective) with perfection itself (objective and unknowable in the precise details). So when you are asking "which perfection is more perfect?" you are really asking "Whose idea of perfection comes closest to true perfection?" This is a valid question (almost said a "perfectly" valid one but let's not go there
). I think a diagram would help explain your concluding logic a little better, big thick paragraphs get murky. As I see it, yes, there are flaws with Descartes' and Anselm's arguments as you present them, but they are not the only way to argue God's existence, if you want to do so.
Obviously, the existence of anything is not predicated on its conception by the human mind. But to disprove that assertion is not to disprove the existence of whatever is in question (The former is what I think your paper is doing). Light is just now reaching the earth from stars who radiated it before there were any humans to observe their existence, let alone comprehend their nature. At the time of the founding fathers, scientists thought combustion occurred due to something called phlogiston, and would have had no clue what an oxygen molecule was. Does this mean that oxygen was "born" when it was discovered? I think not. So to say that the existence of God is dependent on humanity's conception of God is absurd.
There are plenty of things out there that we don't understand yet, and never will. So for scientists to become condescending towards people of faith is incredibly arrogant, considering how wrong they've been in the past. Not that they're not getting a better and better picture of HOW the universe works. They just don't know ultimately Why It All Is The Way It Is. Perhaps there is a place for God in the Big Bang. Even if the universe was created by a one in a trillion event, maybe that was Him just saying "hmm . . . let's see if it works this time." Was the Big Bang really the beginning of time, or just the beginning of evidence? If so, does anyone have any clue what happened those other 999,999,999,999,999 times?
Similarly, though, logic has its place. If religious zealots are going to argue the mathematical calculations about the age of the universe, why don't they attack Newton's Theory of Gravity, or Gauss's Law while they're at it? Those simple formulas are the genesis of the idea that the universe is billions of years old, and no one argues them (Yes, I know Newtonian mechanics breaks down as you enter the realm of quantum theory and relativity, but it is a progenitor of modern theories). No matter what your religion and views on morality, it is utterly inexcusable to use them to justify your own ignorance. Personally I think that the logical proof of God's existence is unnecessary, at least for my own opinion. I agree with the above in that faith is by definition the belief in things which are not necessarily contradictory to science, just in the realm beyond what it can prove or disprove. At least mine is.