Objections to Anselm's Ontological Argument

I promised a critique of Anselm's ontological Argument. Well, let's give it a try, shall we? I'm going to use the summarized version presented on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy ( http://www.iep.utm.edu/ont-arg/ ).

Here's the argument:
1.It is a conceptual truth that God is a being than which none greater can be imagined (that is, the greatest possible being that can be imagined).

2. God exists as an idea in the mind

3. A being that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is, other things being equal, greater than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind.

4. Thus, if God exists only as an idea in the mind, then we can imagine something that is greater than God (that is, a greatest possible being that does exist).

5. But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God (for it is a contradiction to suppose that we can imagine a being greater than the greatest possible being that can be imagined.)

6. Therefore, God exists.

I'm going to start with an obvious objection. Existence is not an attribute in the same way as "greatness" or "blue-ness". Existence is the precondition for these attributes to be ascribed to a referent. What Anselm is doing here is claiming that the attribute "Greatest being conceivable" entails the being existing, otherwise it wouldn't be great. The problem is we ascribe qualities like "Greatness" to objects that exist already. This is essentially a fallacy of equivocation regarding the idea of existence.

Another objection that can be raised is the fact that this argument conflates the idea of concepts with the idea of the object that is conceived. His argument, if correctly stated, would need to assert that the concept of God must exist outside of the mind for it to be greater than the being conceived in the mind; if this isn't done, it commits another fallacy of equivocation. We don't literally conceive of beings, but mental representations of said beings. (I don't want to get into a philosophy of mind debate regarding the idea of mental representations. This is for the sake of simplicity.)

I could go on with the objections, but it seems pointless at this point. Two of the premises are flawed, so the argument is impotent.