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The Problem with the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God
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But how can something be "most perfect". Doesn't that imply levels of perfection? Or was that just thrown in for flair?
If the concept of God exists a priori and the ontological argument uses only logic and reason, the ontological argument is a priori. If the thesis of an argument exists a priori, so does the idea of its inverse, as are all variations on that argument. We then arrive at
1. The idea of a perfect argument against the ontological argument for the existence of God exists
2. If this argument is not valid, not complete or not true a more perfect argument exists.
3. Therefore a valid, complete and true proof against the ontological argument exists.
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QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
exactly. I don't see how it's not a valid atheistic position to say "the only thing that is omnipresent is the existence, the volitionless substance of the universe."
Jesus Christ. The ontological argument isn't even part of epistemology.
This is roughly what I understand to be Meinong's approach to ontology and philosophy of language. Although he refrained from saying that Sherlock Holmes exists; instead, he said that Sherlock Holmes was a thing that we directly referred to (just like other things) but which happened to lack the property of existence. So it sounds like you're giving a similar sort of approach, but substituting 'being actual' where he used 'existing.'
Regardless, as you go on to say, existence in your sense doesn't tell us anything about 'being actual,' or existence in the more common parlance:
That is the question, isn't it.
It had better have been thrown in for flair, because it kills the argument. If it is impossible for God to exist, then God could easily still be the most perfect being despite not existing, since everything else is flawed in more significant ways that not existing.
Unless you're claiming that existance dwarfs everything else in importance, which is both arbitrary and has a whole bunch of ramifications that I haven't even considered yet.
Ontology is part of epistemology. The idea that "existance" is something you need to justify somehow or something you can have a "problem of" and so forth is all predicated on that "knowledge" of anything is something you need a "theory of".
Why? A perfect square and a perfect circle are both perfect, yet completely different.
Suggestion: find your own God, and stop arguing about the existence, or lack thereof, of the Gods of major religions - it's impossible to prove or disprove such a concept.
Edit: the Ontological argument holds water if a God exists. If He doesn't, it doesn't. It's really simple. It's a conditional argument that pretty much folds in on itself. So, I'm guessing that until someone can actually show us God, we should consider it a logical fallacy.
Taking as axiomatic that existence is possible then the argument is necessarily true. If existence is possible then something exists because even the existence of nothing is still an existence. If the definition of 'perfect' is being all that exists, then whensoever anything exists there is a category of being which is everything that exists and that is perfect. Because that is necessarily true, God exists for the definition of God as a perfect being.
Really all that this 'argument' does is provide two levels of abstraction over the statement of the axiom.
Axiom: Existence is possible.
Definition: Perfection is the totality of existence.
Definition: God is perfection.
Restatement: The totality of existence is the totality of existence.
Reduction: Existence is.
I am not arguing that it is possible for the axiom of existence to be incorrect, I'm just saying that it's assumed here and that the argument has no value beyond the statement of that assumption.
This God has no relation to any theist God with which I am familiar, so arguments regarding the relation of this God to theism or atheism are merit-less because there is no form of theism which attributes to their God perfection. Christianity calls their god 'perfect', but under the understanding that 'perfect' does not mean 'all encompassing' so much as 'omnibenevolent'. Atheism is not the rejection of the word God but the rejection of theism. This argument is, you said yourself Podly, unrelated to theism and therefore also unrelated to atheism. Atheists need not account for Being or being any differently from theists because ontological being is not directly related to theist deities any more intrinsically than it is linked to unicorns or chairs.
I'm going to disagree with you there. In fact the exact opposite is true.
"Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." Matt 5:48
"He is the Rock, his works are perfect,and all his ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is he." Deuteronomy 32:4
"Be assured that my words are not false; one perfect in knowledge is with you." Job 36:3-5
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
So we are arguing that existence is the basis of everything we see around us, a basic premise. And, therefore, existence is omnipresent, 'superior' to everything and thus becomes very much like god. Secondly, without existence nothing can exist. Now since I am sure something exists, existence must exist. Thus, god being existence, god exists.
Correct?
I hate it when philosophers get into this kind of thing.
For all intents and purposes, i exist, the chair i'm sitting on exists, the computer i'm typing this on exists. Do we really need to get into the whole 'how do you know?' stuff? We could all be part of someone's (rather amazing) imagination, but it would make no difference to us at all.
So why ask?
Kind of, I think. The OP wasn't very clear (referring to God even as a "he" with knowledge of things, which was a concept summarily thrown out the window later on) and threw a bunch of people through a loop.
The problem is being very much like God and being God are utterly different things, and no one has yet made sense of the phrase "existence sustains us" because existence is unable to take any actions or possess any qualities in and of itself, because it's not that kind of word.
Going to great lengths just to prove that existence exists is a fruitless and confusing exercise, because if you're wrong, you've deluded yourself (among other problems), and if you're right, everyone else knows already.
It's an effort to conclusively describe a perfect being through imperfect means, or, at the very least, a highly complex being through relatively simple means.
It's like trying to describe the structure of an atom by observing matter through a simple microscope. Sure, maybe you can come up with something that's on the right track. But then again, you can just as easily come up with something that's way off, and there's no way to really tell which is which without better tools.
You can shove your microscope in everyone's face and tell them what you think you see in there, but the tools are too basic and the objective too complex for anyone to ever reach a consensus on which assumptions are valid.
At the end of the day, it seems like whether God is a being or not is the big issue in these debates. If God is a being, then there's something to apply these labels like 'perfect' to and we can talk about creations and such. But if God isn't even a being, as the majority of this thread has been about, then it's just an arbitrary label you can tack on near-any adjective.
God is the composite of all things green.
There are green things in this world.
Therefore, God exists in this world.
Well sure, that indicates God exists, but not in any meaningful fashion, not in any way that has implications for people in the least. God as a label or a set of concepts is just boring.
With your example of observing an atom, the problem is insufficient measurement. There is no specific evidence against the notion of atoms that can be derived from a simple microscope, only uncertainty due to lack of decent measurement devices.
When we're talking about God in any meaningful way, as in not just a label for some other concept, then we run into the problem that our current measurement devices are already finding flaws. When we try to define God in the context of a being, all sorts of problems crop up, which is quite different from the "I can't see atoms so I'm confused" argument.
Doesn't the ontological argument necessarily depend on an infinite universe? Because only in an infinite universe would anything that is possible also exist. Except, by all evidence, the universe is not infinite - there is a finite amount of matter in a finite volume.
So sure, there is a "most perfect being" out there, in the sense that for any definition of "perfect", there must necessarily be some entity that is closest to it. Just as there is a "largest being" and a "jar containing the closest to 1,572 jellybeans". But given a finite universe, "most perfect" needn't be very close to perfect at all.
I mean, even if we accept the argument as valid on its face, all it does is pick some object in the universe and call it "God". Well shit, I can do that without a bunch of fancy philosophy: God is a realtor from Tacoma named Leroy. Get to worshippin', I guess.
Actually, it's traditionally part of metaphysics. See:
Besides, your diagnostic is off. You blame what you see as a pseudo-problem, namely 'the problem of justifying existence,' on the misconceptions inherent in the analytic tradition. However, you ignore the fact that plenty of philosophers working within that very same tradition have also thought that such problems were pseudo-problems.
An infinite universe needn't contain everything that is possible, any more than an infinite string of numbers need contain every number. If you represent one third in decimal form, the result is an infinite string, but it still contains only one numeral.
In order to know that an infinite universe contains everything that's possible, you would also need to know something about the rules which generated it.
Perhaps. I really don't know. Religious experiences and rites, for me, are quite ambiguous. They can be visceral, but nevertheless they are quite ambiguous.
@HamHamJ: Ontology is part of Metaphysics, which is a separate branch from epistemology. You're just been annoying.
This perfectly describes what I've seen here. You can play some very fine tricks with language when you treat the words as equivalent to the concepts they represent, ignoring that concepts are ephemeral and biased by perception. Thus, as stated, they are imperfect tools; the words themselves are too easily twisted and redefined, until they no longer represent the concept they began as; the glaring example is the word "God". Compound this with variations of understanding of the core concept by each participant in the debate, and you have a room of people discussing the same words, but none of them discussing the same concepts.
Which is the primary reason that the Ontological Argument strikes me as a failure: it's a twisting of language, not an insight into concepts.
Well, it's to guard against other beings which might attain perfection. For instance, if someone plays a perfect game of golf, is he God? Presumably not. Got is the being for whom every possibility is perfected, brought to complete actuality.
That's a good question. Being, as argued by Kant, however, is not merely like God -- it looks as if it meets the definition of the divine.
Well that was Kant's basic critique that you can not derive reality from existence, because the knowledge of the two stems from different catagories. It would be like saying "I exist, therefore I was caused." It seems to be true, via synthetic thought, by the simply fact of my existence does not mean that I was caused. The same goes for "I am part of reality:" that, too, is not "caused" per se, although we cannot imagine how it would not be caused.
I think it's a rather good'n.
But that's just me.
lttp, but why can there only be one being which is perfect? who made that rule up?
also, no matter how you play with words, you cannot define god into existence.
The problem is that unicorns or chairs are beings, whereas Being "presences" beings. Being is omnipresent and the the only [strike]being[/strike] capable of doing such. Beings are only allowed because there is Being.
Because that is the traditional definition of God: essentia dei est existentia, existence is the essence of God.
Except humans made this concept, this is not how it actually is
Swapping around words and semantics doesn't prove God exists anymore than it proves Cthulu exists.
Do you think that Being is a linguistic construct?
Because if God is the being who is completely perfect, then he is infinitely actualized -- he is infinite. If there is a being of which he is not, then he is not infinite. If there were another "perfect" being, it would just be a mode of God, like a trinity God, or a Hinduistic set of modal gods.
That there are other reasons for thinking it's a pseudo-problem does not invalidate the reason I stated for thinking it's a pseudo-problem. It just means that the original problem fails on multiple levels.
If we take knowledge to be a matter of justified belief, we can see that existance is going to be defined as some combination of observability and interactivity and necessity. Any statement about existance is just a statement about a physical state of one kind or another and thus not requiring of metaphysical justification of any kind.
And what's the problem with that?
I can cite a whole bunch of religions with numerous 'perfect' beings.
Well, in hinduism and christianity, there is really only one God, and the rest are just knowable modes. The number is still one, universal and transcendent, it just has modular singularity.