(3) Properly basic belief. I don’t know what this is.
(4) Something called S5 Modal Logic. I do not have the time or level of interest to ask questions about modal logic. If this is convincing to you, you can rest assured that I would be incapable of challenging the intellectual basis for your belief/knowledge that God exists. Please understand that I do not find this sort of argument convincing, because I do not understand it, and am unwilling to apply the time necessary for understanding it.
**(3) **Properly basic beliefs have to do with philosophical warrant for holding a belief: a properly basic belief is something which is completely intuitionistic, by my understanding, which can not be proved but is necessary for further discourse. A classical example is that of other minds. We believe, or know, that other minds exist, but there is no way to prove this (see solipsism and philosophical zombies, and brain-in-a-vat). I believe that Plantinga also introduced this concept, comparing the belief in God to belief in other minds, but I am not sure (he is by far the most original Christian thinker active today, Swinburne being a close second). His book
God and Other Minds and his trilogy on
Warrant cover this in far greater detail, but he is an extremely analytic philosopher: unlike Aristotle, Hume, Kant, and Nietzsche, a layman can not understand him: one must know the bases of modern analytic philosophy first, as he writes within that framework.
(4) The S5 modal logic is nothing but regular modal logic (and I assume you are familiar with at least basic modal logic, Kripke semantics, and possible world semantics, or you’ll not be able to understand any analytic philosophy of the last century) that’s been trimmed to make it easier to express (and easier to plug in to programs such as Prover9): it avoids superfluous iteration of qualifiers of different kinds. For example, under S5, if X is necessarily, possibly, necessarily, possibly true, then X is possibly true. Unbolded qualifiers before the final “possibly” are pruned in S5.
Plantinga takes this and argues also, if something is possibly necessarily true, then it is necessarily true. To justify, he reasons that if X is possibly necessary, it is necessary in at least one possible world; hence it is necessary in all possible worlds and thus is true in all possible worlds. It has much in common with the more modern, analytical forms of realism and/or essentialism (with all of the talk of possible worlds and such).
Wittgenstein offers a similar NP-complete modal expression of the ontological proof that is more suited for his style of thinking, which is the ultimate analytic: mathematical computation. However, both Plantinga’s proof and Wittgenstein’s are ontological proofs set in the modal logic; details of implementation differ (and weaknesses in one tend to be strengths in the other).
Now that that has been removed out of the way, if you would like me to attempt a classical proof (even if you tie my hands to Aristotelian syllogisms) such as the cosmological, ontological, argument from morality, principle of sufficient reason, the five ways, or even a teleological argument (I personally believe the teleological argument is extremely weak, essentially refuted by “the argument to poor design”, and am a poor defender of it in any case), I am more than happy to oblige, but I suggest we open another thread (something like: “Arguments for God: Cosmological. Point-Counterpoint” or something similar, if you get my gist) for it to be done in, as I am certain it will take many posts of back-and-forth (as you can’t raise objections as I go, only to the finished form), and would derail this thread completely.
Again, thank you for your honesty: “this argument is over my head, and I don’t give a fig to bring it down to eye-level.” That’s rare, and befitting of a Christian!
