The Ontological Arguments

  • Thread starter Thread starter adamlsp
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
karl,

still talking to hisself

The prob is, insofar as convincing the world that God exists is concerned, the OA will never realistically do that. It will always be possible to pick at the premises of the argument if not the reasoning. Not much is axiomatic for everyone.

But even if it is unrealistic to expect to remove all doubt concerning theism, it is realistic to remove some doubts through honest and thorough examination of the OA.
 
and it ought to be kept in mind that those who take the negative position have their own unquestioned presuppositions as well.

I suggest the following project: lay out the original OA from Prosl III and take it apart. Then uncover its deficiencies and how they might be resolved. Then examine whether the many worlds version of Plantinga is any better.
 
OK, let’s work with Kreeft and Tacelli’s unpacking of it, or something similar, with Krebsbachian refinements:
  1. the expression “that being than which a greater cannot be thought” (Greatest Conceivable Being or GCB) expresses a consistent concept.
  2. we can conceive of beings existing contingently or necessarily.
  3. A being which exists necessarily is greater than one which exists contingently. (Principle from Prosl. III)
  4. the GCB cannot be thought of as necessarly nonexistent or as contingently existing, but only as necessarily existing.
  5. So the GCB can only be thought of as the kind of being that must exist.
  6. But what must be so is so.
  7. Therefore, the GCB (God) exists.
 
OK, what are the presuppositions lurking therein?
  1. Something exists. What does exist mean? as roy axed back on March 10th.
  2. Of that which exists, we can conceive of a GCB. what is great?
  3. you posit the modes of necessary and contingent existence. What do they mean and is this categorization valid and exhustive of all possibilities.?
udders?
 
actually 4 is part of 3.

Let’s talk about what it means to exist. It is helpful to the OA to distinguish between existence and actuality. The latter is fully specified and determined. It is concrete. It is a persistent reality. Before something becomes actual it exists only abstractly and potentially. Actual things exist, but not all existence is actual. There can be the abstract idea of something which could be actualized but isn’t yet.

When we talk about actual things we can discern that they have attributes. Sometimes we can generalize therefrom and say that this attribute or characteristic exists. e.g. redness exists, meaning that it is actualized in some way in the world. Or animalness or plantness exist when we refer to the animal and plant kingdoms. abstract ideas exist in this sense.
 
What then is greatness? For Anselm it meant being whatever it is better to be. But as Hitite argued earlier, don’t we run into contradictions when we think of multiple attributes at once. Can one individual embody all at once? Yes, if that individual is all inclusive of all value. If the individual is the all-comprehensive reality then there doesn’t seem to be a problem. This also takes care of there conceivably being any rival cuz there is absolutely nothing besides the all-inclusive being. The only way we could conceive of a better would be to conceive him surpassing himself, which shouldn’t be a problem.
 
So can we meaningfully posit different modes of existence (contingent and necessary?) I think so. to say that all existence is contingent is an unproven assumption. I think it must be possible to reason from the fact that something exists now that something or other must always exist.
 
Given all this, the proof leads inexorably to the conclusion that God exists. But there is still the positivist argument that just cuz you construct this argument that seems to hold, given your pressuppostions, all you have managed to do is play with symbols. Thinking these thoughts cannot, according modern dogma, make them so in reality. but neo-classical theism responds: that is true in the sense that an abstract idea cannot compel or require any particular concretetization of it. But this does not rule out this mode: necessarily actualized somehow, which is unique to God.
 
I guess the more think about this, the more it seems clear that proving the existence of God is just a matter of getting one’s thinking straight. God exists necessarily or the idea is nonsense. there are only two choices: theism or postivism…

Seems to me that positivism carries the greater burden. Look at its assumptions. Everything exists contingently. A state of absolute nothingness is conceivable. All talking about reality is a “language game” and could be false. there are no necessary truths. und so weiter.
 
Plantinga also argues that the reason we are justified in believing in God is because God gives the “Elect” a sixth sense that receives and responds to the Holy Spirit. Those not part of the “Elect” don’t have this sense. What a joke. He’s obviously a very intelligent man if Notre Dame decided to place him in such a high position in the Philosophy Dept but his Calvinist ideas are not reconcilable with any form of reasonable Christianity. His new additions to the ontological argument aren’t convincing and his views on theology are out there. So why is he teaching at a Catholic university again?
 
Adam’s original presentation of Plantinga’ OA:
  1. By definition a maximally great being is one that exists necessarily and necessarily is omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good. (Premise)
  2. Possibly a maximally great being exists. (Premise)
  3. Therefore, possibly it is necessarily true that an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good being exists (By 1 and 2)
  4. Therefore, it is necessarily true that an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good being exists. (By 3 and S5)
  5. Therefore, an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good being exists. (By 4 and since necessarily true propositions are true.)
 
From Adam’s post at 43:

"Anselm did not entail the being with any specific properties. This is like an abstract triangle with no specified side length or angles. This is unimaginable because we will have to attribute to it properties. But if we do this to God he becomes a type of being rather than being and we run into problems.

Another problem is existence as a property. If we consider it a property then there exist a great number of things with the property of nonexistence and this is nonsense.

And there are also many misunderstandings. The only real “improvement” is that Plantinga uses better definitions and and his logical structure of the argment is more properly set up. Whereas Anselm makes sets of assumptions that will logically follow his other assumptions but have the above flaws. Plantinga’s also makes use of the S5 axiom which is beyond critical to his argument and not to Anselm’s. The above problems could be applied to Plantinga’s argument but this would be just a misunderstanding of his argument whereas in ANselm’s version these objections cause actual problems. Helpful at all?"
 
As Adam observed, Anselm’s definition (that than which none greater can be conceived) does not contain specific attributes other than greatness. In contrast, Plantinga’s definition of greatness includes the usual attributes of God including necessary existence.

Anselm would say that necessary existence, along with the other attributes, are deducible from his definition of greatness. To put them into the definition seems to redundant. It also leaves one susceptible to criticism that one is arbitrarily building into the defintion what one wants to prove, as was oft pointed out in page 1 of thread.

I would suspect that Plantinga was trying to come up with a formulation more friendly to classical theism. The criticism of the neo-classical interpretations of the OA as set forth by Hartshonre and the like is that you are led to non-classical understanding of divine attributes in order to answer the objections of the logical postivists.

I guess I still don’t know if Plantinga is successful. Will take some more pondering. But I do observe that the original OA is simpler and makes us focus on one issue, namely whether it makes sense to say greatness exists. If you grant that it does, then the proof leads inexorably to a postive conclusion.
 
Adam said in #1: S5 is an axiom from S5 modal logic which states that if something is possibly necessarily true then it is necessarily true.

Subsequent critique argued that any X could be substituted for “maximally great being” and then proven to exist via the S5 axiom. that would seem to an abuse of the S5 axiom. One would have to arrive at a plausible candidate for necessary truth before the axiom could be applied. Any X just won’t do.

Hittite thought “possibly necessarily true” was nonsensical, but i don’t find it to be, as long as we drop the “possibly” after we get our thinking straight about what necessary means. Why not just dispense with ‘possibly’ from the get go? Because, as with Anselm, we find that folks, theists and atheists alike, think it is sensible to talk as if God might not exist. It seems helpful to start out talking in a confused manner to show the incompatibility of possible and necessary. the thrust of Anselm’s argurment was against empricial theists and atheist alike, remember. But he really didn’t have a well developed argument against posttivism.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top