For a man so often enamored with experts your comments are surprising.  It's only the online Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy that was linked, after all. 

Fuck those guys, because Rhythm linked them, and I disagree with that asshole.   

Let me guess, you prefer the equivocational sense of "being"....gives you something to plug your god into for further "philosophy"?

(August 31, 2016 at 9:02 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: A necessary being exists in all possible worlds. If there is a possible world in which the proposed necessary being does not exist, it is not necessary; and the supposed necessary being does not exist in any possible world...necessarily.

You need to pick one or the other.  If you say it is not necessary, then it can exist in some possible worlds.  If you say it can't exist in any possible worlds, that's because it's still defined as necessary. 

I use the latter move, myself, but I confess that I'm not entirely comfortable with it.  It leaves us with something simultaneously necessary and impossible.

Behold the power of defining!

In context, it's a failure of the power of defining.  If one defines god -as- a necessarry being in an argument meant to demonstrate it;s existence, one has simply assumed their conclusion... meanwhile the modal hook tells us that god cannot -be- a necessary being just as easily and by the same means as it might otherwise conclude that god exists...thus defining it as such (in addition to being invalid) is to refuse the validity of modal logic...which forms the basis of the most popular modern ontological arguments -for- god in the first place.

Ignoring all of that, and running with it anyway, the manner in which god exists as per the modal hook is not the manner in which it exists -in this world- in any sense other than the sense of modal logic. Which is to say that if something exists in some other world, it exists...even if doesn't exist -in- this world. If there are phlephlarps out there in another world, but not this one, phlephlarps exist in all worlds - logically and linguistically -...despite their utter lack of presence in this world....which is the thing that people, generally, hope that we'll take from such an argument....that it exists here. That it's relevant to us. That it played in the dirt and here we are.

It's a giant steaming pile.

(August 31, 2016 at 12:22 pm)Rhythm Wrote: In context, it's a failure of the power of defining.  If one defines god -as- a necessarry being in an argument meant to demonstrate it;s existence, one has simply assumed their conclusion... meanwhile the modal hook tells us that god cannot -be- a necessary being...thus defining it define it as such (in addition to being invalid) is to refuse the validity of modal logic...which forms the basis of the most popular modern ontological arguments -for- god in the first place.

It's a giant steaming pile.

When faced with a big steaming pile of it .. I just want to be somewhere else.

Whereas I kind of like playing around in piles of shit...but then again I would, wouldn't I?  

You can't logic a gawd into being any more than you can logic faeries, elves or unicorns into existence.

The problems with a "Necessary Being" are all the the extensive lack of any evidence.

(August 29, 2016 at 4:13 pm)TheMuslim Wrote: Is there anything wrong with a Necessary Being per se?

Is there really anything incoherent or illogical about the very concept of a Necessary Being? In other words, can anyone come up with reasons why a Necessary Being is impossible? Or have we now accepted that it is certainly possible for there to be a Necessary Being?

By "Necessary Being," I mean something that cannot not exist. In other words, "existence" is in the very essence/definition of that thing.

something cannot exist without somewhere to exist in or duration, so time and spacial dimensions seem to fit the bill nicely.

(August 31, 2016 at 12:19 pm)Whateverist Wrote: Behold the power of defining!

The question is whether or not a given definition serves as the means to identify and clarify the nature of a discoverable feature of reality. It seems you would have people believe that necessary being is just an invention and not something whose presence can be deduced from common observations.

(August 31, 2016 at 2:53 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: The question is whether or not a given definition serves as the means to identify and clarify the nature of a discoverable feature of reality. It seems you would have people believe that necessary being is just an invention and not something whose presence can be deduced from common observations.

There's something a little messy with this statement. Using deduction, all we can say is that 'something' caused 'x', assuming of course that it's reasonable to conclude 'x' is not itself eternal and has a cause. Without observation absolutely nothing else can be said about this 'something'. In addition, we must also conclude that multiple 'somethings' could have produced 'x'.

The fact that I exist means that my biological parents went from contingent beings to necessary beings when I drew my first breathe. The obvious consequence, that someone mentioned early on, is that you are now faced with an infinite regression.