(December 16, 2015 at 3:11 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: Here is my favorite example, one I suggested earlier. The notion of perfection is based on how completely something instantiates an ideal form. For example, a yield sign, three dots on a paper, and a piece of spanakopita all, to various degrees embody the idea of a triangle. Anyone can see that some instances of triangles are better examples than others. The worse examples are those that most lacking with respect to triangularity.
Since I quoted Aquinas, I must mention that he did not consider the ontological argument as formulated by Anslem false per se; but rather incomplete. The argument assumes that everyone already knows that God is the maximally great being. Even in Aquinas’s time, people knew that many people had very different ideas about the nature of God and not all of them included maximally great.
You've done a nice job of defining what would make a perfect triangle, so it's easy to see when one attains this perfection or falls short. You haven't done anything to define what would make a being maximally great or perfect, so there's no way to know that something meets this (unstated!) criteria without bald assertion.
(December 16, 2015 at 3:11 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: Like Anslem, Plantinga takes it for granted that everyone knows that the maximally great being is God. If the God is not the maximally great being then the argument fails as a ‘proof’ for God.
This strikes me as a bit of a "but can he see why kids like Cinnamon Toast Crunch?" line of reasoning. It's basically an ad hoc declaration that "just makes sense" to the theist, so they can never really explain it to a skeptic.
