(December 24, 2015 at 9:19 pm)God of Mr. Hanky Wrote:(December 24, 2015 at 10:44 am)ChadWooters Wrote: If, as you say, he is using it mathematically then I suppose you are right. Maybe there is a distinction being made of which I am ignorant. To me at least, Plantinga seems to be using 'probable' in a way similar to previous uses of the word 'possible'. I must admit that my focus on Scholastic nomenclature sometimes gets in the way of understand modern uses of the same or similar terms.
Yes, that's pretty much what I'm seeing it as. It's been a long time since I've been in any school, and my career never called for much math application, so perhaps I may have worded it wrong.
I gazed at Plantinga's ontology for the first time, and the first thing I said was "WTF, nobody would try and say that the possibility of pink nicorns roaming a remote planet somewhere in our galaxy makes it a certain truth, so he can't really be saying that of any Earth deity". I thought about it for hours, and then it hit me that he must be suggesting (deviously, as a hidden diversion from the possibility logic which he had established in his first ontology statement) the logic which is used in a random-sample probability solution. Either that or he presumes the universe is infinite (which is false), or the multiverse (not proven, therefore should not be presumed) is infinite (probably false anyway). I can't see how such a contextual difference between scientific possibility and mathematical probability can be easily confused, therefore I believe Plantinga has been more than devious in his fallacious argument.
As noted by Brian, Plantinga's ontology is crap.
Well if we pretend for argument's sake it was valid, there would still be the problem of all the countless god claims in our species, and what would Plantinga do if other people co opted his argument to point to a different god and different holy book? Like I said, other religions have their apologists too.
Where religion fails is that the buyer never considers that "all this" isn't caused by a being, but is simply a giant weather pattern in which we are a mere finite blip. When you have Hawking saying "A god is not required", your probability issues are solved by Occam's Razor and the best data we have so far is that humans make up gods and science is pointing away for the need for one.
