(March 6, 2017 at 8:01 pm)TheAtheologian Wrote:(March 6, 2017 at 7:34 pm)SteveII Wrote: The human mind is not the problem. Using 'possible' creates a couple of problems.
Defining God as the greatest possible being is not the definition of God. How do you define what is 'possible'? Since it is not clear that God would necessarily exist from premise 1, you you have an unsupported assertion in 2.
The whole argument hinges on greatest conceivable (maximally great) being concept and it is a greater to exist in all possible worlds than one possible world. Premise 3 requires understanding of S5 Modal Logic. Substituting "possible" does not allow you to bridge the argument from 2 to 3 because you need it to be necessarily so.
True, God is the postulated to be the greatest possible being in theistic thinking, but this argument fails to demonstrate neccessity and what this being is. {A}
As for the ontological argument you mentioned, the greatest conceivable being is no better since that relies on epistemic possibility rather than metaphysical possibility. {B} Also, how do you define 'greater'? It suffers from the same problem as the "possibility" argument, that would be, How do you define what is 'conceivable'? I cannot conceive a being that is outside space-time, immaterial, and omnipresent at the same time, therefore the monotheist concept of God doesn't count in this argument, since it is inconceivable. Being conceivable is dependent upon experience and knowledge. {C}
I fail to see any more success in that argument.
The real argument can be formulated as follows:
1- It is possible that a maximally great being exists.
2- If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.
3- If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.
4- If a maximally great being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.
5- If a maximally great being exists in the actual world, then a maximally great being exists.
6- Therefore, a maximally great being exists.
A. The argument hangs on the concept of necessary (within premise 3) and as such, you need to clearly understand how the word is used. The opposite of necessary is contingent. Since being contingent on something is a defect it would not be considered maximally great to be contingent. A maximally great being would be a necessary being because it could not be contingent on another (then that would be a greater being). It is important to understand the S5 modal logic that if something is even possibly necessary, it is actually necessary. If God necessarily exists in one possible work, then he exists necessarily in all possible worlds.
B. The key is understanding the difference between epistemic possibility and metaphysical possibility. Epistemic possibility is simply "for all we know something is possible". On the other hand, to illustrate metaphysical possibility take a math equation 24673244/8=3005567. While we might say "for all we know" this might be true, but if it is true, than it is necessarily true if it is false than it is necessarily false. If a maximally great being exists, it exists necessarily in a metaphysical sense. Therefore, God’s existence is either possible or impossible.
C. When Anselm first wrote this argument, he was careful to distinguish between what we could think of as the greatest possible being and God is the greatest being possible, that is to say, it is impossible for there to be any being greater than God. While greatness might be subjective, maximal greatness is not. If a description of God allowed for a greater being, then God would not be God because that being would be God and the definition becomes a logical impossibility. Even a limited grasp of God's properties does not entail that our conception of God is false because it would be impossible to have full knowledge of God.
