RE: Arguments for God's Existence from Contingency
November 28, 2017 at 2:42 pm
(This post was last modified: November 28, 2017 at 2:44 pm by Edwardo Piet.)
In fact that last part is so golden I'm going to re-quote it by itself. It demonstrates the crucial flaw in Aquinas's argument so perfectly:
Aquinas's so-called "argument" is pointless point at best, and a fallacy of equivocation at worst.
Quote:Some people are fond of saying that they define “God” to be the unknown, or to be a symbol of perfection, or to be whatever caused our universe to exist. At first glance, this seems puzzlingly pointless. Why assign the word “God” to something like the unknown? We already have a word for the unknown — it’s “the unknown.” But clearly, this doesn’t feel pointless to them. There is some reason they want to be able to say “God exists” instead of “The unknown exists,” even though those two statements should theoretically mean the exact same thing according to their own definition. And that’s because the symbol “God” still has concepts hidden inside it. They haven’t scrubbed the word entirely clean of its original meaning before redefining it. With both meanings of “God” conflated into one word, they feel like the fact that the word is now pointing to something that exists allows them to believe in the existence of what the word used to be pointing to.
Aquinas's so-called "argument" is pointless point at best, and a fallacy of equivocation at worst.