(February 7, 2018 at 10:40 pm)SteveII Wrote:(February 7, 2018 at 9:57 pm)Cyberman Wrote: You're palming a card here. You went from 'if "God" exists then it must exist' to 'if "God" must exist then it does exist' without so much as a pause for breath.
What is the justification for entertaining the concept at all? Btonze- and Iron-age man lacked our understanding of the nature of reality and our tools to investigate it, at least to the degree that we can. They can be forgiven for seeing gods, demons, spirits etc in every shadow and every tree. We haven't had the luxury of such an excuse for the last couple of centuries.
Not so. Your first sentence summarized the Ontological Argument. That's hard to understand so I don't bring it up. I don't think anything in the referenced post claims that God must exist. I was making the point that if he does, he needs no explanation.
The Modal Ontological Argument is a bit tricky to grasp at the start, but once you understand what the argument really is saying, you realize it's just a vacant argument that says nothing about whether God actually/likely exists or not. All it is is that if God is possible, then he must exist. Valid argument, but empty as fuck.
It's like arguing for the proof of a mathematical conjecture by saying that if such a conjecture is possibly true, then it is necessarily true, because it can't be true in one possible world while false in another. But that's not how proofs are done in the realm of mathematics.
