RE: Ontological Disproof of God
August 28, 2018 at 12:46 pm
(This post was last modified: August 28, 2018 at 12:55 pm by Abaddon_ire.)
(August 28, 2018 at 2:55 am)IWNKYAAIMI Wrote:Indeed. Ontology simply is the study of that which has "being" or "existence".(August 27, 2018 at 9:56 pm)negatio Wrote: Yes, indeed, Iwnkyaaimi, that is an ongoing and serious problem for me in my discussions with friends, whom I have known for decades, when we interact over my theories, which high-falutin theoretical language makes such constant reference to 'ontological', in my intently repetitious fashion, on and on, over and over again.
''onto'' simply means being; and, ''-ology" merely means ''the study of'', thus, the study of being, the being being studied is the human being, thus ''ontology'' , the study of human being. Thank You Iwnkyaaimi ! Negatio.
Ah, the consequences of erudite vernacular utilised irrespective of necessity.
Thus the ontological argument for the existence of god rotates around claims of things which exist and the conclusion which might be drawn from that. An example would be the Kalam Cosmological argument for god. It roughly goes like this (there are variations)
Premise 1. Everything which exists has a cause.
Premise 2: The universe exists.
Conclusion 1: The universe therefore had a cause.
Objection 1: If the cause was god as you claim, then what caused god.
Note that in it's raw state, the conclusion is that the universe had a cause. Kalam has nothing to say about what that cause might be.
So the god-botherers start adding terms.
Premise 1. Everything which begins to exist has a cause.
Premise 2: The universe began to exist.
Conclusion 1: The universe therefore had a cause.
The special pleading for god not having a beginning has started.
At each step, critics will raise objections with the god nuts responding by adding further and further qualifiers until you end up with a theist actually claiming that the answer was "beyond the event horizon of the formless" whatever that means. Somehow, ontological arguments grow until they become unintelligible under the shear weight of word density. They reach a strange kind of critical dictionary mass at which point they implode and nobody has a clue what any of it means on either side of the argument.
Now, the ontological disproof of god starts from a similarly simple place.
Premise 1. Everything which exists may or may not have a cause.
Premise 2: The universe exists.
Conclusion 1: The universe therefore may or may not have a cause.
Simple enough, but inevitably it ends up in exactly the same place, a word salad that nobody can make head nor tail of as we see in the OP.
It is all a rabbit hole of navel gazing that gets nobody anywhere, wastes a lot of time and achieves nothing because the fundamental conclusion leads nowhere.
No matter how complicated one makes the semantic acrobatics, the conclusion is useless in either case. This is, of course, the reason why I give neither ontological argument any credence. They are both an intellectual cul-de-sac wearing an Armani suit.