RE: Ontological Disproof of God
September 14, 2018 at 12:13 pm
(This post was last modified: September 14, 2018 at 12:20 pm by Abaddon_ire.)
(September 14, 2018 at 12:07 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: Actually, I would be curious to see the argument in more capable hands, if you have an example of it being pitched by someone else.
I never did get full answers on either the conflict between Sartre's existentialism and other models of freedom, nor how a double nihilation contradicted theological assumptions.
Ultimately, Khem is right, God did know people wouldn't keep the law, and he made that clear many times. So the fundamental contradiction, that an omniscient God would know that the law is ineffectual for regulating behavior and the charge that the Christian God did not know that the law would be ineffectual for regulating behavior does not exist. He did know.
Sure. In brief...
Quote:An Ontological Disproof of God
Nothing could count as God that did not have the property of aseity, or in plain Anglo-Saxon, from-itself-ness. The concept of God is the concept of something that by its very nature cannot be dependent on anything else for its nature or existence, and this holds whether or not anything in reality instantiates the concept. This is equivalent to the assertion that God exists necessarily if he exists at all. But if everything that exists exists contingently, as philosophers of an empiricist bent are likely to maintain, then we have the makings of an ontological disproof of God. In a 1948 Mind article, J. N. Findlay gave essentially the following argument:
a. God cannot be thought of as existing contingently.
b. Everything that exists can only be thought of as existing contingently.
Therefore
c. God does not exist.
This ontological disproof of God turns Anselm on his head while retaining the Anselmian insight that God is “that than which no greater can be conceived.” Precisely because God is maximally great, supremely perfect, id quo maius cogitari non nequit, he cannot exist. For if everything that exists exists contingently, then nothing exists necessarily. Necessary existence, however, is a divine perfection. Ergo, God does not exist.
The trouble with Findlay’s 1948 argument, an argument which the older and wiser Findlay renounced, is that premise (b) is by no means obviously true, even if we replace ‘everything’ with ‘every concrete thing.’ Indeed, I believe that (b) is demonstrably false. But the argument for this belongs elsewhere.
To me, it is all navel gazing and pointless word salat.
It is useless.
(September 14, 2018 at 12:02 pm)Lucanus Wrote:
That was obvious.
