RE: The modal ontological argument for God
August 7, 2024 at 12:56 am
(This post was last modified: August 7, 2024 at 1:05 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Plantinga is not the inventor of modal logic or possible worlds semantics. I think it's probably fair to say that he saw the utility of it's criteria and semantics to a proposition he very much wanted to arrive at, though, for sure. At any rate, under modal logic, in possible worlds semantics...if there's one possible world where you are necessarily drunk at every game then the statement "thump is drunk at every game" is true in all possible worlds. Yes.
I'm right there with you in suggesting that logic does not dictate terms to reality - but the thing is that we..at least when we talk about logical this and thats...tend to posit that they do., We say, for example..that there are no and can be no married bachelors. That we can know this a priori - that is..without the sort of demonstration you're asking for. The moa is also an a priori argument. The law of identity is believed to be able to make binding inferences on existential realities. Now, there are physicists who might object to that, the notion that a thing cannot be itself and not itself. All of this, though, it ought be acknowledged..is us meaningfully doubting the accuracy or efficacy of logic et al, not the moa in particular. Burning down the moa in this way comes with collateral damage - and plantinga or any other rhetorician can and will exploit that....and rightly so.
If we doubt that logical inferences are binding in reality then it doesn't really matter what logical inferences we plug in. There's no correction of this or that which can satisfy such an objection..genuinely maintained...and no demonstration would mean anything, either. If we only doubt as much when the logical inferences arrive at conclusions with which we disagree or are uncomfortable....well.....that's a big old us problem, logically speaking, eh? To plantingas credit, he's careful to mention that he doesn't think that modal logic and possible worlds semantics can prove god exists, exactly - more that it proves that belief in gods can be rationally explicated.
I'm right there with you in suggesting that logic does not dictate terms to reality - but the thing is that we..at least when we talk about logical this and thats...tend to posit that they do., We say, for example..that there are no and can be no married bachelors. That we can know this a priori - that is..without the sort of demonstration you're asking for. The moa is also an a priori argument. The law of identity is believed to be able to make binding inferences on existential realities. Now, there are physicists who might object to that, the notion that a thing cannot be itself and not itself. All of this, though, it ought be acknowledged..is us meaningfully doubting the accuracy or efficacy of logic et al, not the moa in particular. Burning down the moa in this way comes with collateral damage - and plantinga or any other rhetorician can and will exploit that....and rightly so.
If we doubt that logical inferences are binding in reality then it doesn't really matter what logical inferences we plug in. There's no correction of this or that which can satisfy such an objection..genuinely maintained...and no demonstration would mean anything, either. If we only doubt as much when the logical inferences arrive at conclusions with which we disagree or are uncomfortable....well.....that's a big old us problem, logically speaking, eh? To plantingas credit, he's careful to mention that he doesn't think that modal logic and possible worlds semantics can prove god exists, exactly - more that it proves that belief in gods can be rationally explicated.
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