RE: The Modal Ontological Argument - Without Modal Logic
February 15, 2014 at 5:57 am
(This post was last modified: February 15, 2014 at 5:59 am by Alex K.)
(February 15, 2014 at 2:37 am)Rational AKD Wrote:(February 14, 2014 at 11:09 am)Alex K Wrote: Haha, are you taking a piss? Here you changed from stating a few hypotheticals (e.g. if it exists, its existence must not be dependent upon an external factor because blabla) and in the next step just dropped the conditional "if it exists" and called it a proof? That's just a cheap exploitation of imprecise language, nothing more.
incorrect. P4 is speaking of metaphysical necessary since the definition is necessarily part of the concept. C2 is hypothetical in nature, but P5 is deductive in nature not hypothetical.
The slippery part about your argument is that none of the language is precise enough to really nail down what is stated where, so you can shift back and forth the point where you switch from necessary properties of God to actual properties of God. This becomes more clear if one puts the argument in one sentence, where it is harder to do stealth shifts in meanings of words.
Because the concept of God includes omnipotence, God's existence is not dependent on an external factor, and therefore God's existence is necessary in and of itself, and God thus exists.
This is precisely a condensed version of your argument, no?
So what went wrong here? The second sentence is wrong if you mean it to talk about God's actual existence in the world rather than elaborations on the properties included in the concept of God.
You cannot conclude that God's existence is not dependent on an external factor from saying that the concept of God includes this necessity. Since you have before only said things about the concept of God, it only allows you to conclude statements about God's existence if he exists: something that does not exists does not have to fulfil the requirements laid out in its concept. This is confusing in this case because you put existence as a requirement into the concept.
If you let your logic work like this, it would mean that any idea you dream up is necessarily realized in the world if only you attach the necessity of existence in its definition.
