RE: Why all "Logical Proofs Of God" fail ...
March 7, 2014 at 2:20 am
(This post was last modified: March 7, 2014 at 2:23 am by MindForgedManacle.)
I figured I'd give a semi-formal response to this.
We have VERY good reasons for doubting any sort of First Cause or Unmoved Mover style argument from modern cosmology (and yes, I'm aware those two arguments are not the same). To loosely quote theoretical cosmologist Sean Carroll - who I might add is well-versed in and very respectful of philosophy - from his excellent performance in his debate with William Lane Craig, according to modern physics "Any universe with a non-zero energy and a time-independent Hamiltonian must necessarily be eternal", put formally put in the Quantum Eternity Theorem, with numerous cosmological models (including one by Carroll) in which the universe persists infinitely into the past and the future.
Now, on the philosophical side of things, my problem with all logical proofs of God's existence (in their myriad of styles) is that they ALL import some dangerously dubious premise or presupposition, often causing question-begging or some other fallacies or rejectable offense.
Let's take the ontological arguments. My criticism of it (here) admittedly relies on a group of concepts that are flawed and don't really work, but useful for my purposes here; basically, I'm invoking the analytic-synthetic distinction. Analytic claims are basically tautologies, i.e "all batchelors are unmarried"; basically, the truth of the statement is guaranteed because the description is contained in the concept itself. Synthetic judgements however aren't like that. An example would be "All batchelors are white men". The truth of the proposition is not within the concept itself, and hence can only be assessed by some other means, in this case empirically.
This pertains to ontological arguments because all of them (near as I can tell), in some fashion, import the ridiculous assumption that existence is a property of an object. But if we're going Kantian here (and really, it's going Humean to be exact, a lá bundle theory), "existence is not a predicate", it's not a property. You can't add existence to something, it either exists or it doesn't. If I imagine an apple,and then try to imagine it as an existing apple, have I actually changed ANYTHING in my imaging? No, because you cannot imagine the concept of existence itself as it's not a property. To have properties denotes existing already, not vice-versa. Hence why philosophers generally agree that existence claims are synthetic propositions so that the core assumption of ontological arguments is generally considered outright false.
So, essentially all attempts to prove God's existence fail in that sort of way (assuming something as if it were innocent and just running with it), and they ALL rely, essentially, on what you might call Aristotlean Metaphysics, which I don't think can work, although that's still an open question in the philosophical community. And as this pertains to ontological arguments (and any apologetic argument for God's existence) I ask you in particular Chad:
Why do you want a logical proof of God's existence in the first place? This is a metaphilosophical question, so we're talking about the methods and the stakes. What do you hope to gain by attempting to prove God's existence? It seems like such a strange thing to want and to me is the least philosophically interesting thing relevant to the philosophy of religion.
Unlike most of my fellow atheists and such, I actually DO think Christianity and other forms of theism are defensible, just not on these slippery metaphysical grounds.
We have VERY good reasons for doubting any sort of First Cause or Unmoved Mover style argument from modern cosmology (and yes, I'm aware those two arguments are not the same). To loosely quote theoretical cosmologist Sean Carroll - who I might add is well-versed in and very respectful of philosophy - from his excellent performance in his debate with William Lane Craig, according to modern physics "Any universe with a non-zero energy and a time-independent Hamiltonian must necessarily be eternal", put formally put in the Quantum Eternity Theorem, with numerous cosmological models (including one by Carroll) in which the universe persists infinitely into the past and the future.
Now, on the philosophical side of things, my problem with all logical proofs of God's existence (in their myriad of styles) is that they ALL import some dangerously dubious premise or presupposition, often causing question-begging or some other fallacies or rejectable offense.
Let's take the ontological arguments. My criticism of it (here) admittedly relies on a group of concepts that are flawed and don't really work, but useful for my purposes here; basically, I'm invoking the analytic-synthetic distinction. Analytic claims are basically tautologies, i.e "all batchelors are unmarried"; basically, the truth of the statement is guaranteed because the description is contained in the concept itself. Synthetic judgements however aren't like that. An example would be "All batchelors are white men". The truth of the proposition is not within the concept itself, and hence can only be assessed by some other means, in this case empirically.
This pertains to ontological arguments because all of them (near as I can tell), in some fashion, import the ridiculous assumption that existence is a property of an object. But if we're going Kantian here (and really, it's going Humean to be exact, a lá bundle theory), "existence is not a predicate", it's not a property. You can't add existence to something, it either exists or it doesn't. If I imagine an apple,and then try to imagine it as an existing apple, have I actually changed ANYTHING in my imaging? No, because you cannot imagine the concept of existence itself as it's not a property. To have properties denotes existing already, not vice-versa. Hence why philosophers generally agree that existence claims are synthetic propositions so that the core assumption of ontological arguments is generally considered outright false.
So, essentially all attempts to prove God's existence fail in that sort of way (assuming something as if it were innocent and just running with it), and they ALL rely, essentially, on what you might call Aristotlean Metaphysics, which I don't think can work, although that's still an open question in the philosophical community. And as this pertains to ontological arguments (and any apologetic argument for God's existence) I ask you in particular Chad:
Why do you want a logical proof of God's existence in the first place? This is a metaphilosophical question, so we're talking about the methods and the stakes. What do you hope to gain by attempting to prove God's existence? It seems like such a strange thing to want and to me is the least philosophically interesting thing relevant to the philosophy of religion.
Unlike most of my fellow atheists and such, I actually DO think Christianity and other forms of theism are defensible, just not on these slippery metaphysical grounds.
