Why ontological arguments are illogical

[genkaus]

An amount of beauty that provokes suffering is hardly "ideal", to my thinking.

Why not? Suffering is irrelevant to beauty. Just ask Helen of Troy.

True, but that doesn't make for a great definition all the time.

Yes, it kind of does.

Consider what is meant by "perfect victory" in a fighting game. Would a "perfect victory" have to include taking no damage? Or would it include taking the maximum amount of damage and still winning? Would it include winning using every move available? Or winning using only one move?

It'd include winning with no damage and the number of moves issue would be resolved by whether the standard of perfection is intricacy or efficiency.

You're the one criticizing the argument. I'd go to the Standford encyclopedia of philosophy, they'll probably have something useful.

I did and they didn't. So I had to assume that Leibniz is using "perfect" in the same sense as the dictionary.

...and? If I say, "No atheist has ever loved their mother", I wouldn't have to prove it because it's a negative?

Ofcourse not. Though you'd still need a good argument against an atheist who stands up saying that he does.

"Two contradictory perfections"...how do you know that there are any contradictory perfections?

Pick two contradictory qualities and conceptualize the perfect form of both.

You're going to need more support than that. How do you know that there can be unprovable contradictions (i.e., not all contradictions are provable) in this context?

The contradiction isn't necessarily unprovable in perpetuity, just within that context. Changing the axiom (that perfection can be analyzed) entails a provable contradiction, which would mean that it still entails a contradiction - just not provable.

Uh, right, because you didn't look at the actual argument, you looked at the two-sentence summation of Leibniz's view.

So give me the "actual" argument then. This is the best I've found.