Why ontological arguments are illogical

[Angrboda]

I'm hopping into the middle without reading everything past, first, so forgive any repetition or irrelevancy.


I actually enjoy the ontological arguments, but then, I'm of a very philosophical bent. (I have a very good book on such by Graham Oppy.)

Various people have weighed in on Kant's analysis of it, the most contentious being Kant's claim that existence isn't a property, so God can't be improved by changing that property. I've a handful of refutations, the one of which I consider the most persuasive being the question of ordering of properties. On the order of Robert Ingersoll's remark that, "In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences," in nature, nothing is either good or bad by its nature, but only relative to some standard, or some point of view that includes interests. Thus, you can't define a "most perfect" being, because perfection and goodness either a) doesn't exist, as nature implies no ordering from best to worst, or b) is defined in terms of the desires of a being, and is therefore purely subjective (and irrelevant). Thus, because properties have no implicit order of ranking, no "best" can be rationally asserted, and therefore there is no "best" being.

I think my favorite remark on the arguments though that I've heard was attributed to Richard Dawkins, that we don't need a "most smelly" being to have a concept of smelliness, so we don't need a most perfect being to define goodness for us. (I guess that's more an argument against Natural Law, but it's worth hearing, I think.)

And I'll leave you with one more, of somewhat dubious value. If we imagine God as a being that is most perfect, except that it does not exist, then we can imagine a better being that does exist. However, the very conclusion of the argument makes clear that the being we were imagining was not God — as a God that does not exist is not God — so what relation does that other being, call him Harry, have to God, and why introduce him to the argument? That effectively leaves us with:

1) God is the most perfect being;
2) Think about the imaginary being Harry;
3) Because Harry isn't perfect, and God is perfect, God exists.

Wtf?

Anyway, one more, since Plantinga was brought up. Plantinga's modal argument for the existence of God seems persuasive until you realize that it says nothing about the nature of God, and indeed, in Plantinga's argument, you can replace "God" with "the Universe" and the argument is equally valid. In that case, the argument devolves into just another cosmological argument, and the modal argument has served as little more than a sneaky bait and switch.