The Ontological Argument for the Existence of God

[robvalue]

If God created people who are unable to see him even when he's unmistakably everywhere at once, then he should take up that complaint with himself. I don't make colourblind robots then bitch about them getting run over at traffic lights.

[Delicate]

If God created people who are unable to see him even when he's unmistakably everywhere at once, then he should take up that complaint with himself. I don't make colourblind robots then bitch about them getting run over at traffic lights.

Thankfully this doesn't represent anything I'm saying. So we don't have to worry about it.

[Pizza]

Why are we to believe a personal(anthropomorphic) god is identical to a maximally great being? You got anything beyond semantic tricks?

[Edwardo Piet]

Do you or do you not believe God is omnipresent yet invisible, Delicate?

[Cato]

You fail to comprehend that what I'm pointing to is not "the uncertainty of prognostication", but the fact that we are justified in holding to premises in the absence of demonstration, and thus demonstration is not necessary to accept a premise. 

Unmitigated bullshit. If you want your argument to be sound and convincing you will demonstrate the veracity of your premises. If you choose not to all you're left with is "I believe in god because I want to". Your deliberate obfuscations do not resolved this problem. Try again.

[Delicate]

You fail to comprehend that what I'm pointing to is not "the uncertainty of prognostication", but the fact that we are justified in holding to premises in the absence of demonstration, and thus demonstration is not necessary to accept a premise. 

Unmitigated bullshit. If you want your argument to be sound and convincing you will demonstrate the veracity of your premises. If you choose not to all you're left with is "I believe in god because I want to". Your deliberate obfuscations do not resolved this problem. Try again.

Preposterous gobbledygook.

But perhaps you have an idiosyncratic conception in mind when you say "demonstrate the veracity of your premises".

Explain what you mean explicitly.

[Delicate]

Why are we to believe a personal(anthropomorphic) god is identical to a maximally great being? You got anything beyond semantic tricks?

You're to figure out something a lot more basic before you step up to that level.

Do you or do you not believe God is omnipresent yet invisible, Delicate?

Depends on what you mean by omnipresent.

[Cato]

But perhaps you have an idiosyncratic conception in mind when you say "demonstrate the veracity of your premises".

Is the word 'veracity' kicking your ass? The premises (stated and assumed) must be shown to be 'true' if a valid argument is also to be considered sound. Logic 101.

[Esquilax]

Strictly speaking, the sun rising every morning in the past, is not a demonstration that it will rise tomorrow.

Which is why I took great pains to both call this a "probabilistic inference," and to list our understanding of the celestial mechanics that cause the sun to rise in my answer. It's not just "the sun rises in the past, therefore it will in the future," that's an oversimplification. In truth, we understand why it is that the sun has risen all those other times, and thus we can, in the absence of anything that might interfere with those workings, assign a high probability to it continuing to do so. It's the key difference between this claim and the ontological argument; where the former presents us with accessible evidence laying out exactly how the claim might work, and demonstrations that it does work, the latter does not. The ontological argument merely insists on a series of vague philosophical categories, with no indication that the things within them really exist, or that the categories themselves are even relevant to objective reality. Then, having made those two assumptions, the argument continues with no referents to external reality, no evidence to justify the claims being made, and no reason to believe that reality works the way the argument asserts it does.

At least the items of the former- the sun, the earth, and the concept of sunrise- can be readily shown to exist. No such evidence is contained within the ontological argument.

Very often we see cases of apparent regularities fall through, such as where someone who drinks coffee with sugar for a decade suddenly switches to artificial sweeteners. You can have a decade's worth of demonstrations, observations and the mechanics of putting sugar in coffee, and the next day the person will still switch to artificial sweetener.

Are you going to say you've demonstrated that this person will drink coffee with sugar for the rest of their lives? Clearly not. Only an atheist apologist would be so desperate to salvage such an obviously false position.

I did call it a probabilistic inference in my response. Everyone can go back and read that. You're not going to be able to equivocate between that and a certain demonstration and get away with it, you know.

Instead, we appeal to non-demonstrative bases to justify accepting premises. This is what we do when we accept a premise like "Brown is in Barcelona" even when you cannot directly demonstrate that Brown is in Barcelona, but you have other reasons for believing he is.

With demonstration refuted, I think we can agree that if we want to talk about refuting the OA, we have to look elsewhere. 

Do you want to discuss the actual things I said, or just do an end-zone dance around your strawman and flee from the points I've made at top speed?

[Angrboda]

Here are the two definitions Plantinga starts with

[*]A being is maximally excellent in a world W if and only if it is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect in W; and
[*]A being is maximally great in a world W if and only if it is maximally excellent in every possible world.

Given these two definitions, the argument is constructed:

1. The concept of a maximally great being is self-consistent.
2. If 1, then there is at least one logically possible world in which a maximally great being exists.

Two doesn't follow from one. One only states that the concept of a maximally great being is coherent, not that it is instantiated in one or more possible worlds. I can only assume you've misstated the argument as I can't imagine Plantinga making such a bonehead mistake. You go on to state that there are no "holes" in the argument, despite this glaring one. Nice try but bluster doesn't substitute for logic.