K

mattbballman:

Is it your contention that logical possibility is sufficient to meet the "possible" criterion of the Ontological Argument? On what grounds would you make this assertion? It would seem that if it were true, it would imply the existence of everything which can be defined as non-contingent and given any other traits that are not logically self-contradictory - things like a non-contingent, galaxy-sized, emotional bowling ball.

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by mattbballman :

Let's look at the prosyllogism within McHugh's argument.

1. Everything that's impossible is self-contradictory.
2. God is not self-contradictory.
3. Therefore, God is not impossible.

Do you or do you not agree that this argument is necessary for McHugh's essay to get off the ground?

There are no syntactically meaningful sentences that are not synthetic nor analytic. Therefore, the following must be one or the other: God exists in the actual world and fails to exist in one possible world. It's impossible for that sentence to be true; there is no possible world in which that sentence is true; and these are not consequences of some necessary truth about the past (and by "factually impossible" I take you to mean that), but rather, consequences of the definition of God (as non-contingent). It looks to me as if the sentence is impossible in virtue of an analytic truth.

quartodeciman

Who gets to determine what are and what are not 'valid possible worlds'? By what criteria?

Quart

mattbballman

K,

Indeed, this is the danger implicit in many versions of the ontological argument (as seen in Guanilo's objection to Anselm who asks, "If I can conceive of a perfect island that is non-contingent, does it now necessarily exist?"). But the appropriate focus, to answer your question here, is whether or not it is logically possible that there exists a being whose non-existence is logically impossible. This is Alvin Plantinga's set-up. If you can answer "Yes" to this situation, then you have on your hands a being that exists in all possible worlds and, subsequently, exists in the actual world. Hence, God, the being that exists in all possible worlds, exists.

matt

mattbballman

tom,

If by the question you are asking Is this argument necessary for the possibility of God's existence, I would say Yes. But this, to me, is vacuously true. If you are asking, Is this argument a good one for proving that God exists necessarily, I would say No. Even if the first premise were stipulated

1' Everything that is logically impossible is self-contradictory

it would still not prove that anything could be logically necessary. Without reading McHugh, I couldn't tell you the purpose of this syllogism.

Right. But my point in bringing up the synthetic/analytic distinction is that something is "factually impossible" if a synthetic statement is deemed impossible. And something is "logically impossible" if an analytic statement is deemed impossible. The former depends on the facts about the world whereas the latter is only an internal inconsistency. The sorts of examples you gave about logical impossibility were all synthetic statements, and that can't be. They were, instead, factually impossible synthetic statements (and the dilemma set up in the pseudosyllogism was referring to logical impossibility). I just want you to be familiar with the distinction since to be factually impossible is not to indict something as being logically impossible.

matt

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by mattbballman :

Then my next question is: Do you understand why I deny premise 1? I deny it because non-contingent beings can be logically impossible and yet not be self-contradictory. And if I'm right, it seems that McHugh's argument must fail entirely.

K

mattbballman:

You've done nothing to deflect the criticism. The non-existence of non-contingent, galaxy-sized, emotional bowling ball would be impossible as that of the ontological argument's perfect being. The concept is also not logically impossible. Does this mean that this bowling ball exists in this world?

quartodeciman

I hate to be a bore, but someone please describe the state of "being impossible". Leave out the antitautologous cases, and cases with unexpressed conditional antecedents, please.

quart

Goober

Hi everybody,

Here are my objections to McHugh's ontological argument:

He defines his 'god' as

"(8) Not being deficient in any sense"

But what exactly does this entail?

It seems to me that to be "not deficient in any sense" his 'god' must not be deficient in any positive quality. But we already know that there exist positive qualities that are logically contadictory, so since this 'god' must have all positive qualities to be non-deficient, the 'god' must be logically contradictory and hence not exist.

Perhaps some might change point 8 to read 'not deficient in any negative quality' which would again make such a 'god' non-contradictory. However, now it must now lack no negative quality, so it must have exactly no qualities at all, so it still must not exist!

It seems to me that it must be a logical fallacy to argue that something exists simply because it is defined to exist. If anyone wants to argue with that they will have to come up with some good reasons not to believe that the 'asadfjkl;d' exists, where the 'asadfjk;d' is defined as being whatever the hell I want (provided it is not contradictory) with the added definition that said 'asadfjk;d' exists.

In my opinion the ontological argument simply proves that the definition of his 'god' contains a statement equivalent to 'this being exists' and hence that it would be a logical fallacy to conclude from the definition that it must exist.

Unless I've completely missed the point of this argument, it would seem that McHugh is just stating 'It must exist because I defined it to', and the rest of the argument is simply a sleight of hand to distract the reader that this is what he is really doing by cloaking it heavily in logical jargon.

Is it just me or is the whole point of this argument nicely summed up by the saying 'If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit'?

Comments anyone?

mattbballman

tom,

-- But I have already explained that all logically impossible things are self-contradictory.