Jobar

How odd. We travel the nosebleeding heights of philosophy, modal logic, linguistics, and mathematics- in search of the roots of presuppositionalism.

And, unless I am very much mistaken, we come back empty-handed...

Kenny

I would put my money on the former.

Slex

So, this is my re: to Kenny's first post - I wrote it some time ago while the thread was still "young" but I couldn't post it because I had some problems with the internet. I've only added two sentences shortly before the end. Otherwise, as I can see, I am kind of repetitios there, but anyway, I am right now too lazy to edit anything else. Just to mention that I agree with Kenny in one of his later posts that the premises are the problem. Obviously this is where my remarks are.

OK, Kenny, thanks for making it clear to me what is meant by necessary. I now think that I understand, but I still have my contras against the argument. The problem is that this necessity must be proven, not taken a priori. I mean, it is far from being clear that God is a necessary being in the sence that 2+2=4. I know that it is assumed by definition that it is so, but what are the actual characteristics of a necessary being. I mean, it is easy to limit the defintion of a necessary being only to the word "necessary", but what does this necessary being do? Once we begin attrinuting concrete characteristics to the being, we may see that that being is actually not necessary, we actually open the so called "necessity" premise to attack. Only by retaining the vague and abstract term "necessary being" on its own, unattached with other characteristics, this argument is sound. Once we start attributing concrete things, God becomes contigent upon our world, because we must compare and see if the image of God corresponds with the real world. For example is the God of the literal interpretation of Genesis a necessary being? No, because it is contingent upon the fact that the Universe is more than 10 billion years old. For example you say:
"Now suppose we think that God might not have existed. If God might not have existed, then God’s existence must be explained in light of some contingent feature of our world and it is also true that some contingent feature of our world might have prevented God from existing. But, if that’s true, then God depends on the contingent features of our world being a certain way for His existence. But if that’s true, then God is not self-sufficient. But that violates our definition of ‘God’ as a being worthy of worship. So if God exists at all, God must exist necessarily. Now, regardless of what you actually think of this argument, it shows that there are some intuitively appealing ways to argue for the truth of the first premise."
I don't agree with this neither. There may be no contingent feature that prevents God from existing, but he may be nonexistent anyway. Just because something is possible, it doesn't mean it exists. It is not quite that 2+2=4 is possible in every world, it is rather the opposite - it is impossible for a world to exist, where 2+2 does not equal 4. And in the case of God being a necessity, a leap is made from "it is possible for God to exist in any world" to "God is required that any world exists" - the latter is the real necessity, the first is possibility, but possibility doesn't entrail necessity. The second claim is far from being proven.
And also, I don't think that if God exists at all, he exists only as a necessary being. We have a lot of things that are not necessary (in the sense of 2+2=4), but they still exist - rocks and stones for example. A God that is not possible to exist, obviously doesn't exist, and a God that is possible to exists may exist, or may not. And this question matters only for our world, because this is the world we live in.
I actually think that the ontological argument relies on presuppositions and that is its problem. We presuppose that God is a necessary being, hence he exists in our world. It should be rather the opposite - to see if a God, defined in a certain ways, corresponds to our world. By predefining God as a necessary being and claiming that he can exist only as such, one escapes the responsibility to give proof for God's existence in this world, or even evidential arguments contra the existence can be easily snubbed because of the alleged necessity. Of course if there is a mismatch between the so called necessary God and our observable world, obviously the definition of necessity is flawed. The problem lies with the definition and proof of the necessity, or rather, that together with the "necessity", defined simply as necessity, one tries to sell other attributes, too, which however are not necessary at all, but by placing them together, one tries to avoid challenge to his argument: "You can try to disprove the existence of God by showing his incompatibility with this world, but hey, God is not a contingent being, so he is not influenced by this world, he is a necessary being". And as I have already said, when God is defined merely as necessity then there is no proof for the necessity, and there can be none as long as the attributes of the necessity definition are limited only to necessity itself. Necessity can be proven only if we expand the definition of necessity with certain attributes, whose presence leads to necessity (sth like 2+2=4), not by merely stating that what is necessary is necessary.
Sorry, I didn't want to write such a long reply - you said that you don't want to discuss it in length, and I have some other things to do (I am not prepared for a long tread), but this is what came to my mind, I got carried away, though I wanted to be shorter.

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by Kenny :

If self sufficiency entails necessary existence, then sure, maximal greatness (minus alethic necessity) would entail maximal greatness. But then it seems awfully strange to say a contingent property would somehow grant a person necessary existence, and I think we also start to run into Kantian criticisms of ontological arguments. Not that existence (or here, alethic modal status) isn't a predicate, but that we still have to know whether this being exists in the first place so that it can instantiate this property. Sure, in every world where God exists, God exists necessarily, but that still doesn't tell us whether God exists in any world.

If self-sufficience is necessary and sufficient for necessary existence, then the two properties really do look identical.

And there are still parody arguments waiting in the wings. Isn't there a possible world in which I'm self-sufficient? Or unicorns, or a magical device that makes all theistic arguments unsound?

Understood; thanks for the discussion as far as it got, then. And I'm not interested in arguing that []P where P is synthetic always has a lower epistemic background probability than P.