by Alec Muffett
By the ontological argument God exists because there is nothing conceivably greater than him.
However:
1) Everything is better on a stick.
2) Everything is better with dinosaurs.
Therefore the existence of dinosaurs on sticks creates a quadratic class of infinities each of which may be added to any conceivable greatness to create something greater, including dinosaurs on metasticks and metadinosaurs on sticks and so forth.
Hence, no God. QED.
I’ve never metadinosaur I didn’t like..
OK, I’ll get me coat. 😉
Frances Davey has correctly identified this as a) bullshit and b) mathematically incorrect.
That said there are a clearly infinite set of potential sticks and another clearly infinite potential set of potential dinosaurs, and these infinities are squared because to permutation N of sticks there may be added an infinite permutation of numbers of dinosaurs.
I _think_ that’s quadratic. It’s one of those Aleph-N for N>=2 things, for certain.
I do love Frances’ writing, so wish to preserve it from Facebook’s dungeon:
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I’m not sure you are qualified to talk of a “quadratic class of infinities”. I, on the other hand…
The ontological argument doesn’t require that God is greater than other things, merely that he is perfect. There could be other perfect things as well – indeed the ontological argument would appear to require that there are.
But none of this is at all new. The Schoolmen wrote many works ridiculing the ontological argument – some of them had great fun with it.
Your objection is not dissimilar to that of Gaunilo of Marmoutiers, who wrote something like 900 years ago.
I guess I find discussion of the ontological argument rather tiresome. Even in Anselm’s day it was widely attacked. Acquinas (the leading theologian of the Catholic Church) thought it was wrong and said so 600 years ago. Why is anyone even bothering discussing it now? It is such a bad argument that its flaws were clearly visible long before we had really got to grips with most of the classic paradoxes (we haven’t even discovered some of the most interesting) and when logic was in a very primitive state. I just don’t see why its worth even arguing *about*.
I’m religious (for at least some value of that word) and I don’t (and haven’t) ever tried to “prove” God’s existence. Clearly as a fact about the world it isn’t subject to mathematical proof, in the way that (say) the consistency of propositional logic might be. I’m not sure most Christians would think otherwise. Arguing in favour of God’s existence is much like arguing in favour of the existence of proto-Nostratic, dinosaurs, black holes or aliens – an essentially scientific enterprise, for a broad sense of “scientific”. Nothing can be proved absolutely about the real world, but we have reasonable tools – minimum entropy, Bayes’ Theorem and so on – to enable us to approach it.
Thus, an argument about whether or not natural selection explains species diversity or whether evolution is true is exactly subject to the same kind of inquiry as any of the other things I listed. Its not subject to *proof* – it would be impossible to “prove” in the mathematical sense, but it can certainly be given a probability in the Bayesian sense, just like everything else.
[alec: “It was on Radio4 / Melvyn Bragg a couple of days ago.”]
Really? What a waste of time. There are so many much more interesting things to thing about both in and outside religion.
Jon Crowcroft wrote:
we need a new vocabulary for discussions between religious and irreligious people – I claim that science owns the word “prove” and the term “logic” and what people do when they discuss belief systems isn’t something amenable to “proof” – its a category error – perhaps they could pre-pend all these words, object oriented superclass-stylee, with some prefix like “bogo-proof” and “bogo-logic” – then we could have classes in “bogoscience” where creationism and intelligent design (you call the human lower back an intelligent design? what the hell was god thinking when he did that piss-poor piece of engineering”) and the rest of us could get on with stuff like improving medicine and better ways to keep warm without wrecking the planet…etc etc
Depending how the ontological argument is phrased it would require all unique things to be perfect. e.g. Since the perfect “Simon Russell Waters born June 13th” can be conceived, and existence is a perfection, and since I’m the only “Simon Russell Waters born June 13th” I must therefore be the perfect one.
I believe this is called “Reductio ad absurdum”, although no doubt one can reword it to avoid this embarrassingly obvious flaw. Anselm was faced with this flaw, since it is rather obvious and started theory saving (theologians have a lot of practice at this, they tend to call it apologetics because it sounds better than “theory saving” and doesn’t carry the same negative connotations) however as always theory saving makes the resulting conclusion less likely to be true since it inevitably introduces more conditions that need to be satisfied. In Anselm case he assumed that the object must exist to qualify, thus begging the question; I’m guessing logic wasn’t a strong point for Anselm – probably more important to get the right answer.
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