The Ontological Argument

[Euler]

For you philosophers and logic nerds...

I am attempting to refute "The Ontological Argument" via contradiction.

Is the following argument valid, or have I messed something up?



1. Assume maximal entity exists. (The ontological argument is true)

2. Select a maximized attribute of entity.

3. Since attribute is maximized, it must be measurable. (If not, how could you claim it is maximized.)

4. All measurable things are quantifiable. ****** <--- take note

5. There can be no maximized quantity. (There is always going to be a higher number on the scale)

6. Therefore, there can be no maximized attribute.

7. Therefore, there can be no maximal entity.

1 and 7 are contradicting statements.


I think this works. The only debatable premise is 4... I think. I imagine someone would counter argue that something like "love" cannot be quantified, but I would argue that it also couldn't be measured or compared and so no claims about its maximizing can be made.

I don't really care about your opinions on the existence of a deity. I mean, that sounds cold. I just mean for the sake of this thread I don't care. Of course I want everyone to find eternal salvation in the loving embrace of our Lord or I think sheeple are idiots for even considering the existence of a invisible sky daddy. Pick whichever makes you happy and assume I agree. Be a non believer or a believer.

My son was asking about logic and I haven't studied the subject outside the context of math. Those courses were highly symbolized and often were looking at meta logic or the finding the validity of logical systems. Logic looks different when you use words instead of letters. Yes, yes, I know. Logic looks like logic and words are just symbols of a different feather. You know what I mean by "looks different." GET OFF MY BACK.

I don't want to teach him wrong stuff because I think it is way harder to unlearn bad information than it is to learn good information. Especially problematic in a father/son relationship built upon tons of arguing from authority. The ONLY REASON I PICKED THIS ARGUMENT is that I wanted a good argument to try and refute. Google offered this one when I typed in "solid proof logic."

He is super cute.

7659

Please educate me or give my argument your blessing.

[Silvean]

I have lost huge amounts of time to this thing in the past. First, I think the context of the ontological argument is important and one ought to read at least the Proslogion to get a sense of where Anselm is coming from. It is important that Anselm starts the essay with a prayer:


I acknowledge, Lord, and I give thanks that you have created in me this your image, so that I can remember you, think about you and love you. But it is so worn away by sins, so smudged over by the smoke of sins, that it cannot do what it was created to do unless you renew and reform it. I do not even try, Lord, to rise up to your heights, because my intellect does not measure up to that task; but I do want to understand in some small measure your truth, which my heart believes in and loved. Nor do I seek to understand so that I can believe, but rather I believe so that I can understand. For I believe this too, that "unless I believe I shall not understand" (Isa. 7:9).

In the past, I have taken this to mean that his argument, what's called the ontological argument, is an expression of faith seeking understanding (fides quaerens intellectum) and was never meant to stand alone as a proof. I no longer believe this. I think Anselm found the argument potentially convincing to a theoretical non-believer; the fool who says in his heart that there is no God (Psalm 14:1).

So, I'll talk off my head a little about the argument. You talk about maximal attributes of an entity and this kind of thinking has been used to argue for the existence of God on the basis that an infinite regress is absurd. So the argument goes that a horse is more excellent than a piece of wood and a man is more excellent than both. This quality of excellence goes on up a chain of being that would be infinite (and therefore absurd) unless there is a highest level. That highest level is identical with supreme excellence and so it is one, i.e. God. So the idea that there is always a higher number on the scale is rejected from the start. I would associate this kind of thinking with Aquinas and his "five ways" (quinque viae) for arguing the existence of God. But, really, it's a thread of thought that was held as persuasive for a long time with an intellectual history that goes beyond my ability to summarize here.

Back to Anselm. Anselm's argument (called the ontological argument) runs like this:

1. God is that which nothing greater can be thought.
2. Even a fool who doesn't believe in God can understand point 1, he understands the definition.
3. If he understands the definition, then it exists in his mind.
4. It is better to exist in reality than just in understanding.
5. So, if the entity in question only existed in understanding, we could think of something greater.
6. Therefore, that which nothing greater can be thought must exist in reality.

So the issue here is existence as an attribute, existence versus non-existence in the greatest conceivable entity. A monk named Gaunilo refuted this by substituting the word "island" for God above, such that the greatest conceivable island must exist because of what's above -- and that's ridiculous. I used to think this was damning but Anselm does have an answer. Essentially, he argues that you can't substitute an "island." Anselm insists that this is a misreading of his argument and that the idea of "something that which nothing greater can be thought" refers only to God because God is that which necessarily exists. This necessity is part of being "that which nothing greater can be thought." God cannot not be.

A more persuasive rejection, perhaps, is Kant's argument that we can't use "existence" as a predicate because to say "God does not exist" would then be saying that "there is a God who does not exist," i.e. a contradiction. Existence as a predicate is a property that must be checked empirically or it's meaningless.

Summing up a little:

1. Your understanding of Anselm's "ontological argument" is wrong because Anselm meant it to deal with the property of "existence" and the special case of a necessary being.
2. Your refutation may be better directed at the "argument from degree," one of the 5 ways for proving God in Aquinas' Summa.

There's a lot of stuff about Anselm online that's more clear than what I've said above, especially SEP:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anselm/

[Ardwen]

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith, I am nothing."
"Oh," says man, "but the Babel fish is a dead give-away, isn't it? It proves You exist, and so therefore You don't."
"Oh, I hadn't thought of that," says God, who promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Ah, that was easy," says man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white, and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.
Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979), Chapter 6


My favorite version of this particular argument

[Euler]

Summing up a little:

1. Your understanding of Anselm's "ontological argument" is wrong because Anselm meant it to deal with the property of "existence" and the special case of a necessary being.
2. Your refutation may be better directed at the "argument from degree," one of the 5 ways for proving God in Aquinas' Summa.

There's a lot of stuff about Anselm online that's more clear than what I've said above, especially SEP:


Thank you for taking the time to educate me. You are correct, of course, that the originator is Anselm. The argument google fed me was from Plantinga.

The form is:



1.A being has maximal excellence in a given possible world W if and only if it is omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good in W; and
2.A being has maximal greatness if it has maximal excellence in every possible world.
3.It is possible that there is a being that has maximal greatness.
4.Therefore, possibly, it is necessarily true that an omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good being exists.
5.Therefore, it is necessarily true that an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good being exists.
6.Therefore, an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good being exists.

I do not know the historical or theological history of it. I honestly just picked it because it was the first thing my google search spit at me. The link you gave is fascinating. I am not really smart enough for philosophy, save that I know how much I don't know about it. Having said all this, I am not sure why my counter argument fails. Would it be possible for you to dumb down your answer a little?

I understand "maximal" in this context to mean the most. So, for example, lets talk about intelligence. Unless all things are of equal intelligence, we can say "this" thing is more intelligent than "that" thing. The thing that has the highest intelligence must be the maximal intelligence. Is this a bad understanding maximal?

Check 1:

[] your understanding of maximal is good
[] you are an idiot. Maximal does not mean what you think it means.


Extra credit:
What does maximal ACTUALLY mean. (Do not use words that have more than four syllables.)

[Silvean]

I'm not as familiar with Alvin Plantinga's argument. I believe his use of "maximal" is specific to the categories above (excellence/greatness) with special consideration toward "existence." It runs something like: a maximally great being is maximally great because it exists in every possible world and, therefore, it must exist in the actual world. I'm not sure that his rewording of Anselm's proof really changes anything. I also seem to recall that this is a means to establishing that theism is rational rather than serving as a proof of God outright. I would have to do a close reading of Plantigna to delve deeper.

So, in regard to Plantigna's argument, I don't think your understanding of maximal is accurate because he uses it in a particular way. Your understanding of maximal is more like its use in "the argument from degree" found in Aquinas' "five ways" (of proving God). It is summarized in this way:

1. Objects have properties to greater or lesser extents.
2. If an object has a property to a lesser extent, then there exists some other object that has the property to the maximum possible degree.
3. So there is an entity that has all properties to the maximum possible degree. (This we call God)
4. Hence God exists.

You seem to be holding that a quantifiable property will always have a potential +1, whereas Aquinas (following, I believe, on Aristotle) takes it for granted that there must be a maximal property. Perhaps thinking in terms of "more," "less," and "most" in referring to nobility, truth, and goodness is more accurate. To put this another way: Aquinas does not think of these transcendental categories as quantifiable in the same way that you are using the word.

You can read more about the argument from degree on Wiki:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinque_viae#The_Argument_from_Degree
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_degree

[Euler]

I guess you nailed my problem. I don't accept that there is something that can be measured and not quantified. If a thing is comparable (more true, less noble, most good) then it MUST be measurable. Else how could you support the claim? If not quantifiable, wouldn't the claim Aristotle is more noble than Aquinas be meaningless? Either there is a defined framework on which nobility is to be calculated, or the assertion that one is more noble than the other is subjective? Is that a false dichotomy?

You have to forgive my +1 insistence. I cling to mathematics in almost everything.

[Wrathbringer]

I guess you nailed my problem. I don't accept that there is something that can be measured and not quantified.

How about the wind?

eta: that I just broke.

[Silvean]

You have to forgive my +1 insistence. I cling to mathematics in almost everything.

I wouldn't sign my name to it just yet but it may be that this is the key difference between medieval and modern thought. Your +1 insistence comes from the bottom up rather than the top down. This may, in a roundabout way, have brought us to the problem of universals. (Look into the "problem of universals" and "nominalism.")

I don't think I mentioned it above but Aquinas' "five ways" ought to be taken as a whole rather than individually. In regard to God's existence, I think the question of why there is something rather than nothing looms in the atheistic worldview. At best you can wave it away as unanswerable.

[Euler]

How about the wind? We could measure its mass, speed, or direction.
eta or environmental impact.

Silvean,
I will read up on your suggestions for personal edifications. I do think that it may be getting away from my original purpose, "How to teach my son about logical arguments." I have not found "Dick and Jane Argue." See Dick strawman. No Dick, no! See Jane use modus ponens.

In any case, this has been the most enjoyable discussion I have had in quite some time.
Thank you.

[Silvean]

This looks like fun:

https://bookofbadarguments.com/

I'd introduce him to logic problems like the river crossing puzzle:

http://www.mansvslogic.com/2009/05/river-crossing-puzzles.html

[Gnomad]

Given a metric space, 5 is only true on certain domains.

There is no maximal entity in the real numbers. There is a maximal entity in [0,1]. There is not in (0,1). There is in (0,1)U{2}. There is in S={1/n | n in N}. There is in RU{+/- infinity}. And so on.

[Euler]

Given a metric space, 5 is only true on certain domains.

There is no maximal entity in the real numbers. There is a maximal entity in [0,1]. There is not in (0,1). There is in (0,1)U{2}. There is in S={1/n | n in N}. There is in RU{+/- infinity}. And so on.

Good point. I was going to reply with the fact that in the case of measuring things, there is no maximal. It occurs to me that the Richter scale may be a counter example to that. 0 kelvin may be another. I suppose I would need to add that in cases where there is a maximal, you could not assure uniqueness.

Where did you study, Gnomad?

[Latrinsorm]

2. Select a maximized attribute of entity.
3. Since attribute is maximized, it must be measurable. (If not, how could you claim it is maximized.)This does not follow. What is provable is a subset of what is knowable, which is in turn a subset of what is true. You could also say that you need a measuring tool superior to the measured to successfully measure it: a tape measure for your height instead of a ruler, for example. Thus since we are not God we surely cannot measure God, which is in itself evidence of His maximality.
Else how could you support the claim?Remember that Aristotle and those of his ilk weren't big on "support", that would be empiricism.

[Gnomad]

I studied math at a few universities in Boston as both an undergrad and a grad student. Then I fell in love and moved away before finishing any advanced degrees.