Define God

Great Debates
481

Well, I am Triskadecamus, and I can say, God is greater than logic. I just can’t prove it!

I am a Christian.

I am not a theologian, or a logician, nor am I really much invested in the concept of understanding God, since I can barely understand quantum physics, and certainly don’t understand economics. Understanding God is just not in the realm I consider myself likely to achieve.

So, I shall, as usual plunge onward into the darkness.

Is the imaginary a part of the universe? Is it a part of the universe that has a fundamental characteristic that is not shared by that part of the universe which is not imaginary? Is that part of the universe which is not imaginary real or only unimagined? Is the unimaginable a part of the universe? Can I imagine things that do exist? Does that mean they are not imaginary? To be the universe, the universe must contain both sets of a dichotomy. In fact, if we are to have a word universe, then we must forgo the entire concept of something that is not a part of the universe. If it doesn’t mean that, then we have only conditional subsets of the Universe.

The premise that God either exists, or does not exist seems to me to be based on an assumption that existence itself is a characteristic that may or may not be true of God. I think, on the other hand, that God is the fundamental characteristic from which existence proceeds. (In the beginning, I AM.) In the atemporal tense that must be used when speaking from the point of view of God, He is, and the universe also is. He is not of the universe, but the universe is of Him. He has always been, and is without end. The universe is for all time, and has no end while time continues. Time itself is of God’s making, though He is not constrained by time.

The requirement that God “manipulate” the universe in ways that are outside of the parameters of the known forces and particles which comprise that same universe seems to beg the question of limitlessness that man ascribes to God, not deny it. Accomplishing the miraculous by mundane events is no less a miracle than stopping the sun in the sky. Critique on methodology in matters of omnipotence strikes me as . . . hubris. (The exact same disagreement I have with biblical literalism and its desire to put God in a book.) Of course, all my “arguments” are based on the assumption that God Is.

I offer no enticement or threat to convince you that you should adopt my faith. Theology had little to do with my own acceptance of faith, and second hand miracles are man’s work, not God’s. I believe that God is someone. I believe it because I met God, in the being of His Son. He did not give me proof, but He did give me faith, and I found I did not need proof. It is possible that I experienced a hallucination, or am under the effects of a delusion. The truth can be imaginary.

I am untroubled by the various perceptions of God that are held by men. I am often troubled by the motives of men, which they ascribe to God. I do not need to justify my differing motives when I find it necessary to act to limit other’s actions. I act according to the limits of the social compacts of my civilization, and when those are contrary to my belief in the expectations of Christ, I choose faith, and expect society to act in accordance with the compacts of our civilization, or law. I am at times disappointed by society, and at times by myself.

(on the matter of God as Him. I think God made us in His image, male and female He made us. If you feel more comfortable saying She, it is a matter between you, and God. Like the Universe, occupying both sides of a dichotomy doesn’t seem to be a problem for God.)

My reasons for denying logic, and proof in the matter of faith is not that it might fail, for if it fails, it is only me, being a fool. I am well aware that I am a great fool, and have learned to adapt. But there is the great horror that it might not fail. I might prove to someone that God exists. That seems to me to be a potentially evil thing, to take from you the possibility of faith (a pearl of great price) and leave you with nothing but proof. Reason is great tool, for this world. My faith is not of this world, and I desire that no one follow my lead. I am lost. Follow He whom I seek to follow if you choose.

Tris

Jesus loves you. It isn’t policy, it’s personal. ~ me ~

482

Sure. As begbert2 noted later, I was interpreting the scope of the quantification in “There does not exist anything” (formally, ~Exists x . x = x, which is really just ~Exists x . True) to be over a domain separate from that of the propositions, truth values, etc., thus allowing me to simultaneously believe in the presence of those things and the fact that nothing exists. However, if we want to adopt an interpretation of existence which has us take the domain of the variable x in that statement to be one which allows for x to be a proposition, truth value, or that sort of thing, then, on any but a very bizarre account, we will have to accept not only that certain things exist, but, in fact, that certain things do have necessary existence. For example, the truth values True and False, the proposition “There is an X such that X exists” itself, etc., will all exist in every possible world, and thus have necessary existence. In this case, the premises of the argument (in the forms stated in my and begbert2’s previous post) become eminently acceptable under an interpretation of God as one of these necessarily existent objects. We could end up taking God to be the truth value True, or the truth value False, or any proposition statable in every possible world, etc. But this seems somehow less than satisfying. If all we require of God is necessary existence, then we can take God to be, say, 4, adopt the metaphysical stance that the integers have necessary existence, and then conclude that God exists. However, few would consider this to have any relation to God as they ordinarily understand the term.

I think your goal is something larger than this, Liberal, no? In the above, begbert2 and I analyzed the argument from a perspective where all that was required of God was necessary existence. I believe your actual position is that, in addition to that characteristic, there are several others which are part of your definition of God. Unfortunately, I can’t recall what they were. Could you clarify, and then we could re-analyze the MOP with them and your quoted points in mind?

[I’m about to double or triple post with some discussion of other points. I hope no one minds if I break up my discussion in this way; it just seems cleaner.]

483

Don’t worry. The systems of modal logic are, in themselves, just various collections of rules. Just objects from some particular field of math. You can manipulate them on their own, on a purely mathematical, uninterpreted level, show via symbolic manipulation that some particular proof exists in system A or doesn’t exist in system B, that some Kripke frame with certain properties exists or not, without any concern for what any of this is “about” (i.e., without any concern for what your work could possibly model and be applied to). And there will be nothing to do with Heisenberg’s principle or anything else from physics in any of this. There won’t even be anything to do with the meaning of the words “necessary” or “possible” in ordinary English discourse. There will just be pure math.

The time when it comes for you to examine the meaning of the words “necessary” or “possible” is when you decide to apply the results of your mathematical investigations in some way. At that point, you sit down, decide what particular modal system best characterizes the way you understand those words, and then, having chosen that interpretation, accept the purely mathematical results from before, but now interpreted as facts about the concepts of necessity and possibility. If you find Heisenberg’s principle has some effect on how you understand those words, then here is where it would come up; I wouldn’t personally consider Heisenberg’s principle relevant to my understanding of those words, but then, I rarely consider results from physics relevant to my understanding of any philosophical concepts, at least not in this way. (The way I see it, generally, if people could toss those words/concepts around hundreds of years ago, they must have had something in mind back then which could be expressed without any reference to modern physics, something whose rules could be adequately formalized without any reference to modern physics)

The basic reason for introducing an accessibility relation is to allow some worlds to be hidden from some other ones, allowing a fact to be necessary according to one world (which can’t see any counterexamples), but non-necessary at another world (which can see the counterexamples). “What?”, you may say. “Necessary according to one world and non-necessary according to another? But that’s absolutely incoherent in light of what ‘necessary’ means!”. Well, if that’s how you feel about it, then it just means that you have, or are taking at the moment, an interpretation of necessity which is modeled by a modal logic where the accessibility relation is crippled to triviality to prevent such things (like S5, where accessibility is basically removed from the picture by demanding that every world see every world). Not everyone feels, in every context, this way about necessity and possibility; there are subtler notions floating around that even laymen use. (In particular, there’s a notion corresponding to S4, in which you can coherently say things like “The law of gravity is not necessarily true. But it’s possible for it to have been necessarily true.”) But if you continue to have difficulty thinking about the alethic operators in one of these subtler ways, it may be best to illustrate accessibility by getting around your feelings on necessity/possibility, and interpreting the modal operators as something else.

Thus, let’s take essentially the same operators and <>, but give them slightly different interpretations than the ones we’ve been using. Specifically, we’ll take A to mean “No matter what, A will always be true from now on”, and <>A to mean “It’s possible that A is true at some point in the future (or at the present)”.

How might we model these operators? Well, we’d model the state of the world right now as some possible world. Then, we’d look at all the possible future states. They’d be other possible worlds, accessible from our current world. And of those future states, some of them would be potential future states of each other (for example, one might be a 2008 future world where the Democrats win the presidential vote, and one might be a 2009 future world where a Democratic president takes office. This second world would be accessible from the first one, and both would be accessible from the current world. Also accessible from the current world would be a 2009 world where a Republican takes office, but it would not be accessible from the 2008 world where the Democrats win the vote. See how this works?).

What sort of clear rules are there on accessibility, in this interpretation? Well, every world should be able to access itself, of course, trivially. Furthermore, if W can access X and X can access Y, it seems W should be able to access Y (we can compose potential histories together to create larger potential histories). So, reflexivity and transitivity. But symmetry is very clearly not one of the rules.

Having decided on that, what sort of rules govern whether A is true at a particular world? Well, A just says A is true no matter what future world we look at. So A is true at a world W iff A is true at all the worlds W can see. And, similarly, <>A (which says it’s possible that A is true at some future point (or the present one)) would be true at W iff A is true at some world W can see.

This gives us a very nice way to interpret the semantics of our logic dealing with these operators and <>. Any collection of possible worlds (each giving truth values to each primitive fact), along with a reflexive and transitive accessibility relation between them, gives us a model of potential futures. A statement involving and <> is considered logically justified if it holds at every world in every model of potential futures.

When you generalize this, you get basically the method of Kripke frames for modeling modal operators. You take the same concept, but investigate different rules on the accessibility relation. Based on the rules you take, you’ll get different validities involving and <>. You can then argue that your rules were justified under some particular interpretation, and thus that the validities that come out are true under some particular interpretation (of what A and <>A mean).

There are various well-studied systems of accessibility rules. If the rules are reflexivity and transitivity, the system S4 comes out, and we just showed that it’s pretty convincingly the right system for modeling as “Definitely always in the future” and <> as “Maybe at some point in the future”. If the rules are “Every world can see every other world” you get the system S5; you also get that same set of validities if you take the rules to just be reflexivity, transitivity, and symmetry. S5 models one notion of necessity and possibility; however, there are other different notions of necessity and possibility which are perhaps better modeled by other systems, like S4. And there are all sorts of other accessibility rules you can study, and then wonder what the resulting system can be taken to model.

Hopefully this sheds some light on what accessibility is and what it does in the context of modal logic. I’m afraid I’m not sure what good Internet references would be (you can try the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Wikipedia, looking at articles on modal logic and Kripke semantics, but they might not be that great for just getting a grip on what it’s all about), but if you have any more questions, I’d be happy to answer them.

484

This last post of mine for tonight is on something of a technical philosophical matter, but important, I think, for a clear understanding of any discussion about existence.

This is sort of a problem that tends to infuse discussions of existence. The idea that existence is a predicate of objects, and thus that we can coherently speak of the non-existent objects as just some special subclass of the objects of the world. But this is silly.

Consider: If an object is non-existent, then it does not exist. Tautologous, right? But equivalent to “There do not exist any non-existent objects”, which is to say, “All objects exist.”

That is what we seem driven to, when we adopt the view of existence as a predicate of objects. Now, we could adopt various hacky fixes to try to get around this, but the cleanest way to clear up our thinking on existence is the Fregean path. We must realize that existence is not a predicate of objects, but rather a second-level predicate: a predicate which applies to predicates of objects.

So when we say “Santa Claus does not exist”, we are not speaking of some object Santa Claus and describing that object to have the trait of non-existence. And no more are we doing any similar thing in saying “George Bush exists”, “Red flowers exist”, or “Unicorns do not exist”. Rather, in all these cases, the property of existence or non-existence is being ascribed to a predicate, rather than an object itself. (This allows us to get around the ugliness of attempting to posit some vague pseudo-object Santa Claus which is a thing in the world, but a thing with the property of nonexistence)

Let’s look at “Unicorns do not exist”. What is going on here? It’s most emphatically not an ascription of nonexistence to some pseudo-object unicorns, teaches Frege. Rather, what we’re saying is “The predicate ‘X is a unicorn’ is not satisfied by anything.” The property of nonexistence is something that applies to the predicate ‘X is a unicorn’, saying that it is satisfied by no one. The property of existence is something that applies to the predicate ‘X is George Bush’, saying that it is satisfied by some one. That is the proper logical decomposition of these sentences.

Basically, existence is a quantifier, as opposed to a trait like, say, that of being male. Perhaps, for some, it will be clearest to put it in programming terms. In those terms, note that Exists has the type (Object -> Bool) -> Bool. When we say “George Bush exists”, that’s a wholly different sort of statement from “George Bush is president.” Even the words “George Bush” have different senses in the two. In the former, we apply Exists (of type (Object -> Bool) -> Bool) to the predicate of being George Bush (this having type Object -> Bool). In the latter, we apply Is President (of type Object -> Bool) directly to the actual person George Bush (of type Object).
The above view is not entirely difficulty-free (in particular, what exactly is the nature of the relation between the object George Bush and the predicate of being George Bush? How do we get from the former to the latter?), but I think all the difficulties which could be raised could be adequately dealt with within the Fregean framework, or at least are no more difficult to deal with within it than in any other, more naive views of existence. As far as I’m concerned, the Fregean view of existence as a second-level predicate is just piercingly insightfully correct; one of those cases where someone managed to cut through the crap accumulated by ages of linguistic confusion (not merely accumulated, but also constantly independently re-invented from that same linguistic confusion), and in so doing made possible a massive increase in clarity of future thought.

(Luckily, in the formalizations of the MOP I’ve seen so far in this thread, I haven’t seen any problems arising from this confusion. But I do want to head it off before it has any chance to start making a mess of things, whether in the formalization of the argument or in the surrounding discussion.)

[More on the matter here, I suppose, though I wish I could link to something better.]

485

I should clarify that this is only a difficulty in the modal context, where it gets caught up in questions about the concept of transworld identity (we would generally want our predicates to be interpretable in all possible worlds, but not require the same of our objects, and thus it becomes difficult to explain how we can move from a particular object (which is tied to a particular world) to its associated identity predicate (which we would want to be sensibly interpretable in all worlds)).

486

With respect, I don’t think that’s what Begbert noted. What Begbert noted was that he had given a “disproof” of Plantinga (although citing Gödel’s version in doing so). I can’t speak for you or him, but I would take “disproof” generally to mean a finding that an argument is invalid. Since your research into the matter is more prodigious than my own, I’m hoping you can link me to (or even cite from memory — I trust you) any reputable philosopher who hasn’t just rejected one or more premises, but has declared that Plantinga misapplied a rule of logic.

I agree with you for True, but not for False since every false statement describes a metaphysical impossibility. If the statement, S, “Statement X is false” is true, then what statement X describes is not possible. And so what S describes (the falsity of X) would exist, but what X describes could not. And if S is true in every possible world, then S is necessarily true.

I agree, and I have no problem with Truth being used as a property to describe God. But the MOP makes a statement about God’s ontological nature, not His moral nature. If corollaries arise from the statement that God exists in actuality, that’s fine, and we can deal with those — but separately, please. There is already plenty of inexplicable conflation, confusion, and gnashing of teeth over a very simple argument without the introduction of red herrings.

We certainly can analyze them if you wish, but they have no relevance to the MOP. In my opinion, we should take from any analysis only the answer for which our question is framed. In this case, the question is, “What is the nature of God’s existence?”. And the answer is, “He exists at every world where existence is possible.”

Now, I do posit such things as “Goodness is an aesthetic” and “God values goodness above all else”, etc. But these are not a part of the MOP and do not follow from it. They aren’t even the right questions to ask of a statement about ontology. If I were to posit that “God created the universe”, then I would need an argument about cosmology to answer whatever questions I might have.

I think sometimes people are tempted by converses, especially when they’ve lost sight of what the non-converse implication actually is. And so just because I say that God has this or that property, what I say does not imply anything about His ontological description unless my statement is about the nature of His existence. Likewise, just because I use the MOP to make a statement about the nature of His existence, that does not mean that I am done with God once I’ve said “G”. I have much more to say about God, but with “G”, I am saying only that whatever other properties He may possess, He exists in actuality.

That may be why people — even eminent people like you — tend to respond to the MOP by saying, “Surely this does not sum up your God or the God that most people recognize.” Well, of course it doesn’t. Why should it? It is the Modal Ontological Proof, not the Proof About Every Conceivable Aspect That I Might Assign To God. I do think it behooves us to examine this extraordinary thing, whatever It may be, in every way we can. But we cannot use the same tool, the MOP, over and over to examine everything.

What we end up with, with the MOP, is something that exists at this world and at every world where existence is possible. If we sit at that place and dwell forever, we will never move on to examine other things. Nor should we examine other things that are not ontology by attempting to push them through an examination that is about nothing but ontology. If you want to examine whether God is good, that’s fine. But we have to leave the MOP to do that.

487

Not surprisingly, perhaps, I disagree. :slight_smile:

I think Barry Miller has taken the Fregean view to a far more coherent treatment of existence, including exactly what you noted: the relation between an object and the predicate of being that object. The nutshell version is that Miller describes existence metaphorically as a boundary, and posits that an object may be individuated by its bounds. Thus, where “Aristotle is wise” and “Socrates is wise” may very well describe two different predications of wisdom, each is bounded by the sort of wisdom that describes him. And in general, Aristotle is individuated from Socrates by the bounds of each one’s existence.

For Miller’s own development of this notion, see The Fullness of Being: A New Paradigm for Existence, University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. Or see the link you gave to Stanford’s article on existence near the end about ontological implications. Also, this review of his book might be helpful.

488

Well, begbert2 noted several different things in several different posts, didn’t he? :slight_smile:
I wasn’t referring to his talk of disproof here (though I think you both do agree that the MOP follows validly from its premises; when begbert2 speaks of disproof, I think he is just nothing that, having demonstrated why we should not hastily accept the premises, and even perhaps should take them to be false, he doesn’t take the MOP to be of any use in establishing its conclusion as a fact). I was just referring here to his statement “I don’t think that Indistinguishable posited a world in which no logical statements exist; that would probably be impossible anyway by the Necessitation Rule… I think that Indistinguishable was positing a world in which various statements have truth values, including the statement ‘Nothing exists’.”, which is indeed an accurate picture of the source of my objection to the premises.

Well, in speaking of the existence of False as a truth value, I was trying to say something different from that false statements hold. What I was trying to say is, well… for starters, there is the proposition “There is a red unicorn”. There aren’t any red unicorns, of course, but there is the proposition anyway, the statement. And, should we feel to desire to do so, we can take the proposition to be an object of the world and say it exists. And the proposition has a truth value, this boolean object False, which we can also take to be an object of the world, the sort of thing that exists, if we want. Basically, here I was trying to elucidate what I took to be your counter-objection in #464. You said a world in which nothing at all exists was metaphysically untenable, on the grounds that it would contain no truths or attributes or what have you. When I posited the world in which nothing existed, I wasn’t originally thinking of that reference to existence (the statement that there are no objects in the world) as applying to truths or attributes or such things, but read your counter-objection as demanding that truths, attributes, and such be proper objects in the world, negating the possibility of the world with no existent objects. But I may have perhaps misread your counter-objection.

At any rate, taking truth values to be proper objects isn’t important to me. It just seemed that your counter-objection was a particular sort of “But these sort of things are going to be around in any possible world, and should be treated as existent objects”, to which my reply was “Fair enough. The bare minimum we can conceive in a possible world is one in which those sort of objects still exist, but nothing else. Those sort of objects have necessary existence, and if you want, you can identify God with one of them. But then, to say ‘God necessarily exists’ is just a roundabout way of saying ‘The proposition “Horses have four legs” necessarily exists’, or some such, depending on what particular object of this sort you ended up identifying God with. But few have any serious objections to statements of this latter type, and you don’t need any tricky modal arguments to establish them. So it seems you are trying to establish more than just something of this form.”

489

Oh lord, yes.

If that is what he meant (and I’m confident he’ll agree with what you say), then “disproof” is a bizarre word for it. I’ve never seen it used to mean that an argument was not useful for a particular purpose. I’ve seen it used to mean only that an argument is wrong.

[…shrug…] I’m not sure why he would reason that way. I mean, we might as well discard NEC while we’re discarding things. But I still maintain that the statment “nothing exists” is a contradiction at any world.

It may be the case that we’re two ships passing in the night. My counter-objection centers around the demand for an epistemic resolution to a metaphysical problem. It’s much like the often encountered demand for empirical evidence of the existence of a supernatural God. Science is not a proper tool for examining the supernatural; it is a tool limited to examining nature. You and I seem to view the notion of possible worlds in different ways. Naturally, as the inferior person in this discussion with you, I’m at a disadvantage if I’m forced to see things your way. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that I am as renegade with respect to logic as I am with respect to Christianity. But how I interpret a possible world is not that it is a world in the sense of a physical place; but in the sense of a set of statements that may (or may not) map onto a physical place with objects. Otherwise, actualism would be the default worldview. Thus a world as I see it is a set of statements, all of which must be true — even if there is only one. False statements do not count as statements much as impossible things do not count as things. Therefore, “statement X is false” could never be necessarily true because X itself would be undefined, and isn’t needed at its own world, let alone any other. It is a case of X being qualified by a null. It is like x/0, which is not mitigated by negating it as ~(x/0). Maybe we could pause to discuss this, and you could tell me where I’m off-base with respect to my subjective interpretation.

I think that every possible world must contain at least one tautology. And of course, all other statements in that world, if there are any, will prove that tautology to be true.

490

Well, of course, there are still all kinds of non-modal tautologies we could get without NEC (“Everything that is red is red”). But that’s just a side comment. (When you speak of “discarding things”, what is it that you are referring to? What did we discard to propose the world in which nothing existed? I guess an interpretation of the sentence “Something exists” under which the tautologies are reified as existent objects confirming the sentence’s truth. At any rate, I’m cool with replacing “Nothing exists” with “Nothing exists except for things of this sort” as a description of the conceivable world at the source of my objection (with this sort covering the tautologies and such things), leaving open the possibility for a necessarily existent God, but constraining him to be one of the things of this sort.)

Ah, don’t be so hard on yourself; renegade doesn’t imply inferior, and my posts and my position have to earn their respectability in this debate, same as anyone else’s. Also, I don’t think we view the notion of possible worlds all that differently:

I pretty much see things the same way. I certainly don’t think of possible worlds as physical things, I basically just see them as abstract bundles of truth judgements, in some accessibility relation to each other.

Sure, we could identify a world with the set of true statements in it (though I prefer to think of a world as just a function mapping statements to their truth values; it amounts to the same thing, but it’s just a more symmetric picture (between true and false statements), and thus cleaner in my mind). Presumably, given enough in our language to talk about, there would have to be infinitely many true statements; all the tautologies like “All red things are red”, “If God exists, then God exists”, “2+2 = 4”, “If it’s raining, then it’s either raining or snowing”, etc. (And infinitely many false ones as well, including all the logical contradictions)

This is where you get a bit incomprehensible, to me. Perhaps we should distinguish more clearly between a statement/proposition, the judgement of that proposition actually being the case, and the truth value taken by that proposition. Whether or not unicorns exist, the statement “Unicorns exist” is still around. I mean, there it is, right there, in quotes. When we say it, we’re saying something. The false proposition is around as the intension of the quoted words, just as a true proposition is around corresponding to “Socrates was a Greek”. It’s around in the same sense that, say, the string of letters “arihaer” or the number 4 is around. It’s not a physical object, but it’s something we can talk about, and, while we don’t have to, if we want, we can take it to be not just any old entity, but the particular kind of entity under consideration in “Do any objects exist?”.

So that’s a statement and its proposition; a string of words and its intension. Now, as for the judgement of actually being the case (truth judgements), of course, only true propositions have this, by definition. False propositions have, instead, the judgement of not actually being the case (falsehood judgements).

And as for truth values, we could hypothesize mathematical objects True and False to be the extension corresponding to (intensional) propositions. I.e., we could hypothesize the referent of “Socrates was a Greek” to be True the same way that the referent of “Socrates” is a particular Greek man who died long ago. Or the relationship between propositions and their truth values could be some other sort of thing; at any rate, these would be mathematical objects which we might find convenient to have around, having the same sort of abstract existence as things like the number 4 or the unit circle centered at the origin or the Monster Group.

Now, so far as I can tell, you’ve only been thinking about truth judgements, and so when I’ve said things like “False statements exist” (in the first sense of the above) and “The truth value False exists” (in the third sense of the above), you’ve recoiled, on grounds deriving from the second sense of the above.

At any rate, I’m perfectly happy to reify none or any or all of the above as objects in the sense referred to by “Something (some object) exists.” But we’re not compelled to go in any particular way. We can distinguish between a world visualized as a set of truth judgements and the particular set of objects associated with that world (as existent). It all depends on the particular interpretation you want to take. But there really is some sort of linguistic confusion going down to take a world to be a set of truth judgements, and conclude that, since a world is a collection and the things in that collection are truth judgements, then those truth judgements are all and only the things which exist in that world, and thus that true propositions have existence but false propositions do not.

Sure, in fact, there will be many tautologies, as I remarked above (all provable, by definition). There will also be many contradictions. Many strings of letters, many natural numbers, etc. For each of these types of things, you could choose to regard it as the sort of thing under consideration for existence, or not, depending on what it is that you want to mean by saying that “Some thing exists”.
[All this hearty debate over and discussion of the structure of the metaphysical universe, and just what gets to exist in it and how, makes my inner ordinary language philosopher squirm… But I can tell it “You know I don’t really mean it like that; it’s just the framework within which we’re having this discussion” and quiet it down a bit.]

491

I’m glad we’re clearing up some of the language. When I attempted to do that with exactly these two terms before, it was said that I was “nitpicking”. I’ve become sloppy with using them interchangeably of late, but I’m happy to resume using them in sense I always had as a self-taught renegade: a statement is a linguistic string that is not a truth bearer; a proposition is a linguistic string that is a truth bearer. So, “Fetch my slippers” is a statement, but not a proposition. “He fetched my slippers” is a proposition.

I don’t take existence and truth to be synonyms. I’m not an existentialist, and so I believe that essence preceeds existence. God was true before He existed, when existing was what He was to be. (English doesn’t give me a nontemporal conjunctive adverb, and so consider such terms as “before” and “when” to be metaphors.)

So in that sense, everything exists, including your false statements (or propositions). But in examining the ontology of God, we must not assume that He exists at the actual world, or our proof is destroyed by circularity. (Well technically, all circular proofs are valid, but they are uninteresting.) In fact, whether God exsists is not the question we are asking when we set about to posit <>G and (G -> G); the question we are asking is what is the nature of God’s existence. Existence is merely prepositional to the actual question. In other words, what we are concerned about is truth: i.e., His true nature. We do indeed discover that in our penultimate inference: G. The nature of His existence is that it is metaphysically compelled (or, not contingent). It is merely a matter of serendipitous fortune that we may then infer, by modus ponens, that His existence is actual — that He is, as you call it, around.

But I don’t think we can conclude generally that just because something is around, it exists in an essential sense. Thus a contradiction may be around in the sense that its string is there. But the contradiction represented by the string is not the essential thing; the essential thing is the truth that the contradiction cannot exist. And so I keep coming back to the matter of epistemic versus metaphysical modalities. A unicorn may be out there somewhere for all we know, but is there any principle that compels it to be? For me, that’s the sort of question being asked.

492

I must be quick, but:

As usual, Indistinguishable was correct in interpreting my term ‘disproved’ as to refer to a demonstration of unsoundness, rather than invalidity. I chose this word because I don’t know if a simple word meaning “having demonstrated that the argument is unsound”, and in my experience ‘disproved’ means pretty much “having demonstrated the agument for it to be insufficient.” I know of no context where ‘disproved’ is accepted as being strictly synonymous with “invalid”, but then again, I don’t get around much.

(I’ll just chalk this down as being another case where you and I do not define words the same way. So far I have “definition”, “exists”, “justice”, and “disproof”. It’s perfectly normal for people to have different understandings of the definition of words, but too much more of this and it’ll become hard to debate.)

And Indistinguishable, I’m perfectly aware of the problem of referring to ‘existence’ in any logic where you use the 'There Exists" or “For All” operators. Most logics I know of aren’t built for handling existence as a predicate or property, even though it’s commonly referred to one in english. Heck, most aren’t built for handling identity either. Personally I detest “Ex.(x = y)” as being a supposed definition for “exists”, since it’t my understanding that in standard logic, y -> Ex.(x). (That is, y exists merely because you wrote it, entirely nullifying the meaning of the definition altogether.)

However the current discussion requires existence to be defined as a predicate; therefore I’ve been assuming that it is one, by standard english definition, which when referring to a singular noun like God, impies a single specific entity. (Specifically, my interpretation for the context of this argument is that any symbol y without an E(x) around it means “the concept of y”, and E(x) means “The concept x matches something that actually really exists.” I can think of no other interpretation for the E(x) symbol under which any part of this argument that uses it makes a lick of sense.)

Anyway, to integrate your position back into the post you took it from, the problem lies in the fact that God is a proper, singular noun. If the phrase were plural, like “gods exist”, or despecified, like “a god exists”, then a third english meaning becomes feasable:

  1. There exists a specific object, that has the property “an unmarried man”. By this ‘Bill’ is a generalized object set, which may contain some objects. If any such objects exist, then they have that property. Any object that does not have this property is definitely not a Bill.

This definition seems to match what you were saying as a concept of of the definition, and in fact it sometimes seems to be what Liberal is trying to prove. (That’s even though that’s not what the philosophers who formulated the MOP were gunning for, and even though this definition is vaguely incompatible with the “supreme” argument for premise 2, which presumes a specific object having supremacy as its subject.)

The thing to note is, using either the 2) or 3) interpretations of the phrase, the thing that we are proving to exist is still a noun (the object with the property set defining a Bill/God), and not a predicate itself; equivalence cannot be used. So my protest still stands: you can’t intermix the conflicting definitons to prove your point. It destabilizes and possibly does make your proof invalid, because the ‘G’ in the two premises do not have the same meaning, and thus should be treated as though they were differing symbols, which of course ruins the symbolic argument.

493

If anyone is still interested in, you know, hearing definitions of God or anything like that… you’re not going to get one from me. I don’t disbelieve any specific God, I just disbelieve anything and everything I see no evidence of. Thus, I disbelieve most Gods defined in this thread, whereas I believe in the ones defined as “God is truth” and similar (I certainly believe there is such a thing as truth). It seems to me, though, that most people offering such definitions have much longer definitions in their heads. “God is unconditional love” seems, for example, to be meant to mean at the very least “God is a being that feels unconditional love”.

As for whether every natural number has a successor, I probably can’t prove that to Lib’s satisfaction, but for me it’s perfectly enough that the alternative (natural numbers suddenly stop) is utterly and ridiculously nonsensical.

494

As I understand it you are saying,essence existed before it existed???

Monavis

495

That’s an equivocation on “existed”. It simply means that a thing must exist as something, and that it could not have existed as anything else. Essence individuates one boundary of existence from another.

496

For my own clarity: what’s a boundary of existence?

497

Existence is a totality in itself so it must proceed anything…thought,essence,etc. If it exists it is in existence. The essence of any thing must radiate from something unless it is nothing,as we know it is impossible for nothing to exist, for once it does it is in existence.

Monavis

498

bump

499

I’m glad you bumped this, sorry. A boundary of existence is basically the set of all existential attributes and experiences assignable to an individual. Consider the fact that no two people can possibly experience the exact same thing at the exact same time in the exact same way owing to the nature of electromagnetism, which creates a shield between any two objects. In other words, even if we were to stand side by side with our faces mashed together and look at a small red dot, we still would be slightly offset from one another on account of the fact that we cannot physically merge. You are viewing from longitude x and latitude y, and I am viewing from longitude x’ and latitude y’. And so, your viewpoint of the red dot differs from mine, and our existences are differentiated in part by what we experienced differently. Most of our experiences, of course, are vastly different rather than barely different, but in any case can never be identical. Thus, a boundary of existence individuates a person’s existence and therefore makes existence a predicate: just as Socrates is wise and Aristotle is wise confers two different instances of wisdom, so does MrDibble exists and Lib exists confer two different instances of existence. See my links to Indistinguishable for more in-depth (and probably better) explanations.

500

I see (I think) - but if essence does define the boundary, which comes first - the existence or the boundary that individuates it? This would be where we have our fundamental disconnect, of course.