There is certainly the same evidentiary power behind them as there is for any theistic god that I’ve ever heard of. We have the same quality and quantity of evidence (per-capita).
I’m absolutely serious. On what basis do you dismiss the expert opinion on elves but consider the expert opinion on god to be worth considering?
They seem functionally and qualitatively the same to me.
That doesn’t bear any relationship I can recognize to what I’ve said, so it’s sort of difficult to reply to. I’ve explained in my previous post that in an analogous situation, elf expert’s opinion on whether a topic of elf lore is silly is just as relevant as philosopher’s opinion on whether a philosophical topic is, when the topic is alleged to be easily unmasked as silly by the lay practitioner.
OK, you seemed to be suggesting that because an “expert” on a subject has an opinion that it was wise to bet on that being correct. If you aren’t extending that to experts on elves and gods etc. then no matter.
Personally, when the subject matter under discussion by “experts” is non-falsifiable, non-evidential, unrevealed and stands merely on anecdote then I don’t think it is possible to assign any weight to what the experts think is “silly” or not. I’m only ever interested in what the quality is of the evidence that stands behind them, their claims, their axioms, premises etc. And to me at least elves, gods and associated experts are in precisely the same state.
They must be talking about some part of the argument besides proving that God is real, because that part is nonsense. Maybe there’s some sort of elegance to the argument that could be applied to topics that have a connection to the real world. Maybe it’s just a concept of historical interest, like the Greek Gods. Experts can write a lot about Zeus and Poseidon without actually believing that they are real.
That’s certainly not my interpretation of anything @Half_Man_Half_Wit said.
Nevertheless, it is being discussed, even in book-length form (see my post above), and there are still those arguing that some variant is sound. I personally don’t think so, but it’d feel a bit presumptuous for me to just handwave these discussions away by calling them silly.
Sure but that assertion was just something another poster said a few posts ago.
It’s not the OP, and it’s not my position. Please do not mischaracterize my position.
That said, now we’re discussing that assertion, I might agree in a certain sense: I think you’d struggle to find a non-religious philosophy student that thinks that the ontological argument works. Whereas you could probably find religious philosophy students who agree that the argument doesn’t work, or at least only entails a very vague definition of god, nowhere near close to a personal god.
Again, it’s not time per se, just like it isn’t about the amount written. It’s the process, and how rigorous it is.
When I hear the claim that the sun is ~150 million km away from earth, I trust it not because people spent time or wrote a lot about it. But because their methods are rigorous, publicly available for scrutiny and repeated by scientists and students the world over.
Now, applying this to philosophy is not entirely straightforward, because, as I already mentioned, most philosophical claims are not testable. But the point is, the time where we’d trust that a conclusion is sound is where the vast majority of philosophers have arrived at it though a clear and rigorous process and reached a consensus.
When it’s at the level of just ‘a bunch of philosophers think something, and wrote a lot’ it’s meaningless. In itself that’s of no value at all.
I didn’t ascribe this position to you, I merely explained that this is the position I was reacting to. It’s in the light of this that I offered the observation that, contrary to the assertion that everybody with a cursory understanding of the topic thinks the ontological argument is silly, lots of experts on the topic debate it, and thus, don’t think it’s silly (if we presume that people generally don’t spend their time willingly on things they think are silly).
Trivially. After all, everybody who thinks the ontological argument works believes in god (if they are not inconsistent).
I’m not saying that you should trust an expert’s claim because there’s lots of things written about it; I’m saying that experts who write lots about a topic don’t think it’s a silly topic, and hence, it’s not trivially silly to anybody with a cursory understanding of the topic (as there are experts who don’t think it’s silly).
On the other hand, if you already have other reasons for believing in the conclusion of an argument, you may not be nearly as invested in whether/why the argument itself is or is not valid.
Yeah, after I posted that I realized I should not have said “works”.
What I mean is, I can agree that an argument is compelling even if not going so far as to change my worldview immediately.
I doubt in the modern era there are many atheist students of philosophy that came to the ontological argument and found it strong enough to start to doubt their worldview, simply because the flaws are so trivial and well-known.
The fine-tuning argument OTOH may well be considered compelling by some atheists. Not me, but I would still say it works better than the ontological argument.
That’s what I’m saying.
I doubt very much that the “it” being discussed is the Almighty Creator of the Universe Embodied with Every Positive Trait Imaginable. “It” is almost certainly philosophical / logical minutiae rather than literally explaining the source of, well, everything.
People may think the ACA was a ‘big fucking deal’ or splitting the atom, or discovering actual aliens, but that’s just peanuts to God.
It’s a little thought experiment, a logic puzzle that claims to have the biggest answer to the biggest question, an answer that proves my world view to be completely in error, yet has a flaw that you could drive a planet through.
Your doubts notwithstanding, that (the existence of god) is indeed what’s being discussed, for instance, in this book, which defends a particular version of the ontological argument due to Charles Hartshorne.
Since I, to my succeeding horror, brought it up, Liberal absolutely meant the proof to show the existence of his god. For that matter, Anselm absolutely did, and from my limited reading, so did most people who followed him. What abstruse realms modern philosophers put the proof into notwithstanding (or even irregardless, whose proof of existence I have written in the margin) I can’t say, but it is, so to speak, a goddamn proof of God.
I found an old thread, Explain the ontological argument to me that is fun to read. I don’t think you can top this post:
Holy crap, I can’t believe this guy actually argues that it is ‘not possible’ to think of a perfect being that may or may not exist in reality.
His argument is that it is impossible to think of the thing I just wrote down in 10 words that you read and understood perfectly.
It’s gibberish, these arguments. The fact that I can imagine something leads inexorably to that things existence. I think that’s the plot of a few Santa Claus movies.
I truly have no desire to defend any form of the ontological argument, but that’s bad reasoning. Whether you can write down and understand something is no indication regarding whether it can be thought—“the round square copula of Berkeley college” is readily written down, and understood, but can’t be thought, since it’s impossible.
So is an omniscient, omnipotent, perfect being, but that’s never stopped anyone.
I wanna go to that one!
To be fair, it might be possible for such a being to exist but the additional attributes assigned to such a being by the various followers cannot be squared with the traditional tri-omni entity.
Fair nuff.
How about this, the question being pondered by this philosopher is, in fact, the question of whether or not a perfect being exists in reality. The question he is seeking the answer to involves the uncertainty he claims is impossible to even think of.
Honestly, flat earthers make more sense. At least they can see a ‘flat earth’ with their own eyes. This guy is saying it’s logically impossible to have the thought that we all have when discussing the existence of God.