One other thing I found interesting about your link to McHugh’s article, Libertarian: it’s actually on a site that argues that the ontological proof is deeply flawed. If you click on the “back” arrow at the bottom of the page, you’ll go to a page with plenty of links to philosophers arguing about the fallacy of the ontological argument.
I don’t know if the argument is universally accepted amongst formal logicians, but it seems that some professional philosophers find it to be lacking.
Daniel
One of those links, http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/philo/drange_1_2.htm , contains an illuminating idea:
I think that McHugh’s argument matches the bolded text to a T.
Daniel
Okay, last post for the night, from the same site, and in an effort to refute Libertarian’s assertion that no logician has found a flaw in the modal logic proof of God (forgive me if I misunderstood what you were saying; I recognize that the flaw below is one of premise, not one of argument):
Daniel
Which means your argument is logically consistant (Debatable) if we accept your axiom.
However, we could propose other axioms. What if we use the axiom “God is not possible.” Now we have proof god does not exist? And what makes “God is possible” more valid than “God is not possible?” If both axioms can be used, without any judgement about wether they can be true or not, then aren’t we just at a giant dead-end, unable to prove anything?
And I still want to know how you can use that “definition 5” to declare no positive descriptions for god, as support for a possitive description. Or the other negative descriptions that can be applied (Non-sentient, not loving, not omniscient, not powerfull, not great, not good…). This is what I mean by dodging, I don’t see how you’ve addressed this stuff at all. At most, your replies on this matter seem incredibly vague.
Daniel, I am in awe. There is nothing left say.
I understand that the concept of probability exists, and therefore we can speak of a probability existing, but I don’t understand how anyone can consider this to be identical to the standard sense of “existence”.
Even considering that I see no actual distinction between information and “material” things, I don’t think probability itself exists. “Time” is a set of relationships between things, and can be said to exist. Countless other abstract concepts exist in higher levels of reality. But chance? Probability? I don’t see it.
All of it. I respectfully suggest that neither you nor anyone else understands the concept either. I understand the general meaning of necessity, but I don’t see how the fundamental nature of the cosmos can be anything other than what it is. Chance means as little to it as causality or order or chaos: zip.
Probability is an illusion created by ignorance (much like everything else 
).
The Tao is the source of heaven and earth, but it did not create them. Heaven and earth are facets or aspects of the Tao, as are unheaven and unearth. The Tao itself contains no distinctions; this state is equivalent in every way to containing all distinctions.
Imagine a three-dimensional sculpture made of flat planes placed at many different angles. From most angles, the sculpture appears disorganized and without meaning. From a few perspectives, however, the planes fall into a meaningful pattern or order.
Now imagine an infinite number of such sculptures, each different, superimposed upon each other.
The result is not the Tao. However, it bears the same general resemblance to a two-dimensional sculpture as the Tao bears to hierarchies of reality.
Well, that’s the best point to begin, then. No one does.
Well, that’s certainly one perspective.
Now look what you’ve made me do. I’ve begun lapsing into mysticism again.
If no one understands why modal “existence” can be considered to be equivalent to standard “existence”, I’d like to know what empirical reasons we have to make this distinction.
If the definitions are derived from reality, they can be used to meaningfully describe it in a way that they cannot if they’re made as rules in a game. It’s conceptually possible to confirm or disprove referrent ideas, while we can create any rules that the nature of reality will allow us to create.
Okay… that’s a bit unclear. Let me try again.
I can show that the double-slit experiment produces the same interference pattern regardless of whether photons are sent in groups or individually through the interferometer. It doesn’t matter if I can explain or justify this result theoretically: the result is there.
I cannot say whether altering any of the rules of Go is wrong. The result isn’t Go… but the rules of the game are ultimately arbitrary.
If we have nothing from which we can draw the distinction you’re making, and no one understands how such a distinction can be justified, then it isn’t justified. Such was the point of the OP (although it was considerably less complicated).
But it can! It is… except in the case of the “possible” operator.
Yes, but who is changing the rules? We are considering cases where the rules might be different than we believe them to be, or we are considering cases where the rules are what they are and we don’t know if they fit any perspective or not.
Do you never use the word possible? Seriously! 
I mean, we’re all clear on the use of this word, right?
I think most everyone understands the distinction between impossible, possible, exists, necessary. I have a strong suspicion you do, too.
Lib’s links provide almost all of the objections contained within this entire thread. Reading them can’t hurt us materialists.
I’m coming back when I’ve got something different to say. At the moment I’m exploring whether God could be contingent on human thought. Keep you posted.
Theories of Existence (as previously offered)
I’m not sure where the notion that modal logic is inferior to arithmetic — allegedly owing to arithmetic’s ability to be practically applied while modal logic has no practical application — comes from, other than an ignorance of how to apply it. But even a cursory search would have yielded a vast array of practical applications. From the Department of Computing, Imperial College, London, for example:
Naturally, that makes sense, given that modal logic provides a means to represent machine states. Truth, in any system and by any theory, is fundamentally a state that obtains.
Equally unaccountable is the strange notion that operations within modal logic do not represent real world phenomena, while operations within arithmetic do. This notion is particularly disturbing given that they both derive from the exact same set of axioms. (Axioms which have never been — and cannot be — proved, by the way.) It’s okay, apparently, to introduce tomatoes into arithmetic so that you can sum how many you hold in both hands. But it is contended that modal logic may not examine the tomatoes for properties of states that obtain. When it makes the attempt, protestors say, it has introduced something new into the system that wasn’t there before — this, as though tomatoes had been intrinsic to arithmetic all along.
I suppose it is only natural then that a person — thinking that modal logic has no practical applications that can help us in the real world, and that it is so self-contained that using it to examine tomatoes results in tomatoes being sucked into its vortex of fantasy — such a person might then surmise that possibility, necessity, and actuality mean something so substantially different in modal logic than they mean in everyday language that they are, for every practical purpose, useless. And in fact, such a person thusly ill-informed but nonetheless undaunted, might press on to declare that his ad hoc analysis “in no way convinces me that I should use it to describe or predict the real world”. And in so declaring, he is left behind while others move on.
He even charges that Hartshorne, et al (though he wrongly credited this author with introducing G) — in constructing their various varieties of modal ontological proofs (we give him all possible leeway and assume that he has studied them all) — have left God hopelessly “ill-defined”. Let us set aside for the moment the fact that arithmetic has left completely undefined its most fundamental term, “successor”. The term “God” is so precisely defined in the modal ontological argument that it corresponds exactly to the real world definition that is used in most theological theories. No more direct a correspondence has ever been seen between a set of symbols and what they represent. Necessity is supreme above all other modal states, both comprising and generating every possibility and actuality. Existence is the very topic of ontology, the nature of being. Necessary existence is as synonomous with supreme being as it is possible for a synonym to be, and is as pertinent to a modal ontological argument as any possible topic.
I see now that someone else has offered argument so profound and complete that it leaves his allies in awe, with literally “nothing left to say”. But before we close down all the philosophy departments at all the universities and send the professors off to get real jobs, let’s examine whether there might be at least a tiny fissure in the armor.
The argument laments that “McHugh’s God is not creative, for it is nothing positive”. It then proceeds to wager that McHugh would discard an equivalence of God and love on account of love being positive. I am duly humbled by the presumption of explaining McHugh’s position, but since McHugh himself has apparently failed, the onus must be assumed by someone.
The confusion is understandable enough. It is natural to think of creation as positive and destruction as negative, or love as positive and hate as negative. But if that were what McHugh had meant by positive and negative descriptive terms, then I would be the first to join others and throw either tomatoes or stones at McHugh, whichever arithmetic can more easily provide me.
But what McHugh meant was what McHugh gave as examples: not the use of attributes that are themselves conceived as either affirming or damning traits, but rather the use of descriptive terms that are constructed as logical negatives, e.g., Not A rather than A. As he explained in quite some detail, God must not be contingent, or else He is not God. A god who is not necessary is hardly the supreme perfection, otherwise there would be possible worlds in which the contingent god does not exist.
Therefore, rather than saying that God is omniscient, we say that His knowlegde is unbounded. Rather than saying that God is omnipotent, we say that His power is without limit. Rather than saying that God is good, we say that He is sinless. And indeed, in our remedial studies of modal logic, we find that that is precisely how necessity itself is derived. It is the negation of impossibility, or ~<>~ (not possible not). G means ~<>~G, or it is not possible that God does not exist.
And yes, I was aware that the links I gave were to articles hosted by a materialist. I often cite Infidels’ famous list of logical fallacies as well. And Atheists for Jesus. And other materialist sources. I have no fear of treading in the materialist waters. They use to be where I swam, after all.
So, if you can just take the negative of whatever you’re trying to say, (“God didn’t not create the heavens and earth,”) then is the “must be described in terms of negatives” meaningful at all?
Yes, I understand them. That’s why I have a problem with claiming that things that are possible exist. It’s establishing a connection between two ideas that were previously distinct for no good cause.
It is meaningful if it is understood. Link me to what you’ve studied on the topic of positive and negative descriptive terms in logic, and I’ll try to help you put it together.
I am also beginning to understand denying the possibility of God. Before, I thought that to do so was to be guilty of blinkered intolerance becoming of only the most judgemental fundamentist bigot.
However, since the admission such a possibility automatically annihilates its opposite (that God might not exist) due to the unjustified definition of God as Necessary Existence, it is starting to appear to be a justifiable “first strike” to counter bigotism with bigotism.
The only thing that necessarily exists is Necessary Existence. No matter how close the synonyms are, they still require a jump. Any such jump is unjustified IMO.
Sentient
The problem with denying the possibility of God’s existence remains no matter how you approach it: it is a substantive denial of a positive ontological proposition, and therefore is a logical fallacy — thus, recognizing the possibiliy of nonexistence is to recognize contingency , and recognizing contingency is to recognize the possibility of existence.
(While you’re reading, Leibniz dealt at great length with this, and formulated several arguments for the possibility of God’s existence.)
Hmm. The only thing I am denying is the necessary existence of anything except Necessary Existence.
To be honest, I don’t think I’ve got it in me to call God “impossible”. It would just be guerilla tactics against those calling my materialism “impossible”.
The trouble with not believing in an afterlife is you never get to say “I told you so”.
But arguments about the possibility of God’s existence are meaningless, when discussing the necessity of God’s existence. Many things are possible but not necessary. Many things are possible but never happened. Many things are possible but do not exist. Retrofitting a definition of God that makes your model complete in my mind just doesn’t prove that God exists-it only proves that that God can only be defined the way you’ve put forth for the model to work. It’s like using a mathematical formula to prove that 2 equals 3. It is valid if and only if you define 2 as being equal to 3 in the first place, the plug your personal definition of 2 and 3 into the equation.
Likewise, it seems as if you have “proven” that God is necessary and thus exists by defining God to mean that which is necessary and thus must exist, then using the model to give you back what you have defined in the first place.
GIGO.