Plantinga's ontological argument

Originally posted by finnegan
Thanks. I enjoyed following this debate and the background available on Wikipedia was more than helpful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument

To my litle mind what is interesting is to challenge those who are, in other situations, prepared to rely on the type of argument captured in premises 2 and 3 and ask them to explain why they woul ...[text shortened]... (with the added bonus that Hinds is not reading this thread any more). Thanks.

😀

Hi - I'm glad you're enjoying the thread. It has been a mixture of enjoyable, frustrating, and educational for me. 🙂

I thought over the whole God-in-possible-worlds idea and I've come to the conclusion that it is valid to use the 'many-worlds' concept with respect to determining the existence of God.

Suppose it is not the case that God is eternal in both the past and future directions, but had a beginning, kind of like our universe. That leads to the idea of a time before God existed, and thus a temporal-type set of possible worlds - points in time, with God existing in only some of them. The statement 'either God always existed, or he never existed' is now false.

But even if God is eternal in both directions, and there is only one reality with respect to his existence, that does not change the fact that we do not know which one it is. As far as we are concerned, we still have two possible worlds to deal with.

Let's say your genie in the bottle tells you that 32 is your lucky number. So you put your money on #32 on a roulette wheel and win big. You're sure there was only one possible world - the sure bet you were bound to make - but your friends, who don't believe in genies [their loss!] insist there were 37 possible worlds [38 on my side of the pond].

Much like probability calculations, our possible worlds are based on the information at our disposal.

I agree that the result of the argument is deplorable. Something is obviously going wrong. Impudent atheists are sticking in bizarro-God, the embodiment of non-excellence in every world, and proving his existence with that argument. Some used it to negate the existence of God. I think we differ with respect to where the argument goes wrong.

I'm not quite ready to throw out the many worlds yet. My real concern is that S5 axiom discussed above in response to LJ. You can take "it is possibly necessary that P" and turn it into "it is necessary that P". Plantinga's argument hinges on that trick. But again, as the critics have pointed out, it's a little bit too effective an argument - and it is capable of producing contradicting conclusions if you feed it the right inputs.

Originally posted by VoidSpirit
yes, i noticed that later in another of your postings, though it has little bearing on the weakness of plantinga's argument. i don't see any reasonable defense of p's argument posted by anyone, so i think we can bury that dead horse.

We're not done flogging him yet. 😠

Originally posted by SwissGambit
Hi - I'm glad you're enjoying the thread. It has been a mixture of enjoyable, frustrating, and educational for me. 🙂

I thought over the whole God-in-possible-worlds idea and I've come to the conclusion that it is valid to use the 'many-worlds' concept with respect to determining the existence of God.

Suppose it is not the case that God is eternal capable of producing contradicting conclusions if you feed it the right inputs.

I have problems with that response. Primarily it is that you write:

I think we differ with respect to where the argument goes wrong. ... and it is capable of producing contradicting conclusions if you feed it the right inputs

which tells me that you are not disagreeing with my own basic argument, which is that a line of reasoning which yields paradoxical or mutually contradictory outcomes is defective.

"A being has maximal greatness if it has maximal excellence in every possible world.
It is possible that there is a being that has maximal greatness."

The slippy step that is employed here is that many worlds thinking allows us to say, given two alternatives, there is a possible world for each outcome. It does not allow us to say that anything that is possible is the case in every possible world which Plantinga asserts as a premise and not as a conclusion of his argument. You can use different arguments to this end if you wish (St Anselm did not use the many worlds argument after all!) but not the many worlds argument.

When you feed in the proposition that God had a beginning in order to resolve the problem, I answer that He only had a beginning in the possible world containing God [ who is no longer eternal in both directions ]. In your scenario, there was no God for some arbitrary period, after which in one possible world a God had His beginning and in an alternative possible world He did not come into existence at all. The first case does not allow for a Creator God or places a limit on His scope (perhaps God created our world out of a primordial chaos but how do we account for His arrival on the already existing scene and surely in this case He encounters laws of physics that He did not create and cannot ignore or break?) and in any event it is not coherent or consistent to employ that many worlds argument unless you still allow an alternative, Godless world as well, not instead. My problem arises when Planting prceeds to inject his God into every possible world, because I do not see this as a legitimate application of the many worlds argument.

I see what you are saying when Planting slips from "it is possible" into "it is necessary." However, for this debate, is it not the case that exactly that type of proposition is made by scientists in respect of many matters. For example, when discussing the remarkable number of features in our particular universe that have had the outcome of the evolution of human life, it is argued that once we acknowledge the power of the multiverse proposition (there are actually many forms to this apart from the many worlds idea) then we can accept that there are so vastly many possible universes that it is not surprising to find at least one universe in which the features suit the evolution of human life. It is less surprising than if there is only one universe and no others at all.

So the question is not about the transition from possible to necessary as such, but about the transition from there is a possible world in which God exists to the different proposition that God exists in every possible world (and so there is no possible world where God does not exist). This is not legitimate and more critically, it is not a step that a scienists would accept. To take my example above, scientists would not argue that human life did or possibly could evolve in every possible alternative universe. On the contrary, at least one and at most a small minority of possible universes are capable of supporting human evolution.

Plantinga's ontological argument tries to trip up Science by turning its own logic to the service of religious belief. It deploys seductive words that appear the same as those used by scientists but it does so in a way that is not legitimate. That is why Plantinga produces nonsense, which we reject, but does not reduce the many world concept to nonsense, since that can be supported by Reason and mathematics and it does not make the illogical leaps seen in Plantinga and most importantly it does not disintigrate into the dust of paradox.

Originally posted by SwissGambit
Yes - but you are the one making the stronger claim! The theist here is claiming that G's existence is possible - in other words, the likelihood of it is greater than 0%. This is a very weak claim. To deny this claim, you must assert that the likelihood of G's existence is 0%.

Whoa there SwissGambit... The argument is not stating that it MIGHT be possible that MEB exists.

The premise reads "1. It is possible that a maximally great being exists. "

It IS possible that a maximally great being exists...

Well it might not be, we don't know, you can't just assume this.

My position is not the stronger claim because my position is that "it may or may not be possible for an MEB to exist".

The theist is the one making the strong claim that "it IS possible for an MEB to exist".




For example if I put these two claims next to each other...

It IS possible to travel faster than light.

It MIGHT be possible to travel faster than light.

Which one is making the stronger claim?


So no. I am not claiming that the MEB is impossible, I an just not accepting the assertion that it is possible without
supporting arguments and evidence.

Originally posted by LemonJello
Suppose you had being B1 in world W1 and being B2 in world W2. Suppose it is a fact, F1, that the Mets lost yesterday in W1; suppose it is a fact, F2, that the Mets did not lose yesterday in W2. Suppose B1 and B2 are specified exactly the same, except that B1 knows F1 whereas B2 knows F2 instead. According to your argument, B1 and B2 cannot be consider ...[text shortened]... inference pattern cannot be warranted. So, we would need others reasons to accept Premise 1.

"So, being identically specified in all respects should not be considered necessary for saying that twhitehead is the same person he was a day ago. Why should it be considered necessary for saying B1 and B2 are the same being?" (In W1 and W2.)

Because PW theory is a conceptual construct or system, it is up to its users to decide this. There can be differing schools. One direct and relevant distinction is to say that no object participates in or exists at more than one W; that is, the fact of different worlds implies or entails the non-identity of any objects that are posited as existent in the different worlds. Thus the facts about the objects, other than that they are in different worlds, may be exactly the same, yet they are not to be treated as the same object, because they differ in that essential aspect. Even if all the facts about two different worlds are the same, so that they are duplicates, and the same treatment of certain objects has the same effects, the fact of specifying that they are different worlds, is taken to mean there is no one object that is existent in both of them.

The question then concerns (merely) the comparative utility of a PW system that includes this specification, versus one that does not. The utility may depend on complications that one has in application, compared to the other.

One complication I see in NOT specifying non-identity across worlds is that two worlds sharing an object may collapse to one world.😉

Originally posted by googlefudge
Whoa there SwissGambit... The argument is not stating that it MIGHT be possible that MEB exists.

The premise reads "1. It is possible that a maximally great being exists. "

It IS possible that a maximally great being exists...

Well it might not be, we don't know, you can't just assume this.

My position is not the stronger claim because my pos ...[text shortened]... accepting the assertion that it is possible without
supporting arguments and evidence.

"For example if I put these two claims next to each other...

It IS possible to travel faster than light.

It MIGHT be possible to travel faster than light.

Which one is making the stronger claim? "

Doesn't "possibly possible" simplify to "possible"? This could just be semantics. But you might want to look into conceivability versus possibility. There is academic literature on the subject.

Originally posted by SwissGambit
Let us say that omniscience means 'knows all true propositions' and omnipotence means 'can do anything logically possible' and moral perfection = 'always prefers the best moral outcome, or more specifically, the best overall good state of affairs'. I don't see a contradiction here.

But if you still do, you must reject Premise 1. I would think you need ...[text shortened]... to the general falsity of Premise 3. But I cannot figure out what that might be.

Let us say that omniscience means 'knows all true propositions' and omnipotence means 'can do anything logically possible'
and moral perfection = 'always prefers the best moral outcome, or more specifically, the best overall good state of affairs'.
I don't see a contradiction here.

The contradiction as I say depends on how you define the terms.

However having come up with a definition that is not mutually or self contradictory (I am not convinced that you have but lets assume
you have for the moment) you still haven't shown that those properties are actually possible.
While 'not being logically impossible' is a requirement of existing it is not the only one.

Lets start with your definition of Omniscience as meaning "knows all true propositions"...

Well for starters I think you run into logical problems with this but that aside I don't think that this is physically possible.

In fact for a being existing inside our present universe I would make the stronger claim that it emphatically IS impossible according to the
presently known laws of physics.

Which means that for this being to exist it must exist outside of our universe and we currently have no evidence that there IS an outside
of our universe, let alone evidence for what the properties of that 'outside' are and what beings could live there.

Which means that we can't know for sure if a being with the property of Omniscience can exist and thus can't make the claim that it is
possible that it exists.

I think your rejection of Premise 2 is invalid. Whether there are an infinite or finite number of possible worlds, if it is true that god
never exists in any of them, then it is necessarily true that god's existence is impossible - you have exhausted the full set and god remains
uninstantiated.

Not true.

If there are a finite number of 'worlds' existing for a finite time then it is perfectly possible (in fact inevitable) that not all possible things will
happen.

Only if there are an infinite number of worlds/and or infinite time does it become inevitable that every possible thing will occur and thus anything
that does not happen is impossible.

I agree with you on Premise 3.

Well it's a start I suppose 😉

Originally posted by JS357
"For example if I put these two claims next to each other...

It IS possible to travel faster than light.

It MIGHT be possible to travel faster than light.

Which one is making the stronger claim? "

Doesn't "possibly possible" simplify to "possible"? This could just be semantics. But you might want to look into conceivability versus possibility. There is academic literature on the subject.

In physics there is a distinction between things that might be possible, "possibly possible" as you put it.
And things that are known to be possible.

Let me put it this way...

There things that are known to be impossible, as they violate known and verified laws of physics.

There are things that are known to be possible, That have been observed and are allowed by the laws of physics.

And there are things that may or may not be possible and we just don't know yet.


Faster Than Light travel is one example of something that might be possible as we haven't yet ruled it out as being
completely impossible but we can't yet say that it is possible as we have no experimental evidence of FTL and have
no verified theory that allows for it. (there are a number of potential hypotheses that allow various forms of FTL but
they rely on the properties of things not yet observed or known to exist)


So I will stick with there being a difference, and an important one, between possible, and possibly possible.

Am I right that the argument is essentially nothing more than an unsupported assertion that every possible world contains a "maximally excellent" being and all the rest is just smoke and mirrors?

The key trick being:
1. Suggest it is possible that a "maximally excellent" being exists in a possible world, (to which most of us say 'well maybe'😉.
2. then subtly changing the suggestion by taking you back to the original definition and saying 'hey, but I defined it so that it must now exist in every possible world.

Ultimately the multiple possible worlds take no real part in the assertion at all except to provide the smoke screen.

Originally posted by finnegan
I have problems with that response. Primarily it is that you write:

[b] I think we differ with respect to where the argument goes wrong. ... and it is capable of producing contradicting conclusions if you feed it the right inputs

which tells me that you are not disagreeing with my own basic argument, which is that a line of reasoning w ...[text shortened]... seen in Plantinga and most importantly it does not disintigrate into the dust of paradox.[/b]

What threw me is that your first post started out with...'there is no fork in the road [with respect to god's existence] ... and thus no reason to divide reality into two worlds' (paraphrased) but then changed to 'the only valid application of the many worlds concept is if one world has god existing and the other does not' (paraphrased again), i.e., there must be at least a fork (if not a branch) in the road with respect to god's existence. This strikes me as contradictory and I should have asked for a clarification before proceeding.

However, with the bit about 'no forks in the road' now gone in this latest post, I think it will be easier to resolve the situation.

Yes, I agree that a line of argument that leads to contradictory outcomes is defective. But I also think it's important to be precise as to where it fails.

Yes, I agree that many-worlds does not allow us to say that anything that is possible is the case in every possible world. With a bit of help from LJ and a study of S5 modal logic, I am now convinced that Premise 1 is the faulty one.

When you feed in the proposition that God had a beginning in order to resolve the problem, I answer that He only had a beginning in the possible world containing God [ who is no longer eternal in both directions ]. In your scenario, there was no God for some arbitrary period, after which in one possible world a God had His beginning and in an alternative possible world He did not come into existence at all.

No, there is not a possible world in my scenario in which God never came into existence because I get to define the scope of my argument. It need not be infinite.

The concept of 'possible worlds' in philosophy can be thought of as 'possible descriptions of reality'. This provides some latitude in the way possible-reality is divided. Imagine a graph with time as the x axis and outcomes on the y axis. On your view, the graph must be chopped up with horizontal slices, i.e., into various outcomes. However, it is equally valid to chop it up with vertical slices, i.e., into various points in time. I could even imagine dicing it up diagonally [think of causal forces in the universe leading to change over long periods of time].

Maybe an example will help. I define a set of possible worlds, W consisting of the years 1962 to 1992, sliced into years - a set of 31 years. Now, the set obviously has properties that are true in all members of the set - The nation of the USA existed, televisions existed, television programs existed, The Tonight Show existed and its official host was Johnny Carson, etc. I don't need to consider other worlds in which, say, the nation of the USA never existed, because they're simply out of scope.

The first case does not allow for a Creator God or places a limit on His scope (perhaps God created our world out of a primordial chaos but how do we account for His arrival on the already existing scene and surely in this case He encounters laws of physics that He did not create and cannot ignore or break?)

I see no problem with limiting the scope of God's power - for example, I don't think omnipotence includes the ability to do the logically impossible. Maybe there are certain laws of physics that are brute facts and cannot be changed, even by God.

...and in any event it is not coherent or consistent to employ that many worlds argument unless you still allow an alternative, Godless world as well, not instead.

I think this is simply wrong, as shown by my earlier examples. Again, I get to pick the scope of my argument. That does not render it incoherent.

My problem arises when Planting prceeds to inject his God into every possible world, because I do not see this as a legitimate application of the many worlds argument.

I think this would be OK if he had a valid means of doing so. The Ontological Argument clearly isn't it, however.

I see what you are saying when Planting slips from "it is possible" into "it is necessary." However, for this debate, is it not the case that exactly that type of proposition is made by scientists in respect of many matters.

Well, this debate is a philosophical one, not scientific.

For example, when discussing the remarkable number of features in our particular universe that have had the outcome of the evolution of human life, it is argued that once we acknowledge the power of the multiverse proposition (there are actually many forms to this apart from the many worlds idea) then we can accept that there are so vastly many possible universes that it is not surprising to find at least one universe in which the features suit the evolution of human life. It is less surprising than if there is only one universe and no others at all.

I'm not a big fan of the multiverse theory. I think it is the result of succumbing to a devious ex-ante probability argument from the ID crowd. Niall Shanks deals with this in his book God, the Devil, and Darwin. The multiverse hypothesis might be dubbed Occam's hair-restorer [the embodiment of needless multiplication of entities], the creator-God hypothesis has one needless entity [God himself], while one-universe-by-chance emerges as the clean-shaven alternative.

It remains to be seen if the multiverse theory will yield a testable proposition. Until it does, it will be relegated to the same category as string theory - a very interesting and cool idea, but not of any current practical use to science.

I take exception to the idea that it is critical that scientists would not accept certain logical steps in a philosophical argument. This is borne of the fallacy that science is the ultimate authority on everything. [Indeed, I wish someone would remind Richard Dawkins of this when he is tempted to make some of his bad philosophical arguments.]

I really take exception to the idea that logic is a tool owned exclusively by Science and not available to the merely religious. In fact, I wish religious believers would use it much much more often! Look at the fruits it has borne here. Plantinga is forced to speak in a language that logicians can understand, which allows his conclusion to be appropriately rejected or accepted. If religion took its old tack of appealing to the mysterious nature of reality, we wouldn't be able to reject its claims so easily. We would be stuck in an endless, hopeless attempt to have them clarify that which they purposefully leave vague.

Originally posted by googlefudge
Whoa there SwissGambit... The argument is not stating that it MIGHT be possible that MEB exists.

The premise reads "1. It is possible that a maximally great being exists. "

It IS possible that a maximally great being exists...

Well it might not be, we don't know, you can't just assume this.

My position is not the stronger claim because my pos ...[text shortened]... accepting the assertion that it is possible without
supporting arguments and evidence.

Yeah, I think LJ and studying S5 set me straight here. I'm with you now. I agree you can reject Premise 1 without negating it fully.

Originally posted by JS357
"For example if I put these two claims next to each other...

It IS possible to travel faster than light.

It MIGHT be possible to travel faster than light.

Which one is making the stronger claim? "

Doesn't "possibly possible" simplify to "possible"? This could just be semantics. But you might want to look into conceivability versus possibility. There is academic literature on the subject.

Interestingly, under S5 modal logic, 'possibly possible' simplifies to just 'possible'. So, under S5, the two claims are equal in strength.

Originally posted by SwissGambit
Interestingly, under S5 modal logic, 'possibly possible' simplifies to just 'possible'. So, under S5, the two claims are equal in strength.

Right now S5 Modal logic is striking me as a big pile of useless nonsense that bares no resemblance to reality.


There is a difference between 'possibly possible' and 'possible' and failing to recognise that difference is in
my view inane.


The point of this argument is supposed to be to demonstrate that an actual god [MEB] actually exists in this
reality.

Using any sort of logic that does not in fact map to reality is thus a pointless waste of time.



If S5 Modal logic can't tell the difference between something that 'may or may not be possible' and something that
is 'possible' then it does not reflect reality and fails in a way that is crucial to the validity of this argument.


Thus S5 Modal logic absolutely can't be used in debating this argument.

Originally posted by SwissGambit
Yeah, I think LJ and studying S5 set me straight here. I'm with you now. I agree you can reject Premise 1 without negating it fully.

"Anything asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence"

Originally posted by googlefudge

Let us say that omniscience means 'knows all true propositions' and omnipotence means 'can do anything logically possible'
and moral perfection = 'always prefers the best moral outcome, or more specifically, the best overall good state of affairs'.
I don't see a contradiction here.

The contradiction as I say depends on how you def ...[text shortened]... te]I agree with you on Premise 3.[/quote]

Well it's a start I suppose 😉

I'm going to skip the premise 1 stuff because we're both rejecting it now.

If there are a finite number of 'worlds' existing for a finite time then it is perfectly possible (in fact inevitable) that not all possible things will
happen.

I am thinking of the term 'possible worlds' in a philosophical sense, meaning something like 'possible descriptions of reality'. By definition, the set of all possible worlds includes the totality of every possible thing that can happen - the whole tree, including all the branches. Whether that tree is infinite or not is another argument. 🙂