Originally posted by bbarr
That is an old problem. Russell and Strawson went around and around on this. Could we take the Russellian line and construe the first premise, for instance, as expression a conjunction where two conjuncts consist of existentially quantified statements?
I take your suggestion to mean that we should construct the proposition:
"If there exists an entity and a universe such that the entity created the universe and the entity is all-powerful, then the entity is God."
We could take that route, but we'd have to butt heads over definitions and axioms again.
Once you construe the expression that way, the statement may no longer be used as a definition, as it asserts something to be the case. It may only be used as an axiom taken as true, or as a proposition whose truth value is to be solved. That may be fine for the purpose of the toy syllogism, but it doesn't help to answer the question, "What does the term God mean?" (That is, once you deduce that an entity is God for having created a Universe and being all-powerful, you still haven't attached any meaning to being God. Said another way, what have you learned about the entity by making the deduction that the entity is God? Nothing.) For that, one needs a definition, such as "Let any all-powerful entity that created the Universe, and nothing else, be referred to as God." Then when once you have deduced something as being God, you know that all it means is that that entity created the universe and is all powerful, contrasted with above in which you don't really know what it means to be God.
Dr. S