For reasons I’m not quite clear on, the New York Times has dragged up the Ontological Argument, one of the stupider reasons for believing in a god.
Conveniently, they’ve summed it up in drawing form, which I’ve fair-used below:
Although there are various counter-arguments, like “existence is not a predicate” and “by the same logic you could conclude a perfect island exists” and “Anselm was a crackhead,” none of them directly addresses the argument’s immediate flaw:
“That than which no greater can be conceived” (i.e. “the greatest concept ever”) is not well-defined, and there’s no good reason to think that it describes anything at all. This shouldn’t be surprising, as many optimization problems simply have no solutions.
If I start talking about “the prime number than which no larger can be conceived,” eventually someone is going to point me to Euclid’s proof that there is no largest prime number. “The prime number than which no larger can be conceived” describes absolutely nothing. Therefore, any conclusions I draw about it are necessarily spurious.
There’s no good reason to think that Anselm’s problem has a solution, either. Yahweh’s certainly not it. For Yahweh doesn’t have a rocket-powered jetpack, and a deity with a rocket-powered jetpack is easily “greater” than one who doesn’t have it.
Any deity you pick, you can do the same math. Allah would be even greater if he was more scrupulous about personal hygiene. Jesus would be even greater if he’d done magic tricks with bourbon instead of wine. Hanuman would be even greater if he didn’t throw his feces all over the place.
Pretty much anything you describe to me, I can come up with a way to make it better. Pamela Anderson would be greater if she didn’t have Hepatitis. The Beatles would be greater if they hadn’t let Ringo write any songs. “Saturday Night Live” would be better if it was funny.
In short, whenever someone begins an argument by defining something as the solution to a “greatest conceivable” optimization problem, the burden of proof is on him to demonstrate that his definition actually describes anything at all!
“That than which nothing greater can be conceived” is most likely an empty set. Draw conclusions accordingly.
I have never – ever – been able to wrap my head around the Ontological Argument. And oh how I’ve tried, because I desperately want to be sure to take seriously all of the competitions claims.
And in almost all cases, I can – if I imagine myself to be sufficiently ignorant (or deranged). That’s good, because from that understanding I can see what’s lacking, and where to start from.
What scares me about the Ontological Argument is that there’s no perspective from which I can make it “add up.” That worries me not because that might make it valid (how?) but because I can’t understand the failures in the proponent’s view.
My only consolation is the strong suspicion that the reason I can’t understand it is because it doesn’t make sense. It appears so blatantly flawed, on the face, that I hesitate out of fear of simplification: ‘perfection’ is subjective (what would be ‘most perfect?’), and the fact that one imagines a thing does not necessitate objective existence. Reductio ad absurdum.
Is that really all there is to it? How is that even an argument? o.^
Thank you for tackling this one. Like Just Some Guy, above, I’ve been baffled by this argument, which just doesn’t seem to have any cognative value — it seems to argue around itself somehow.
The idea that because we can *say* we can conceive of a perfect being doesn’t mean anything. To say that perfection requires actuality isn’t true – who says existence is perfection? Only our human judgement, which last time I looked rules nothing.
This whole argument is a chain of Say What?’s. “So (*hah!) if what you’re thinking of is really so great, it must exist!” How about: “Or not, as the case may be.” Or: “I guess you’re not capable of thinking of something so great it must exist because you thought of it, are you?”
This kind of exercise in sophistry reminds me of Xeno’s so-called Paradox, which is stated in such a way as to wrap itself in its own linguistic knot, overloading terms so that it appears to create a paradox where none exists. (If you divide an ‘infinite’ number of halfways of distance into an infinite number of halves of time remaining, you get ’1′ — which is to say, the turtle reaches his destination, and only your failure to notice the halves of time and of distance cancel each other out creates the pretense at a paradox.)
If you conceive of a being so perfect that its perfection requires its existence, and it doesn’t actually exist, then you failed at your pretense of conceiving of such a being. Which is hardly surprising.