:
: Bob! I must be soooo bored to be doing this...
: : a) logical
: : b) not based purely on a subjective appeal to oneself
: : c) not contingent upon dubious historical texts: 1:The Ontological Argument
: 1:God is perfect and has all the features it is good to have.
: 2:Existence is a good feature.
: 3:tehrefore God must exist.
: (I'm a bit ropey, that might be a bad rendition of the argument, there is anotehr way of expressing it, to do with imagining perfection, but I can't remember how it goes.).
It goes like this.
1. God is defined as a mental contruct to be the most perfect being imaginable, with a set of properties X.
2. assume that God doesn't exist.
3. now let us imagine a being "Bob" which has the set of properties Y, including Set X, but who also exists.
4. (Here is the debatable assumption, which i personally tend to agree with.) Existence makes a being or system better and more perfect. I.e. it is better to exist than not to exist.
5. Therefoire Bob is better than God. But we previously defined God as the msot perfect being imaginable. This leads us to a contradiction. Hence our assumption 2 was false. Hence God does exist.
(By the way, RD< you might be amused to compare assumption 4 to the argument I gave you once to teh effect that "Cuban socialism is better than the SPGB's variety because Cuban socialism actually exists." Note the similarity and laugh, if you feel like it....
: The usual philosophical response to this is to question whether existence is a great giving feature, or even if it is a constant, personally, I prefer to note that the argument is circular, because it defines God in its first term, and that efinition is not falsifiable.
Um, Red, neither is your argument that all American foreign policy is motivated by imperialism, as I pointed out before. in other words, by using "imperialism"to account for both pro-colonial and anti-colonial behavior (e.g. American intervention on behalf of Nasser in the Suez) you render the argument unfalsifiable. Your response was tos ay that falisifiablity refers to questions of science, not to ocial or philosophical questions. Correct, but now you shouldn't deride the God hypothesis for being nonfalsifiable.
: God above is taken to be teh Judeochristian god, or any transcendant and eprfect Deity.
: 2: The Teloelogical Argument
: 1:The universe is a regular system.
: 2:All regular systems we have enountered up till now, usually have a designer/creator.
: 3:therefore the universe probably has a designer/creator.
: This is an inductive argument, and is thus prone to fallibility, and can only state that God probably exists. It is also flawed because it extends a condition of creation within our uuniverse (the laws of thermodynamics, etc.) and extends them back beyond our universe, and applies them to God.
Um, the argument is indeed flawed, but there is a more sophisticated form, viz. the universe is run by rational and mathematical laws, rational laws imply a rational lawgiver, it si inconceivable to think that such degree of order and rationality can simply "exist". Personally, I find this convincing. However, because there is no way to estimate probabilities of (mathematical universe vs. random, chaotic, lawless universe), this argument cannot be a rigorous proof. It's merely a line of evidence taht some find airtight,others do not.
: All we are left with is:
: 3: Pascal's Wager
: Despised by theologians.
: 1:God either exists or doesn't exist, so there are only two equally likely outcomes.
: 2:If God doesn't exist then we have only this life-time to live, and thus a finite sum of pleasure.
: 3:If God does exist then we have the opportunity of an after-life, and thus an infinite sum of pleasure.
: 4:Thus if we assume that he doesn't exist, then we are gambling on 50% x a finite some, against beliving he does exist, 50% x infinity. Thus the latter option offers infinite reward, versus finite returns, any reasonable person seeking to maximise their return must thus gamble on God existing, and belive in him.
: You can see why Theologians hate it, its utterly unreligious, and doesn't so much as proove God, as proove why its a smart gamble to believe in him.
: Thats basically it, really.
You forgot the Moral Argument. Morality can have 4 sources.
1. God or Divine Revelation (Transcendent)
2. The Man (Social imposition)
3. Evolution
4. Reason, i.e. a bunch of guys thought up Morality one day.
Argument 3 is disproved because it depends ona largely discredited view of evolution called group selection. If evolution were the only force determining social behavior and ethics, we would expect to see a greater degree of selfishness than we do. Not to be too simplistic, but there are some behaviors we practice taht are clearly non-adptive. volution, it seems to me, cannot entirely explain human morality. Argument 2 is the relativist's argument; its flaw is taht it denies the existence of objectively true moral standards and fails to take into account the great similarity between different cultures' moral codes. Argument 4 personally seems silly to me, I can't believe that a bunch of people were smart and prescient enough to invent morality just like taht, can you imagine yourself or myself doing that? Anyway, that's teh moral argument.
