

Proof of God's existence by 10th century Bishop - anupj
http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/the-self-thinking-thought/

======
3pt14159
I believe in God and everything, but this is my rebuttal. My greatest startup:
Will be known by everyone, make me trillions of dollars, solve world ills, and
bring sheer beauty to the world.

If it doesn't exist, it isn't my greatest startup, is it? Therefore it must
exist. Why do I have a day job again?

~~~
ewjordan
Exactly.

Frankly, the dude couldn't have been very smart if he didn't realize that you
could replace the word "God" with any word you want in that "proof" and thus
establish that it exists. This type of spot checking is important, and any
competent mathematician or logician is expected to have worked out the limits
of any new method to see if there's potential for ridiculous results to be
"proven" as a result.

The only interesting part of this is pinning down exactly where the logic
fails. And even that is not _very_ interesting, because it devolves into
bickering over definitions: what exactly do we mean by "great"? Couldn't we
imagine a thing whose "greatness" depends on its non-existence? ("Greatest
non-existent entity" would result in some ridiculousness if you tried to apply
this proof to it) What does "exist" mean? Mario and Luigi "exist" in a sense,
even if they are fictional, and a good case could be made that they are,
indeed, the greatest video game characters of all time (okay, maybe not Luigi
:) ), despite their real world "non-existence". And so on...the end result
being that we've neither proved nor illuminated anything at all, except that
our original phrasing was too vague to mean anything.

But I'll give the philosophers this: they give the rest of us a great deal of
evidence that you can prove very little about the actual world without
actually referring to it to test your assumptions: they've been trying for
several millenia, yet have accomplished all but nothing.

~~~
joshu
Alternatively, this proves the existence of the perfect hamburger. Now I'm
hungry.

------
Locke1689
Heh, like philosophers have never seen this argument before. Granted, it took
a while to refute but none other than Immanuel Kant pretty much destroyed the
ontological argument a long time ago.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument#Kant:_exis...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument#Kant:_existence_is_not_a_predicate)

------
sharpn
That's not a proof by any definition of the word I understand. Imagining
something does not prove the existence (or otherwise) of that thing. [edit]
but a 10th century bishop writing 77 years after the end of the 10th century
is still noteworthy :o)

