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The difference between Anselm's original ontological argument and modern ones like Goedel's or Plantinga's is that while Anselm's is full of terrible reasoning, Goedel's reasoning is (unsurprisingly) watertight and all the terribleness is concentrated in the axioms.

Specifically, I think the idea of classifying all properties as "good" or "not good" is hopeless: I do not believe there is any such classification that fits anyone's intuitive ideas about goodness well enough that calling something "godlike" if it has all "good" properties is credible. More specifically, I suspect it's consistent to suppose -- hence there are no humanly-comprehensible counterexamples -- that the only notions of goodness obeying all Goedel's axioms are ones that look like "P is good iff P(x)" for some fixed object x. (And, like Krishnaswami, I think the system of modal logic Goedel needs is awfully strong.)

In the spirit of Anselm's ontological argument, however, I offer the following proof of the nonexistence of God:

Consider a really bad argument for the existence of God. In fact, consider one so bad that no worse argument can be conceived.

Obviously a bad argument for something fails to prove what it purports to prove. But merely failing is a pretty mediocre kind of badness. The worst possible argument, surely, has to be much worse than that: it must conclusively prove the opposite of what it's meant to prove.

Now, the worst conceivable argument for theism clearly "exists in the understanding", as St Anselm put it. But it can't exist only there -- because a bad argument is more damaging to the premise it's meant to support if it's actually made.

Therefore, there is an argument for the existence of God which is actually a conclusive proof of the nonexistence of God.

And, of course, any proposition that can be conclusively disproved is false; therefore there is no God.

(This argument is in my opinion almost exactly as strong as the original ontological argument for the existence of God. Which is to say, it's absolutely hopeless. But I think it's fun.)




> The difference between Anselm's original ontological argument and modern ones like Goedel's or Plantinga's is that while Anselm's is full of terrible reasoning, Goedel's reasoning is (unsurprisingly) watertight and all the terribleness is concentrated in the axioms.

To me that makes it a success. Part of the entire game of philosophy is to use watertight reasoning to illustrate flaws in the original axioms.


I would think that any god that is proven to exist by simply defining it to be identical to something that exists is pretty worthless to begin with. You could always just short-circuit and just say "I am right by definition."

Which really gets us closer to the heart of what proof is: it is that which will compel a rational mind into agreement. It is not enough to follow formal rules. It must be measurably dangerous -- potentially a catastrophic failure -- for a rational mind to disagree with a proof. Someone should be able to build a dutch book on your expectations and obliterate you for failing to agree with that proof.

So until someone actually measures their god to be good, there are no consequences for a proof in either direction, and a rational mind should not be convinced.


Your objection to the notion of positive and negative properties is the first that stood out to me after reading the Wikipedia summary. If I'm understanding things correctly, Godel's proof seems committed to some objective notion of goodness--I'm not sure how such a thing could exist without some higher power, which makes the proof somewhat circular in my mind.

I could be missing something here as I only took my first philosophy class this semester and I'm not taking ethics until next, but is that basically what you're getting at?


What many people miss about Anselm's argument is that it is based on an ontology that essentially identifies existence with goodness. Arguments that attempt to derive existence from extreme badness are obviously wrong under that premise. On top of that, existence would not be considered an attribute of arguments themselves. You have trouble with this point yourself, where you quickly replace it with a notion of "being made". Speaking of which, existence would not be considered an attribute of acts, either.


I love it. I think Anselm's ontological argument is more a proof of confirmation bias than anything else. So as a corollary to his argument, the more beneficial something may be to us, the more biased we are to confirm its existence. Therefore, a maximally benevolent being incites maximal confirmation bias on our part, and any logical argument for its existence is therefore problematic.


Yet another interesting side of Anselm's and Gödel's proof is that they leave the possibility open for us to be gods.


wow! did you come up with this?


What, the anti-ontological argument? Yes.

There's another very-slightly-similar inverted ontological argument that may have been in the back of my head. It's due to a chap called Douglas Gasking, and it begins with a standard ontological argument -- which, as you know, delivers us a Maximally Excellent Being. Now, of course God's signature accomplishment is the creation of the universe; but any creative achievement is more impressive when it is accomplished under greater constraints (so, e.g., while it is impressive to come up with a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem it would be even more impressive to come up with a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in the form of a perfect Shakespearean sonnet). Well, what would be the most impressive obstacle for God to have overcome when creating the world? His own total nonexistence, obviously. So our maximally impressive being must be a god who created the universe without existing; therefore God does not exist.

I have to confess that I like mine better.




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