Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Jul 11, 2017 4:24 pm
Me:
To understand that question I would have to know what you meant by 'exist'.
No. It just means, "Do you have any reason to think that, given the right set of conditions (or "possible world") the Supreme Being could not exist, or do you regard His existence as a possibility, even if you don't consider it an actuality." I don't know if I know how to spell it out more clearly.
You would describe that convoluted sentence as spelling it out clearly!?
To say
'given the right set of conditions' begs the question. Given
the right set of conditions, unicorns, pixies, spaghetti monsters and everything else could exist. So the question just becomes
'Do the right set of conditions exist?' And we can only answer that if we know what the existence of the Supreme Being is supposed to entail.
Plantinga does a great deal with explaining these "great-making" properties. But I'll have to refer you to him on that.
We have to establish that it exists before we can discuss whether it has any properties. Unless, as I say it only exists as an idea, such that its properties are the like 'the horn of a unicorn' i.e. also just ideas.
Analytic proofs come on line when we examine the implications of the conceptions we have. If we have an incoherent conception, say, like "married bachelor," we discover its incoherence and reject it. If we discover a concept to be coherent, then we go on to its implications.
But as you agreed, it is no problem for a concept to be coherent. For example, any tautology is coherent. But it has no implications.
But notice that there is no empirical argument for the reality of 1-ness. One cannot find 1-ness apart from its adjectival attribution to some kind of noun. 1-ness, as a pure "existence" itself forever escapes us; and yet we believe in it and use it routinely for empirical things.
No we don't. We can only apply number to abstractions. Objects are themselves, we can only turn them into numbers if we disregard their individual nature. For example, on my left is a banana and on my right is an apple. I can only call them '
two fruit' if I ignore all the ways they are different.
Me: Yet again, if the 'Supreme Being' remains simply a concept then you are pushing at an open door. Everyone in the world agrees that the concept is a concept.
The question is, "Is it a possible concept?" or "Can it be regarded as essentially coherent?"
To both of them, I still cannot tell because you haven't told me what it entails. It might be self-contradictory therefore impossible.
If it is simply a concept i.e. an idea, then it makes being coherent a lot easier, but then it would only be possible
as a concept.
When are we going to get to the Ontological Argument? Should I take it that by the OA you mean Plantinga's version, rather than Anselm's?
