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I actually put my "reasonably" intelligent (IQ 135) mind to it (that had done engineering and teaching degrees), I could see that there was far more to the arguments for the existence of God, and that it really was a pretty arrogant position to take to think that we could explain away God with some mathematics and science.
I suppose the best place to start then is with some historical ontological argument:
From St Anslem:
The ontological argument was proposed by Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) in the second chapter of his Proslogion.[8] Although he did not propose an ontological system, he was very much concerned with the nature of being. He distinguished necessary beings (those that must exist) from contingent beings (those that may exist, but whose existence is not necessary).
In Chapter 2 of “The Existence of Nature and God” Anselm′s Argument for the Existence of God is as follows:
1. God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived
2. God may exist in the understanding.
3. To exist in reality and in the understanding is greater than to exist in the understanding alone.
4. Therefore, God exists in reality.
From Rene Descartes:
Descartes wrote in the Fifth Meditation,[10]
But if the mere fact that I can produce from my thought the idea of something that entails everything which I clearly and distinctly perceive to belong to that thing really does belong to it, is not this a possible basis for another argument to prove the existence of God? Certainly, the idea of God, or a supremely perfect being, is one that I find within me just as surely as the idea of any shape or number. And my understanding that it belongs to his nature that he always exists is no less clear and distinct than is the case when I prove of any shape or number that some property belongs to its nature (AT 7:65; CSM 2:45).
The intuition above can be formally described as follows:
Whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive to be contained in the idea of something is true of that thing.
I clearly and distinctly perceive that necessary existence is contained in the idea of God.
Therefore, God exists.
Criticism by "essence precedes existence"
Avicenna's argument is based on essence precedes existence. In his view existence is secondary to essence or quiddity, because a human can think about something and it need not exist. Everything that exists only comes into existence because it is brought from potential to actual existence by something else, except God, who is the only Necessary Existent.
Averroes rejected Avicenna's ontological distinction between existence and essence. He argued that in an eternal universe anything that could exist would and indeed must exist, and existence of a thing is not just a property added to it.
Kant put forward a key refutation of the ontological argument in the Critique of Pure Reason (first edition, pp. 592–603; second edition, pp. 620–631).[23] It is explicitly directed primarily against Descartes but also against Leibniz. His criticism was anticipated in Pierre Gassendi's Objections to Descartes' Meditations. Kant's refutation consists of several separate but interrelated arguments. They are shaped by his central distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments. In an analytic judgment, the predicate expresses something that is already contained within a concept and is therefore a tautology; in a synthetic judgment, the predicate, or claim, links the concept to something outside it that is not already logically implied by it. New knowledge consists of synthetic judgments.
Kant first questions the intelligibility of the very concept of an absolutely necessary being, considering "whether I am still thinking anything in the concept of the unconditionally necessary, or perhaps rather nothing at all". He examines one way of understanding the concept, which looks to examples of necessary propositions, e.g. "a triangle has three angles". But he rejects this account for two related reasons. First, no absolutely necessary judgments will ever yield an absolute necessity for things and their existence: e.g., "a triangle has three angles" yields only the conditioned necessity that, if a triangle exists, then necessarily three angles exist. Thus even if we defined a concept of a thing X so that "X exists" were a necessary judgment, all that would follow is the conditioned necessity that, if X exists, then necessarily X exists. Second, since contradictions arise only when we keep the subject and cancel the predicate (e.g., keeping God and canceling omnipotence), and since judgments of nonexistence cancel both the subject and the predicate, therefore no judgment of nonexistence can involve a contradiction. Kant concludes that there is a strong general case against the intelligibility of the concept of an absolutely necessary being.[23]
Second, Kant argues that if we include existence in the definition of something, then asserting that it exists is a tautology. If we say that existence is part of the definition of God, in other words an analytic judgment, then we are simply repeating ourselves in asserting that God exists. We are not making a synthetic judgment that would add new information about the real existence of God to the purely conceptual definition of God.
Third, Kant argues that "'being' is obviously not a real predicate" [23] and cannot be part of the concept of something. That is, to say that something is or exists is not to say something about a concept, but rather indicates that there is an object that corresponds to the concept, and "the object, as it actually exists, is not analytically contained in my concept, but is added to my concept". For objects of the senses, to say that something exists means not that it has an additional property that is part of its concept but rather that it is to be found outside of thought and that we have an empirical perception of it in space and time. A really existing thing does not have any properties that could be predicated of it that differentiate it from the concept of that thing. What differentiates it is that we actually experience it: for example, it has shape, a specifiable location, and duration. To give an example of Kant's point: the reason we say that horses exist and unicorns do not is not that the concept of horse has the property of existence and the concept of unicorn does not, or that the concept of horse has more of that property than the concept of unicorn. There is no difference between the two concepts in this regard. And there is no difference between the concept of a horse and the concept of a really existing horse: the concepts are identical. The reason we say that horses exist is simply that we have spatio-temporal experience of them: there are objects corresponding to the concept. So any demonstration of the existence of anything, including God, that relies on predicating a property (in this case existence) of that thing is fallacious.
Thus, in accordance with the second and third arguments, the statement "God is omnipotent" is an analytic judgment that articulates what is already contained in and implied by the concept of God, i.e. a particular property of God. The statement "God exists" is a synthetic judgment of existence that does not assert something contained in or implied by the concept of God and would require knowledge of God as an object of that concept. What the ontological argument does is attempt to import into the concept of God, as though it were a property, the synthetic assertion of the existence of God, thereby illegitimately and tautologously defining God as existing. In other words, it begs the question by assuming what it purports to prove.
But, fourth, Kant argues that the concept of God is in any case not the concept of one particular object of sense among others but rather an "object of pure thought", of something that by definition exists outside the field of experience and of nature. With regard to unicorns, we can specify how we could determine that unicorns exist, i.e., what spatio-temporal experience of them would look like. With regard to the concept of God, there is no way for us to know it as existing in the only legitimate and meaningful way we know other objects as existing. We cannot even determine "the possibility of any existence beyond that known in and through experience" [23].
The typical response (e.g., Plantinga's ontological argument, below) to this objection to the ontological argument is this: "While 'existence' simpliciter cannot be a predicate, 'necessary existence' (like 'contingent existence') can be a predicate." Some things are contingently so, and some things are necessarily so. God, it is said, is a necessary being de re. Some have objected that Plantinga's argument merely re-assumes that existence is a property and continues the argumentation by tautology.
jog on
duc
