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You said > Suppose God doesn't exist. Then ... middle, middle, middle,...Contradiction. Thus by "excluded middle", God does exist. I have never seen theology d
by jessriedel 11y ago
You said
> Suppose God doesn't exist. Then ... middle, middle, middle,...Contradiction. Thus by "excluded middle", God does exist. I have never seen theology do that.
Here is a summary of Anselm's argument for the existence of God:
> 1. It is a conceptual truth (or, so to speak, true by definition) that God is a being than which none greater can be imagined (that is, the greatest possible being that can be imagined).
> 2. God exists as an idea in the mind.
> 3. A being that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is, other things being equal, greater than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind.
> 4. Thus, if God exists only as an idea in the mind, then we can imagine something that is greater than God (that is, a greatest possible being that does exist).
> 5. But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God (for it is a contradiction to suppose that we can imagine a being greater than the greatest possible being that can be imagined.)
> 6. Therefore, God exists.
(Emphasis mine.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument#Anselm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument#Anselm
But really, you don't even need something with such a close 1-to-1 mapping for fpoling's comment to be reasonable. Consider the Banach–Tarski paradox. In both cases, you're talking about "something that cannot be experimentally observable or constructable" -- a perfect being, or a certain disjoint decomposition of the 3-ball -- "and then apply logic".