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One way to disconvince yourself of Anselm's OA is to look at it as a variant of Quine's "Platonic beard": formulation (1) is equivalent to asserting that the in
by woodruffw 3y ago
One way to disconvince yourself of Anselm's OA is to look at it as a variant of Quine's "Platonic beard": formulation (1) is equivalent to asserting that the intelligibility of an object is a precursor to its necessary existence, which isn't true in non-logic settings.
Put another way: you can replace "God" with "a Unicorn that necessarily exists" in the OA and the proof is no less correct. But the Unicorn still does not necessarily exist.
- wharvle 3y agoThat’s the real nail in the coffin for the argument. You don’t need to pick apart all the specific things wrong with it to tell it’s trash, because it’s easy to see that you can use it to “prove” all kinds of arbitrary bullshit. It’s clearly just useless.
- kjqgqkejbfefn 3y ago[dead]
- SAI_Peregrinus 3y agoThe ontological argument works just as well to "prove" the nonexistence of God. Let the greatest possible being be called "God". Creating the universe is the most difficult possible task. (Unproven assertion). Completing a task with a handicap is more difficult than without, so a being capable of creating the universe with a handicap is greater than one which could only do it without a handicap. Not existing is the strongest handicap possible for any task. Thus, any being worthy of being called God must not exist.