Exactly. Frankly, the dude couldn't have been very smart if he didn't realize that you could replace the word "God" with any word you want in that "proof" and

Exactly. Frankly, the dude couldn't have been very smart if he didn't realize that you could replace the word "God" with any word you want in that "proof" and thus establish that it exists. This type of spot checking is important, and any competent mathematician or logician is expected to have worked out the limits of any new method to see if there's potential for ridiculous results to be "proven" as a result. The only interesting part of this is pinning down exactly where the logic fails. And even that is not very interesting, because it devolves into bickering over definitions: what exactly do we mean by "great"? Couldn't we imagine a thing whose "greatness" depends on its non-existence? ("Greatest non-existent entity" would result in some ridiculousness if you tried to apply this proof to it) What does "exist" mean? Mario and Luigi "exist" in a sense, even if they are fictional, and a good case could be made that they are, indeed, the greatest video game characters of all time (okay, maybe not Luigi :) ), despite their real world "non-existence". And so on...the end result being that we've neither proved nor illuminated anything at all, except that our original phrasing was too vague to mean anything. But I'll give the philosophers this: they give the rest of us a great deal of evidence that you can prove very little about the actual world without actually referring to it to test your assumptions: they've been trying for several millenia, yet have accomplished all but nothing.