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Interestingly many people (including Gödel) have made logically sound proofs that a particular God with a particular set of attributes do exist. But the way the

• ChrisGranger 11y ago
  Yes, indeed, it's all about defining the attributes. It seems to me that the gods believed in by proponents of extant religions were "created by committee" and don't have completely coherent, logically-consistent, non-contradictory properties.
  • gbog 11y ago
    Except for a few mathematical concepts I don't see any thing that would have such property, e.g. Art, Good, Justice, Culture, etc.
    • eli_gottlieb 11y ago
      Luckily, unlike deities, Art, Good, Justice, and Culture are all fairly easy to examine empirically.
• gjm11 11y ago
  Gödel's ontological proof certainly derives its conclusion correctly from its axioms. But the problem isn't only that the conclusion isn't really "God exists" if you want that to match the god of any actually existing religion; it's also that the axioms are ... well, let's just say "not obviously true". In particular, he relies on this notion of "positive properties". It is not at all clear that there is any notion of "positive properties" that satisfies his axioms, still less one for which "positive" is actually a good name. (The axioms are certainly false if, e.g., we take "positive" to mean something like "regarded as good by some particular person" or "regarded as good by a majority of intelligent and thoughtful people". Gödel wants the conjunction of all positive properties to be positive, which in particular implies that it isn't outright impossible. But it's easy to find properties generally regarded as good that are not mutually compatible.)
• eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  No, that's basically just an ought-is fallacy.