Ontological argument and other arguments, à priory
Arguments for the existence of God fall into two main categories, namely à, priory, and à posterior. Thomas Aquinas’s five arguments are arguments à posterior since they are based on a worldview.
Arguments à prior are based on pure armchair reasoning; the most famous of these is the ontological argument, proposed by St. Anselm of Canterbury in 1078; since that time, numerous philosophers have been revived in various forms. The strange thing about it is that it was addressed not to men but to God himself, and in the form of a prayer (they could make you think that if something is capable of listening to supplication prayer, it does not need convincing of its existence). According to Anselm, we can imagine a being from whom nothing can be more significant. Even an atheist can imagine can conceive of an excellent being, even though he denies its existence in the real world. The argument continues with the sentence that a being that does not exist in the real world is already, by that act, less than perfect. This is contradictory, and abracadabra, God exists!
Let us translate this infantile argument into an appropriate language, i.e., the language of the playground, and it will read:
“Let’s bet I can prove that God exists.”
“Let’s bet you can’t.”
“Okay, imagine the most perfect, perfect, perfect being.”
“OK, now what?”
“Tell me, is this most perfect, most perfect, most perfect being real? Does it exist?
“No, it exists only in my thinking.”
“But if it were real, it would be even more perfect because a truly perfect thing must be better than some silly old thought. So I have proved that God exists. All atheists are fools.”
I let my childish sage use the term “fools” deliberately. Also, Anselm quoted the first verse of 14.
“The fool hath said in his heart: There is no God.” and dared to use the Latin term “fool.”
(Incipient) for a supposed atheist:
Even a fool, therefore, is convinced that there is something in mutual understanding from which nothing more significant can be Imaginable. For if he hears it, he understands it. And everything that is understood exists in mind. But, something from which nothing more remarkable can be imagined can exist even in my mind. But if it does exist in mind, it can also be conceived in reality; and it is more significant. The possibility that far-reaching conclusions can be drawn from such word games offends me aesthetically, so I’ll be careful not to use words like “foolishness.” Bertrand Russell (he wasn’t crazy) once said:
“It is easier to be convinced that an ontological argument is false than to state exactly where the falsity lies.” As a young man, he was convinced of this by a certain point: I remembered that exact moment one day in 1894. I was walking along Trinity Lane, and suddenly I whipped a flash through my mind (or I thought I saw it) that the ontological argument was valid. I went to buy a packet of tobacco; on my way back, I threw it up and cried out with all my might, “Great Manitou.
The ontological argument is valid !”
I wonder why Russell didn’t say something like, “Lord runt, that ontological argument seems to me to be acceptable. But wouldn’t it be too lovely if the great truth of the universe relied on a mere pun? Better to resolve it with some paradox, like Zeno’s. “* (*Zeno’s paradox is too well known to be belittled by a footnote, but so be it. Achilles runs ten times faster than the tortoise, giving it a 100-meter head start. When Achilles outruns them, the tortoise is 10 meters ahead of him. When Achilles runs those 10 meters, the turtle is 1 meter ahead of him. When he runs that 1 meter, the tortoise is 0.1 meters ahead of him … and so on ad infinitum; Achilles the tortoise never catches up.)
The Greeks had a hard time when Zeno “proved” that Achilles would never catch up with the tortoise. His reasoning was categorized as a paradox, waiting for later generations of mathematicians to explain it. The possible
It proved possible using the theory of infinite series converging to a limit value. Of course, Russell was as capable as anyone of understanding why the entablature should not be blown up in celebration of Achilles’ defeat in catching up with the tortoise. Why wasn’t he equally careful in the case of St. Anselm? I suspect that he was an excessively peaceable atheist, accepting disappointment when it seemed to require logic.* (* We are experiencing something similar today in the over-published retreat of the philosopher Antony Flew, who, in his old age, announced his conversion to a belief in a kind of deism (thus provoking a feverish repetition of this statement on the internet). In contrast, Russell was a great philosopher. He received the Nobel Prize. Flew’s alleged conversion will perhaps be rewarded with the Templeton Prize.
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