I keep getting pulled away from an intended post [– U/D, Feb 18 2015: cf here — ] on FSCO/I and that famous little round reel as an undeniably concrete case in point:
I have to get around to it . . .
Anyway, a couple of days ago, given some recent exchanges in and around UD, I took time to post a William Lane Craig animation on morality, which has excited quite a debate.
It’s probably worth re-posting the animation:
[youtube OxiAikEk2vU]
Along the way, the significance of the IS-OUGHT gap and of the inherently good God, a necessary and maximally great being as the only serious candidate IS who can ground OUGHT has come up (e.g. cf here).
That leads me to note on a recent discussion by Benzmuller and Paleo of the use of a theorem prover to assess a form of Godel’s Ontological argument and its unsurprising verdict that such is quite valid. [U/D Jan 31] Where, let me observe that nothing, non-being, can have no causal powers; so if there ever were utter nothing, nothing would forever obtain. If something now is, something always was, something that is necessary. Thus, the crux of the matter in hand is to characterise what sort of serious candidate necessary being best fills the bill.
Thus, we may observe:
That is, if you would reject the argument, you need to challenge soundness and thus address the truth or otherwise of premises. Thence, back to worldview foundations:
That led me to recall a recent post in my personal blog on a more accessible form, following Plantinga et al:
. . . a serious candidate necessary being — flying spaghetti monsters etc need not apply — will be either impossible or actual.
Which, is where the existence of God, an eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omni-benevolent mind independent of other beings for existence and causally adequate to account for a credibly contingent observed cosmos that from core physics on up seems massively fine tuned for the existence of Carbon Chemistry, aqueous medium, cell based life comes in. (That is, the issue of a necessary being at the causal root of the observed cosmos is not merely arbitrarily pulled out of thin air and fevered imagination; we are trying to identify a best candidate to fill the bill, and a maximally great being with all great making properties to fullest aggregate extent and no lesser making properties is an obvious candidate to beat. Where also, as we saw, being eternal is directly connected to being necessary as a being. Also, a truly necessary being — a successful candidate — will exist in all possible worlds. [To see why, try to imagine a coherent world in which 2 + 3 = 5 does not hold, or by contrast one in which square circles exist.])
That is, we see already why it is so that God will either be impossible, or actual.
Another — simpler — way of putting the modal ontological argument helps us see that from a fresh angle:
P1: It is possible that a Maximally Great Being (MGB) exists [–> where such a being has greatmaking properties and no lesser making ones, to the maximal degree; and will be a successful serious candidate necessary being, NB]
P2: If it is possible that a MGB [–> inter alia a serious candidate NB] exists, then a MGB exists in some possible world
P3: If a MGB exists in some possible world, then a MGB exists in all possible worlds [–> As,
(P3.1) a serious NB candidate will be impossible or else will exist in any possible world, and
(P3.2) existence in one possible world directly indicates that the candidate being is possible, and where
(P3.3) something like a flying spaghetti monster will be material, composed of arranged parts etc, and will thus not be necessary . . . this also tells us something about constraints on what a NB can be like — a mind or abstract entities are serious candidates (and, immediately, we see that materialists or those deeply influenced by evolutionary materialism dressed up in a lab coat, will have endless conceptual difficulties with necessary beings; I suggest a glance here on in context to begin to see the inescapable incoherence and self-refutation of such evolutionary materialism. Never mind the lab coat and the boasts of being rational, evo mat for short is inescapably self refuting and irrational. This is already an important side benefit of reflecting on this topic.)]
P4: If a MGB exists in all possible worlds, then a MGB exists in the actual world [–> the one that we know to be instantiated, all around us]
P5: If a MGB exists in the actual world, then a MGB exists
________________________________________
C6: A MGB. . . which is in effect, God . . . exists.
So where does this complex chain of reasoning stand?
It is valid [as can be shown technically using propositional calculus . . . but is also intuitively plain], and in fact given the logic of being, possibility and contingency vs necessity, premises 2 – 5 are not generally controversial. The key issue, then, is the truth or otherwise of P1: it is possible (not IMPOSSIBLE) that a MGB exists.
You can of course reject P1, but at a price: showing (not merely asserting or skeptically implying or playing at knocking over strawmanised parodies, etc. . . . ) the impossibility of a MGB.
Tough row to hoe (especially after the same Plantinga sank the deductive problem of evil several decades ago . . . which used to be a favourite atheistical argument to claim that God as conceived by theists was impossible).
So, it seems the modal form ontological argument forces us to face serious issues and implications on what may be reasonably understood on the nature of God and how that works to ground morality. Which carries me back to no 135 in the WLC thread, where I clip:
1 –> As may be easily seen, worldviews must rest on finitely remote first plausibles, on the grounds that infinite regress and circularity are not acceptable. These will be start points for reasoning, best explanatory presuppositions that structure our worldviews on factual adequacy, coherence and explanatory power.
2 –> In this, one of our main things is the premise of moral government that comes out as soon as we see the consensus that fairness is binding. If you doubt, just watch quarrels, and listen to conscience. and listen to the ghost of that murdered child.
3 –> We notice that moral government by the golden rule rooted in the inherently good Creator-God, a necessary and maximally great being makes excellent sense of moral government and allows us to undergo personal and community reformation once we become humble and teachable in the face of evident reason, reality and truth. AKA, willing to admit that X is my neighbour, just as much a quasi-infinite value image bearer of God as I am. (Where also, there are ever so many good reasons otherwise to take the reality of God seriously. Start here for one way forward. Or, here if you want a more worldviews rooted base.)
4 –> In this frame, we expect conscience to be The Lord’s candle within, to be trained and followed, not snuffed out. And justice then teaches us much and grounds much at personal and family etc levels. Light shines far and wide from a city set on a hill in a dark world.
5 –> In the other corner, we find that dismissing God and seeking enlightenment everywhere else runs into the IS-OUGHT gap and the looming menace, might and manipulation — however prettified as institutional socialisation and whatnot — make ‘right.’
6 –> Linked, we see that general delusion is let loose in the mind as conscience’s testimony that we are under moral government must be dismissed as Ruse’s “illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate.”
7 –> So, on subjectivist- relativist views like this the credibility of the perceiving, reasoning, warranting, deciding, acting, knowing mind is undermined fatally in self-referential incoherence.
8 –> In short, purporting to be in enlightenment, we find ourselves instead in en-darkenment and confusion, prone to manipulation. Which, should ring a few warning bells in and of itself.
9 –> So the conclusion is obvious, the evident binding nature of ought and moral perceptions rooted in conscience, can be grounded on an ethical theism. Where, the rejection of such ends in evident self referential incoherence.
________________
On this alone, it would be reasonable to accept the premise of a world founded by an inherently good Creator God, a necessary and maximally great being, and to build life and community on that premise. Light dispels darkness.
But, some will argue, what about Euthyphro’s dilemma?
For that, we may observe how God as understood in light of the above simply is not subject to such an argument:
. . . the point of this dilemma is to try to suggest that theism or the like has no real answer to the is-ought gap either [as “good” is either the arbitrary diktat of god or else it is independent of god] . So in effect, we have to shrug, take moral feelings as a brute given, and try to work out the best compromise we can.
In that light, it is no surprise to see John Locke, in laying a foundation for what would become modern liberty and democracy, would take time in his 2nd Treatise on Civil Government, to cite “the judicious Anglican Canon Richard] Hooker”:
So, we see how we may have an understanding of God that is reasonable and reasonably grounds the heart of morality on our equally quasi-infinite value as beings made in the divine image with the precious gift of responsible freedom.
So, we can argue that light dispels darkness, and just so, we may see how that:
Micah 6:8 He has told you, O man, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,[b]
and to walk humbly with your God? [ESV]
So now, let us ponder, is all the huffing and puffing on how we cannot come to an objective foundation for morality, little more than the worked out implications of rejecting the well known but unpalatable alternative that OUGHT is grounded in the eternal IS of the inherently good Creator-God, a necessary and maximally great being who has granted us the gift of responsible freedom? So that, we all know but struggle with the premise that we should respect, cherish and treat neighbour as self? END
F/N: Some backdrop on the concept of an inherently good Creator-God, a necessary and maximally great being as the IS who grounds OUGHT. KF
OT: kf you might like this:
Ian Juby just posted a new interview with geneticist Jeffrey Tomkins
DNA slam dunk! – Jeffrey Tomkins’ interview – Jan. 30, 2015 – video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZoto0nyHho
Hi Kairosfocus, I have read many of your posts and you seem to be a very intelligent and persuasive individual. I appreciate your discussion of this argument, but I have some issues with the modern analytic revision of the ontological argument. I believe it is much stronger and more accurate in its classical form. If God is only the greatest being among all other beings, then his existence is still uncertain and certainly still demands an ontological explanation to escape the problem of infinite regress (further, I don’t think that a maximally great being must exist in any world and certainly not all worlds).
However, if God is, as Socrates (in your reference) and all of the Abrahamic traditions have traditionally claimed, not a great being like the Pagan gods or the God of deism, but the ground and source of all being — ultimate reality itself, that without nothing else is possible, and the source in which all things live and move and have their being, then He is not just possible but He is necessary. Without God, who is being itself, nothing could exist at all — in other words, God is not just a maximally great being who is potentially part of some possible world; God is the necessary and eternal fullness of being who must impart being to any possible world for it to exist at all. Without God existence is ultimately absurd. Anyway, thanks for all your writing.
Hi Lilly
You have raised an interesting point and there is quite the debate out there.
I’d say, the first thing we learn in detail of the God of the Scriptural tradition is his covenant name, I AM THAT I AM.
The self existent, the eternal, the ultimate being.
I take that as encouragement that speaking of God as being does not rob him of his dignities . . . but then the One I believe in hung on a cross in agony and a state of being accursed.
To be redeemer.
And, BTW, note the reference to necessity of being. Which, inter alia specifically excludes dependence on any external enabling factor. Which is part of the pivotal point that a serious candidate will be either impossible or actual.
And in our day, having a choice to work through like that is in the end a surer footing for confidence, as it is not seemingly dogmatic or arbitrary.
In short, I am responding in terms that today’s people can relate to.
Thanks for thoughts.
KF
BA, looks like a trove out there, thanks. KF
Imagine a maximally great Island. You’d be there. Are you?
Lilly does bring up a great point. God cannot be just another being among beings, not even the maximally greatest being among other beings. There is no “scale of being” that includes God.
To reiterate, God is unlike any other being in that God is the one and only source of being itself. This can be said of no other being. God is uncreated. Everything else is created. That’s a pretty clear demarcation.
DDD, the parody fails, for the same reason a flying spaghetti monster is a non-starter. Such is a composite, contingent being and so cannot be necessary. Put another way, nothing, non-being has no causal powers. If ever there were an utter nothing, there would forever be just that. So, for something to be today, something always was, a necessary being. The real question at stake is, what is the nature of that root necessity. Especially, in a cosmos in which we find ourselves to have rights, so we quarrel by appealing to fairness, and find evil real and objectionable etc which all point to our being under moral government and needing a root of the good. A maximally great, necessary being fills that bill. Such a being would be inherently good and our creator. Also, maximal greatness and the implications of coherence of core characteristics for such a necessary being to be possible throw a lot of light on the idea of God in theology. As just one point, I AM THAT I AM and eternality reflect a claim of necessity of being. KF
Mung, yes, that distinction is there. Howbeit, it is there in the context of things that are. Be-ings, to underscore. KF
PS: Merriam-Webster:
1 a : the quality or state of having existence
b (1) : something conceivable as existing (2) : something that actually exists (3) : the totality of existing things
c : conscious existence : life
2
: the qualities that constitute an existent thing : essence; especially : personality
3
: a living thing; especially : person
KF.
Imagine a maximally destructive force. What, you’re still here?
😀
Most sophisticated thinkers I know (both of them) know that WLC is trying to “define things into existence” and he’s conflating imaginary with possible things.
DDD,
nope again.
It is a parody or strawman caricature of the modal ontological argument — and the champion BTW is former American Philosophy Association president Alvin Plantinga (so your ad hom fails to even target the right person) — to suggest it is defining something into existence.
What you need is to ponder modes of existence, to understand the underlying issue. Let me clip a comment from earlier this morning, in answer to Piotr:
A true nothing is not an adequate Creator, and neither is Krauss’ quantum foam multiverse re-labelled incorrectly as nothing. Not in a cosmos that sits at a locally deeply isolated operating point, pointing to serious fine tuning that enables C-Chemistry, aqueous medium cell-based life. And not a cosmos in which creatures such as ourselves have responsible freedom of mind and the moral guidance of conscience.
A necessary being is required at the root of the cosmos and it needs to be adequate for a world of mind and conscience. Reducing mind to blind computation on mechanical substrates does not account for such.
It is in that context that the joint discussion of ontological roots and moral roots, the IS and the OUGHT takes its force.
No, a flying spaghetti monster or an imagined perfect island — both being contingent, patently so — the like is not a serious candidate necessary being. We have to have something like a mind.
And no a maximally destructive entity (in the sense of evil and chaos) does not fill the bill to ground a world in which OUGHT is credibly real. On pain of self referential absurdity on trying to reduce the awareness of being under moral government to illusion.
Oddly, that we deal with the Dread Judge of all, does fill the bill: the ultimate plumbline of being true and upright is an aspect of maximal greatness. But there is no reason whatsoever to infer from that being the root of purposelessly destructive chaos and frustration of potential and purpose. Which points to the nature of evil as inherently derivative and twisted: the frustration, perversion or privation of the good.
So, no, the parody objection fails.
The argument is valid, and a necessary being at the root of the cosmos is causally required. A cosmos that includes OUGHT and responsible mindedness.
So, you are back to the issue that a serious candidate necessary being will be impossible — containing such core characteristic contradictions as render such a being not possible to be — or actual.
Evolutionary Materialist atheism and its fellow travellers are implicitly committed to the proposition that an inherently good Creator God, a necessary [–> thus inter alia eternal] and maximally great being is IMPOSSIBLE. Thence, to the proposition that our sense of OUGHT is delusional, i.e. it sets loose general delusion in our conscious, self-aware mindedness.
However, there are no firewalls in the mind.
So, it undermines responsible free mind, hence reason, warrant, knowledge, science and more.
Credibly, it is self-referentially absurd.
KF
KairosFocus, You are painful to converse with. I hope for your own financial well-being your job does not require much communication.
I shall let you review the many critiques of the ontological argument(s) on your own. Wikipedia lists some examples. You will be unmoved.
But I must comment on:
“It is a parody or strawman caricature of the modal ontological argument — and the champion BTW is former American Philosophy Association president Alvin Plantinga (so your ad hom fails to even target the right person) — to suggest it is defining something into existence.”
Before you play your “Alvin Plantinga” gotcha, you may want to reread your own words: “…I took time to post a William Lane Craig animation..”. They’re in the original post (by you). Of course neither AP nor WLC proffered the first ontological argument.
Next, learn what an Ad Hominem argument is. My comment “Most sophisticated thinkers I know (both of them) know that WLC is trying to “define things into existence” and he’s conflating imaginary with possible things.” does not attack the man at all, it is a statement of fact. Had I said “Jesus freaks like WLC always get thins wrong”, that would have been Ad Hominem. I do no entangle his character with an argument. I’m sure he’s perfectly nice – but he is wrong on this issue.
You might have got some milage from “Appeal to authority”, but not really.
cheers,
D^3.
DDD,
I will set the personalities to one side, save to note that these are difficult issues and are not going to be reasonably answered by pretending that absence of a simplistic answer opens the door to a dismissal. (Especially, on you no writa da Inglish rite.)
FYI, one serious definition of philosophy is that it is the dept of learning that accepts the hard questions — they are the ones that have no easy, good answers — and then tries to answer them based on logical discussion informed by first issues in light of the comparative difficulties of alternative answers. Key criteria include factual adequacy, coherence and balanced explanatory power . . . neither an ad hoc patchwork nor simplistic.
The ontological issue on the table is a case in point of such a hard question. (And no, on such a matter, with its notorious biases Wikipedia is not a particularly good source, nor would be YouTube or most popular level Atheism sites etc. For that matter most Parsons will not have sufficient phil to make a serious stab at it.)
Next, the modal ontological argument is immune to the sorts of parodies you have posed.
An island of perfection is a composite, thus inherently contingent being and is THEREFORE not a serious candidate to be a necessary being. And yes, that error has been on the table for what, 800 years?
Flying spaghetti monsters etc, as noted in the OP, fall under the same problem.
A maximally great destroyer — note, this speaks to core nature — is obviously contingent and also credibly not great. Indeed, we should note a longstanding insight on the nature of evil as inherently derivative: that which is the privation, frustration, perversion of the good.
Before going on I simply note that if you imagine acknowledging an intellectual debt is blind appeal to authority, that speaks inadvertent volumes. No authority is better than facts, reasoning and underlying first plausibles, and so we are back where we began: addressing, even in fairly brief form, on the merits — and that moves well beyond discredit and dismiss tactics, onto the grounds of worldviews warrant and foundations. (Where, no true Scotsman, by implication or suggestion, is in fact a dismissive attack to the man in the context of dealing with a public intellectual with a PhD in philosophy. As in by implication you tried to distinguish, to his dismissal, WLC, PhD Philosophy and noted public defender of theism including the modal ontological argument, and “sophisticated thinkers” by raising a point that, sorry, is ill-informed: defining an “imaginary” God into existence.)
I will pause to amplify a bit on being, contingency and necessity (in further answer to the ill informed objection of trying to define things into existence):
1 –> First, as the OP notes, nothing — non-being — can have no causal powers. So if ever there had been a genuine utter nothing, such would forever obtain.
2 –> Patently, something now is, so something always was.
3 –> something, that is the root of the reality we experience, a necessary being.
4 –> In our conceptually impoverished day, that needs expansion:
5 –> So, reality is rooted in a necessary being of some sort, and serious candidates to be such will either be impossible or else actual.
6 –> The matter under discussion, properly, is which candidate is successful as root of reality. This is the context of the modal ontological argument and linked considerations.
7 –> God is of course such a serious candidate and those who reject him need to understand that they imply that they have good reason to hold him impossible. (Post the collapse of the deductive form of the problem of evil, that should give thoughtful agnostics or atheists or fellow travellers serious pause.)
8 –> In that context, a modal argument takes its force: those who have reasonable grounds to accept that an inherently good Creator-God, a necessary and maximally great being as the root of reality is possible, have reason to be confident that such would be actual. And,
9 –> they have good reason to challenge those who reject that reality of God to show good reason as to why the eternal God as seriously understood for millennia, is an impossible being of the order of a square circle.
10 –> Thus, parodies about defining God into existence collapse. It truns out the burden of proof is asymmetrical, one it is understood that the cosmos demands a necessary being as root cause, and that God is a serious candidate to be a necessary being.
11 –> But, what if this simply means, “God” is another name for the cosmos or something like that?
12 –> This is a more serious question, worthy of reflection.
13 –> The observed cosmos, of course credibly began and in any case is based on matter-energy and space-time, which are riddled with contingency of being. So we are talking about the alternatives of some root ground of being with maybe an emergent physical world or the like.
14 –> Again, a serious alternative, pantheism or panentheism or the like.
15 –> The two critical worldview issues with such views are: the cosmos reflects purposeful intelligent design for C-chemistry, aqueous medium cell based life per fine tuning, and the issue of a cosmos in which the one and the many have to find coherent explanation.
16 –> Cutting to the chase scene, design points to purposeful mind, thus person. Likewise, the balance of unity and diversity in which we as responsibly free individuals have significance points to our being made in the image of God. Probe
has— oops, wayback machine — a useful article as a launchpad for further thought (though, this goes beyond the proper focus of UD well into specifics of systematic theology):17 –> In short, we are here at a threshold to a much broader and deeper discussion. Time to draw back to the focal matter.
18 –> It urns out that the pivotal question is, why is there something instead of nothing? This points to a necessary being as root of reality and the key force of the modal discussion as putting on the table that in that context, as God is a serious candidate necessary being, if he is possible, he is actual.
19 –> So also, if one wishes to reject God as real, s/he needs to ponder soberly if there is good reason to hold God impossible. God is a question that cannot responsibly be dodged by demanding, YOU prove his reality to me or I can act as though he is imaginary, etc.
20 –> It also allows us to draw out significant understandings of the nature of God, and of ourselves as creatures under responsible freedom and moral government.
21 –> I think I should pause to cite someone else who was not exactly writing to give simplistic pat answers, Newton in the General Scholium to his Principia in which he presented his synthesis on motion in the heavens and on earth through the laws of gravitation and motion . . . in part an exercise on the question of the one and the many:
Food for thought . . .
KF
A maximally great destructive force cannot explain itself. In fact, it’s impossible to combine maximum greatness and maximum annihilation. It’s a square circle.
A maximally great positive force, however, an explain itself – as it can explain the existence of all things.
KF
True – it’s a question of Being or Actualization from potential existence.
The fact that something exists points to the necessity of that which gives existence.
RDFish avoids these waters. One wonders why.
Mung, the rhetorical gambit is, you no writa da inglish rite so I can ignore. KF
Your weird parody of a token-foreigner doesn’t make any sense. The accusation is that YOU might be the one, whose native language is not English.
Here’s a correction:
RDF: I think it might be a language problem – is English your native language?
KF: Ya nein, I komme from German reich sauerkraut wienerschnitzel ignore everyzzing I zzaay!
JWT, The accusation is made to dismiss without consideration. In a context where actually addressing the matter would be most inconvenient for the party trying the dismissal game. And, while I confess to parody, that’s not too far off from some Spanish speakers I have heard struggling with “de Ingles.”* KF
*Ingles is the Spanish word for “English.” But English speakers unfamiliar with that will struggle, so I used a bit of poetic licence. Ditto, for “de” vs da, which sounds closer. In my experience, such Spanish speakers tend to be brief in what they say; German speakers, I presume, would fill out with a few details as you have.
It’s not a weird parody, KF. It’s the humorous colloquial rendering. You were right to use it. These people turn to pedantry – in this case, misconceived, to boot – when they are on the losing side of an argument.
Poe’s law, named after its author Nathan Poe, is a literary adage which stipulates that without a clear indicator of an author’s intended sarcasm it becomes impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of extremism.
KF, vocabulary-wise, English-speakers have one of the richest languages this side of the black stump (to use an Aussie expression), yet English must generally be among the least gifted linguists, either side of the blacks stump. How about the Elephant and Castle for the Infanta of Castile, as an example?!?!
It’s kind of strange in a way, since the English and their Australian, Kiwi, Canadian and US descendants have a gift for metaphor that Shakespeare and Eliot must have envied. It’s usually in the form of slang – the best ones indicating a rich narrative, all the more comical for being tacit.
Skram, there is a rhetorical tactic, increasingly prevalent among certain objectors to design thought, that wants to suggest that what many of us have to say is incomprehensible. In this case, someone challenged the notion of contingent existence being a reality in the observed cosmos. I pointed out that contingency of being pivots on having external enabling causal factors (think: fire triangle or better yet tetrahedron) which is what leads to presence/absence in possible worlds, thence having things like a beginning — only, to have the rhetorical gambit played that “you no writa da inglish rite.” The Poe problem . . . if any . . . is on the part of another party, I suggest. KF
@Alex
The point is the parody doesn’t make any sense. KF is accused of being the foreigner. Yet kf’s parody portraits RDF as the foreigner, meaning kf is now the one using the “rhetorical gambit”.
@kf:
So you’ve decided to join the “dismissal game” club by dismissing the language barrier?? RDF is chatty, just not with you.
JWT, passing back. I note, turnabout in such a context is fair play. And, meanwhile the underlying double issue of the moral and modal ontological questions are at the pivot of current civilisational disputes and agendas. To our peril. KF
I know I’m late to the party but I’ve always wondered why the Flying spaghetti monster hasn’t been showcased far and wide as the de facto nail in the coffin for the bar room Internet atheist.
It’s such a blatant illustration of how uneducated they are of the issues at hand. With aliases like ” logic man” and “reason777” , they advertise themselves as the pinnacle of human thought but they seem to have no idea these topics have been vetted for over 2000 years by some of the greatest thinkers that have ever lived. Like someone said there is a God and no one thought any deeper than that.
Because that’s precisely what these pot heads did. They gave zero thought to it snd their minions all repeated it as if it was a work of genius. Obviously, real atheist and agnostic philosophers must have crapped on this self refuting garbage as they did Dawkins, Krauss and Hawkings childish rants, but I haven’t seen it disappear– most likely because it’s direct blasphemy and mockery of God–which depraved fools love.