h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: God!? - A1914103
Author: chilliwilli - U517805

A little subject for discuss this was written during my first philosopy class. My Prof. was the best and I enjoied the class so much I am planning after this semester to go and take as many Phil. classes as my current scholl offers. Please let me know what you think of this. Oh open-minded responses only. No bashing please.

Hi chilliwilli!

I confess to not having read your entry yet. I will when I've a little more time. I must warn you, though, that there have been many entries with this type of theme, so it might be worth checking whether your entry duplicates an already edited one.

Also, this type of entry tends to generate ... how can I put this? ... strongly polarised opinions.

Thank you. I suspected that I would get polarized views however I do not want any meanness toward another persons point of view frankly this is an argument/dicussion regarding an argument put foward almost 1000 years ago that has been debated ever since.

Had a brief look at the entry, which looks good, but I'll read it more thoroughly in a minute.

Although there are two unedited entries on this subject at A764264 and A768189 , there doesn't seem to be an edited entry, so you're clear there.

Noggin

Noggin

Your first example of unedited entries is the worng one I think. I was given an entry on Charleston Mass.? Is the second one simple a link someone put in from another site or was that written by them?????

Thanks Nog


Gregg

It's A764624 and there's a very interesting thread here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/F91717?thread=188461&latest=1 I think this was the one I thought was edited. ><>o/~

Sorry. The first one should have read A764624

The second has effectively been deleted by its original author.

Should have checked.

You could do with checking out Guide ML at A264520 This will enable you to break up a fairly long text with headers and such like, which will make it easier to read.

Kant's argument is essentially that existence is not a predicate; you can't make something exist by defining it as being something that exists.

I also read somewhere that the argument can be analysed into two separate arguments.

1) God exists. Therefore God exists.

2) If God exists, then God exists

Nice to meet a fellow philosopher

Noggin

Noggin

I am a simple student of philosopy. I am brand new and this particular argument caught my fancy in my last class and I have been doing some toying with it since. Thanks for the help with locating other items of interest.
I am somewhat computer jinxed, not illiterate, jinxed. No matter what I do it never works out the way it is supposed to, by that I mean when installing a program it will freeze halfway no matter how many times i try. When I get frustrated I call my wife in and she then installs it for me without a hitch so I doubt I will be able to get all the fancy stuff to work for me but not from lack of trying.

Thanks for you help

I've had a look through now, and I'm not sure what the big deal is about 'God being greater than He is'. (Or She is, come to that!)

Hi Chilliwilli,

Good article. I would say that this should be a cert for the Edited Guide. However, you really should change the title. Something like 'St. Anslem's Ontological Argument' would be good, but 'God!?' doesn't really tell anyone what is in the article.

It is also a little hard to follow in places. Putting quotes in itallics and using sub-headers (both require GuideML) would be helpfull. Remember that (most of) your potential readership hasn't done a philosophy course and those run-one sentances full of obsolete grammar ('that which nothing greater than can be' used as a 6-word noun) can be very confusing.

Good luck with it,

Gif

Thanks, I will re-edit the title good point and I will look into making it easier for all to follow along with.

bertrand russel disproved it by thinking roughly along these lines:

existence is not a predicate like goodness or wisdom. take this example:

smith has two dogs. one is brown and exists. the other is black and does not exist.

or another way

we can conceive what a unicorn is: a horse with a pointy spike. wewould recognise one if we saw one. but we still dont think they exist.

basically, the ontological argument is a nice idea, but ti doesnt work.

i havent read your article fully, cos i tire of the ontological argument. but the entry should porbably still go in.

incidentally, im doing the teleological argument this week, so i might do an entry on that...

Shouldn't this be titled ...Ontological Arguments? It seems from what I read here there's two: one from existence, and one from necessity.

the argument from necessity is actually a cosmological argument...

ontos is greek for existence...

oh, i will get round to your article on sherried eggs v soon. i split up with my girlfriend and didnt feel like doing it for ages...sorry...

So, it should be Anselm's Ontological and Cosmological Arguments?



I was highly amused with the speculation that I might beat Bels' longest time between acceptance and publication record. Don't be in too much of a hurry now!

no. the necessity bit of anselm's argument is just an answer to gaunilo. because god has this aseity, he is real, arges anselm, rather than imaginary, like the supposed mot perfect of all islands...

in honesty, i didnt really understand that bit...

I agree that the argument does not stand up (all it does is prove that the idea of God is not the same thing as God, or that we mortals cannot have a complete understanding of God). However, I was saving that discussion for when the article gets Edited.

If there is a 'standard' refutation (or refutations), perhaps they could be mentioned - but that would not, in my opinion, make this article unsuitable for the EG.

Argument bad, article good.

Gif

It's a nicely worded article Chilliwilli but it does peter out at the end. It would appear that Kant did sufficiently demolish the ontological argument, so I for one wouldn't be in favour of leaving it open-ended as you do.

Furthermore it is a Bad Move to cite lecture hand-outs as a bibliography. You can do better than that! Or do without any bibliography.

The look of the entry could be tidied up, you are missing some apostrophes, and Latin phrases like 'a priori' should be put in italics.

Nice to hear of Gaunilo's refutation. Steven Pinker uses a similar argument against the idea that intelligence must evolve wherever a planet supports life, in "How the mind works". Just because we find our kind of intelligence the greatest thing in the world, doesn't mean it's universally bound to evolve. An elephant could argue that the greatest thing to have is a prehensile trunk, and then conclude that wherever there is life they will eventually evolve trunks.

One confusion that needs to be clarified is the different values put on the word "great". An unmanufactured bomb may be better, but as bombs go, the more destructive they are the greater they are.

The whole argument hinges on the question "does existence make a thing greater"? and this points up the problem of what Gilbert Ryle called the category-error. The category-error is committed by the visitor who has been shown all the colleges, chapels, theatres, playing fields, lecture and examination halls, residential and dining rooms and so on in Oxford, and then asks to be shown the university as well. Similarly "existing" (if it is treated as a predicate at all) is just not in the category of things that make a concept great. Anselm thought it was; and our job is to see if we can put into words what it was that Anselm was after. His added-value existence seems to be like the value that would be added to the concept a unicorn if one was suddenly discovered, or a coelacanth when it was. But God isn't to be found among the creatures, the way coelacanths are, and unicorns aren't.

Thanks for those points to coreect and improve this I realy apprec. them and am trying to find the time and patients to learn the guideML system but and coming up short on both. Soon I will go in and correct the grammar errors and the bib I left in by mistake.