None of the scholastic 'arguments' were intended as polemical devices to convert non-believers. Nor were the psuedo-scientific hypothesis purporting to demonstrate some scientifically intelligible causal chain. They were exercises in intellectual edification that drew on various themes in the tradition of philosophy. But Anselm, Aquinas, and the rest, would never have relied on a philosophical argument to ground the truths of revelation, as they were by definition matters of faith. Given faith in the basic tenets, then the arguments are meaningful, but without that faith, they can only be empty words - and they all would have agreed with that. — Wayfarer
QUESTION (Jonathan): I read once on a blog post that the proofs for God were not intended as rhetorical or polemical proofs, in the sense of being intended to persuade unbelievers. They were more like edifying exercises for the faithful, but medieval theologians would not say that such philosophical arguments were sufficient to instill faith. Is this true?
DR. FESER: That is not true, and I suspect that the writers you read who said this misunderstand what “faith” means for a medieval theologian like Aquinas. The proofs were indeed meant to be completely rationally convincing even to someone who is initially coming to the question as an atheist. No faith is required at all.
The reason is that faith, as a thinker like Aquinas understands it, is a matter of believing something because it has been revealed by God. But before you can do that, you first have to establish that God really does exist in the first place and that he really has revealed something. And that requires evidence and argumentation. — Proofs for the Existence of God (#AMA with Dr. Edward Feser)
Marcel has been concerned with the question of how we know God from the time of his earliest writings. At the beginning of his Metaphysical Journal, he expresses Kantian thoughts which, with some modification, persist throughout his later works. At this point he is concerned to show that since God does not exist in space-time, he cannot be known as an object of the world is known. Consequently, he makes the typical existentialist statement that God “ is” but does not “ exist.” “ God does not exist,” he asserts; “ He is infinitely above existence.”
But before you can do that, you first have to establish that God really does exist in the first place and that he really has revealed something. And that requires evidence and argumentation. — Proofs for the Existence of God (#AMA with Dr. Edward Feser)
I disagree with Feser on that, at least in part because I think there were hardly any atheists in Aquinas' day, as belief in God was practically universal — Wayfarer
But a further question I have for Feser is that if those proofs are as apodictic as they purport to be then how is there any room for disagreement, when there clearly is? Unless you share the basic presuppositions, then you're not going to be persuaded by such arguments, in my view. — Wayfarer
there were theists of different types so articulating and defending the church's traditional position was seen as necessary. — Andrew M
I don't think Feser denies that these arguments require considerable effort to learn and understand. That's just philosophy for you. But for anyone in the Aristotelian tradition, as Feser is, such presuppositions aren't merely subjective, they are as open to rational scrutiny as anything else. — Andrew M
if one accepts the Aristotelean view of the world, in which notions like 'potential, 'essence' and 'directed' are believed to have meanings beyond their everyday pragmatic meanings, then the OP argument has some bite, and if one doesn't, then it has none. — andrewk
Speaking of these five classical ways, he notes that these arguments presuppose that we have “already grounded ourselves on God.” They attempt to bring to the level of discursive objectivity “an act of a wholly different kind.” Accordingly, he states his conviction that these arguments “are not ways, but blind ways, as one can have blind windows.”
One notes in such statements an echo of Kierkegaard’s assertion that what is known by faith cannot be explained by reason. Yet Marcel’s argument goes further than Kierkegaard’s: proofs are not only ineffectual, they are scandalous word-games about what cannot be voiced: The proofs are ineffectual precisely when they would be most necessary, when, that is, it is a question of convincing an unbeliever; conversely, when belief is already present and when, accordingly, there is a minimum of agreement, then they seem to serve no useful purpose.
If [a] man has experienced the presence of God, not only has he no need of proofs, he may even go so far as to consider the idea of a demonstration as a slur on what is for him a sacred evidence.
The explicit form of the argument is given below:
1. God is the greatest being imaginable
2. If God is the greatest being imaginable then God exists — TheMadFool
Certainly there were antagonists - Muslim and Jewish amongst them - but while they weren't Christian, they were also not atheist. ( I seem to recall that the Kalaam Cosmological argument was of Islamic origin.) — Wayfarer
Whether it can be demonstrated that God exists? Reply to Objection 1: The existence of God and other like truths about God, which can be known by natural reason, are not articles of faith, but are preambles to the articles; for faith presupposes natural knowledge, even as grace presupposes nature, and perfection supposes something that can be perfected. Nevertheless, there is nothing to prevent a man, who cannot grasp a proof, accepting, as a matter of faith, something which in itself is capable of being scientifically known and demonstrated. — St. Thomas Aquinas - The Summa Theologica
True, but what would it take to make the effort? Do you think a conscientious atheist would be interested in making the effort? And what would such an effort consist of? How would they get into a kind of mental space where such Aristotelian ways of thinking would be meaningful to them? — Wayfarer
scientific method attempts to eliminate ‘the subjective’ by concentrating exclusively on what can be objectively validated and measured. — Wayfarer
All fair points, but it's worth noting that Aquinas says the existence of God remains 'a matter of faith' — Wayfarer
And I think it's demonstrably not the case that the 'existence of God' can be demonstrated scientifically - although I suppose a Thomist could answer that in light of the very many great unknowns that the natural sciences are grappling with, it might be yet! — Wayfarer
Kuhn wanted to explain his own experience of reading Aristotle, which first left him with the impression that Aristotle was an inexplicably poor scientist (Kuhn 1987). But careful study led to a change in his understanding that allowed him to see that Aristotle was indeed an excellent scientist. This could not simply be a matter of literally perceiving things differently. Kuhn took the incommensurability that prevented him from properly understanding Aristotle to be at least partly a linguistic, semantic matter. — Thomas Kuhn (SEP)
In the ↪quote above Aquinas says, "The existence of God ... are not articles of faith". — Andrew M
Marcel argued ...that one cannot validly think of God as an existing object independent of ourselves, because this mode of thought would place him within the ambit of the world. When we think God as an object, we fail to distinguish him from the world or from ourselves. An 'objective God' reflects a Kantian conception of existence as limited only to space-time relations. Marcel expresses this in the following terms: When we suppose we are positing (in existence or still only objectively) the absolute independence of God, we are really on the contrary only binding up God with immediate consciousness.
Why read Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein or anyone at all? — Andrew M
On the one hand, the mission of science to arrive at truth sees the observer (subject/subjective) as a contamination to the objective study at hand. This is why, to have total “objectivity”, we have double/triple blind tests. This scientific method has proven to work extremely well when dealing with the outer, quantitative, material order. I for one am extremely grateful to science for its extraordinary success. — Pneuma
The basic rules and dynamics seem to change drastically between the two orders of inquiry. Science does not seem to be interested in the latter because of this perceived contamination. — Pneuma
The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop.
Science does not seem to be interested in the latter because of this perceived contamination. — Pneuma
...by treating it as an object of experience. — Wayfarer
God is the greatest thing we can think of. Things can exist only in our imaginations or they can also exist in reality.
Things that exist in reality are always better than the things that only exist in our imaginations.
If god existed only in our imaginations, he wouldn't be the greatest thing that we can think of, because God in reality would be better.
Therefore, God must exist in reality! — Harjas
Except for being no longer subjective, i.e. no longer what it actually is. Which is the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ in a nutshell, and another topic altogether. — Wayfarer
Without prejudice, it remains a possibility that science is actually investigating all there is to be investigated. — Pseudonym
The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is ‘something it is like’ to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.
All the argument can show - all every such ontological argument can show - is that if God existed, the argument would hold true. — StreetlightX
Every 'ontological argument for God' engages in this slight of hand: beginning with a material conditional and then silently dropping it along the way. — StreetlightX
There exists a being, such that, it exists.
Therefore, it exists. — StreetlightX
Or,
Imagine a being, such that it cannot fail to exist.
Therefore, it exists.
(That's Plantinga's version, only he obfuscates it a bit.) — SophistiCat
We imagine this thing to be all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, and real. If it isn't real then we can imagine something greater that is imagined to be all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, and ... really real? The argument doesn't make any sense. — Michael
Here is what Kant said, that existence is not a real predicate or property of a concept. — bloodninja
For the argument to work, we must imagine something that if it did exist, would exist in every possible world (or necessarily). If you imagine something that, if it exists, exists merely in one possible world, or five possible worlds, or even 9000 possible worlds, but not the actual world, then you have not imagined an absolutely perfect being, have you? — PossibleAaran
(1) If God exists then God necessarily exists. (G -> nG) [Partial Definition of God]
(2) If its logically possible that God exists then God exists (pG -> G) [From (1)]
(3) It is logically possible that God exists. (pG) [Premise]
(C) God exists (G) [From 1-3].
The first premise is supposed to be part of the definition of God. God is, by definition, an absolutely perfect being. He is omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good, eternal and if he exists, exists necessarily. I do myself wonder whether the notion of 'perfection' isn't merely subjective, and so cramming all of these properties into one definition is a little arbitrary. Still, I don't think this undercuts the argument in any serious way. — PossibleAaran
any kind of 'proof' or rhetorical argument, will always fail. — Wayfarer
Kant is disagreeing with this premise (bold) — bloodninja
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