New on the site: Michi-bot. An intelligent assistant based on the writings of Rabbi Michael Avraham.

The ontological argument

שו”תCategory: generalThe ontological argument
asked 8 years ago

Hello Rabbi, first I wanted to thank the Rabbi for the books and articles I read and really enjoyed, thank you.
I thought perhaps to attack the argument from the first part of it that claims that it is possible to conceive of an infinity that is the most comprehensive infinity, after all, such an infinity cannot be conceived because every infinity that can be conceived already exists an infinity that is greater than it, as we see in mathematics, that the power of the infinity of the groups of numbers that can be created from an infinite amount of a number will be stronger than the previous infinite amount of numbers, etc. And there is also a simple understanding that for every reality as great as it is possible to conceive, there is a reality that is greater than it, such as for example that we cannot conceive of what is at the end of the universe because it cannot be that there is nothing there, and there must be something there. I would love to know what the Rabbi thinks about this, thank you very much.


Discover more from הרב מיכאל אברהם

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Leave a Reply

0 Answers
מיכי Staff answered 8 years ago
What argument? From what part? Of what? What is this about?

Discover more from הרב מיכאל אברהם

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

tkhag replied 8 years ago

I meant the ontological proof for the existence of God. I saw this proof in the Rabbi's book "Two Carts and a Balloon," and the Rabbi said that all the attacks on the proof that the Rabbi knows are on the part that says that existence is an attribute and therefore it cannot be that God lacks the attribute of existence. And if I understood correctly, the Rabbi said that existence is not an attribute and therefore it is not correct to say that someone who does not exist is more lacking than someone who does exist. And I thought of attacking the proof from its basic premise that it is conceivable that we cannot conceive of anything greater than it, because after all, anything that we can conceive of can be conceived of as greater than it. (And I brought this as support from the fact that in mathematics, every infinity has an infinity whose power is greater than it), and I wanted to know if that sounded right.

מיכי Staff replied 8 years ago

For a more detailed analysis of the evidence, you can see the first notebook here on the site.
As for your claim:
First, it is not clear that any such infinity can really occur to us.
Second, it is possible to think of the greatest infinity at least in a potential sense (the limit of all Cantor infinities). It may depend on the question of what it means to conceive. I can conceive the concept of “the greatest infinity”. Is that called having conceived it? Maybe.

Leave a Reply

Back to top button