Q&A: The Ontological Argument
The Ontological Argument
Question
You recently mentioned Anselm's ontological argument, and I couldn't help wondering: how is this different from any paradox? Did the tortoise overtake Achilles? Did the teacher fail to create a surprise quiz for the students because by Friday it was no longer a surprise? (I assume you know what I'm referring to.) True, one could argue that in those paradoxes there are contradictory facts standing in opposition, which is not the case regarding God, where there is no actual contradiction here, and it cannot be clearly seen that He does not exist, so who says this is even a paradox? But still, doesn't this say something about the structure of this kind of argument? It says that what you're claiming is actually an admission to the other side, and an argument in the exact opposite direction from what you want to say. Like the book paradox and dozens of other examples, where we tend to assume there is some error or unreality in such a case/argument; because if a paradox can contradict facts, that says something important about the whole move itself.
Answer
It really is no different from any paradox. But in order to reject a paradoxical argument, you have to point out the mistake in the inference. When there is a valid logical inference that takes us from non-factual premises to a factual conclusion, you can't just insist that this can't be done. If you claim there is a problem in the logic of the argument, then by all means point it out.
Discussion on Answer
I didn't understand the question. Gödel's argument does not derive a fact from a paradox, but from a collection of premises. When you have a valid argument, two options are open to you: 1. Accept the premises and the conclusion. 2. Reject the premises (at least one of them) and the conclusion.
Of course there is also the possibility of suspecting that the argument is not valid even though you can't point to the problem.
The decision that this is a paradox is yours,
and that is not because of the conclusion of the argument but because of its character (that it derives a fact from non-factual premises).
Now again you can decide between two options: 1. Accept the argument and conclude that a fact can be derived from non-factual premises. 2. Suspect that something there is invalid and not draw that conclusion.
As long as you haven't pointed out the mistake, this is only an ungrounded suspicion. It is more reasonable to reject your hypothesis that one cannot derive a fact from such premises.
If you're asking whether one may suspect an error in the logic of the argument—certainly yes. People can make mistakes.
The question is whether there can be paradoxes where it's *impossible* to point to a flaw in their argument—not just that in practice we haven't managed to, but that it really is impossible—and yet they still lead to false facts.
No. Unless the premises are problematic. True premises and a valid argument necessarily lead to a true conclusion.
Fashionably late… I'd be glad to know why K is not right (and also Y, the questioner). Many paradoxes cannot be refuted, and there is no point one can indicate in their non-factual premises and say that it is false or problematic, and yet they still lead us to a conclusion that contradicts reality. Like the famous example of Achilles and the tortoise—it seems pretty clear that the structure is problematic even though it's impossible to say why. If so, the whole "institution of paradoxes" stands under a question mark, on unstable ground.
In this case, the paradox comes even before the attempt to determine that God exists. It's really the move where you tell a person who argued for the non-existence of X that he is actually denying Y. People obviously aren't always precise in their arguments, but here we changed the very subject he was talking about, regardless of the quality of his argument.
In other words, isn't this deceptive structure of the argument ultimately just a deception, even if I haven't managed to explain why? (Apparently that's a very integral part of a deception…)
And does the Rabbi mention the argument in the new book too? (By the way, when is it coming out? Waiting eagerly.)
Achilles and the tortoise is a paradox whose solution is really very easy. Where did you get the idea that it can't be solved?
It's true that even if we haven't found the flaw in a paradoxical argument, we won't necessarily adopt its conclusion. Sometimes we'll assume there is a defect and just haven't managed to find it.
I didn't understand the rest at all, and I no longer remember what was going on here (with all due respect to fashion and lateness).
You didn't miss much and there wasn't much to understand….
The second sentence you wrote is important: "Even if we haven't found a flaw in the argument, we won't necessarily adopt its conclusion."
After all, following the objections to the argument, you claimed that it isn't a necessary argument but one with high probability in your view. The question is whether, in your opinion, the very fact that there is a possibility that the argument is no different from dozens of other paradoxes and that one need not necessarily accept its conclusion—doesn't that undermine the strength of the claim?
I also asked whether the argument made it into the new book.
Which argument?
The ontological argument (the title of the question…)
In the booklet you brought several significant objections, but you thought that the high probability still means the argument should be accepted.
And I'm adding: doesn't its paradoxical structure further cast doubt on the probability that the proof is correct?
It does cast doubt, and I think I wrote that too. The ontological proof is in the first booklet, at the beginning of the first book.
I don't want to grind through the discussion again too much after it's already been exhausted… but I'll just ask this: if an incorrect factual conclusion can be derived from a paradox, and we can't point to the actual move in it and identify the precise wrong step, doesn't that mean that paradoxes can lead to incorrect facts? So true, here you can't point to anything, but that is the essence of the question of God's existence—that you can't see it and prove it empirically through our senses. And doesn't that say about the argument that it isn't one hundred percent correct as it claims to be? (That is basically its whole essence.) Since it could be drawing conclusions that aren't necessarily true, even though there's no mistake to point to in the structure of the claim, again.