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Q&A: Questions about the Ontological Proof

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Originally published:
This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.

Questions about the Ontological Proof

Question

Hello Rabbi,
I read your booklet on the ontological proof, and there were a few things there that I didn’t understand at all.
And the first is:
I’ve always had a problem with the ontological proof, namely that the fact that you define something as needing to exist doesn’t make it so. Reality doesn’t care about your definitions.
Or in other words: existence is not a property,
or one could argue against it that the statement “God is a perfect being that exists” is a nice sentence, but it doesn’t apply in reality—you can’t just define existence.
Only at the end of the booklet, in the appendix, did the Rabbi address the counterclaim that existence is not a property.
Obviously!! Why did the Rabbi wait until the end to remember that? In my opinion this is the biggest problem with the ontological proof—how did the Rabbi simply ignore it at the beginning and go into a million other things?? How is that not obvious?
Second:
Even apart from the first question, this method of proof leads to strange things (which in my opinion stem from the fact that existence is not really a property).
After all, I can define the perfect island as an island whose area is 3 dunams and is entirely full of hamburgers…. and the answers that say that defining a perfect island is a limitation because we defined an island and therefore it doesn’t apply, blah blah blah, seem to me like evasions instead of really giving an answer (and I think that in the end it will be possible somehow to define something that is not God but will still exist), and the truth is that there is no answer because the method of proof here is flawed.
Third:
In the middle of the booklet you brought some passage from Steinitz and rejected it.
My friends and I tried to figure out what was written there. We couldn’t understand what Steinitz said, how you rejected it, and what you answered.
Thank you very much

Answer

I suggest you wait for the book. Things will be clarified more there. As for the question of why I didn’t write something right at the beginning, it’s because nothing here is really simple. From a didactic standpoint, I wanted to show the strengths and weaknesses of the argument. See my book when it comes out.

Discussion on Answer

The Questioner from the Land of Uz (2018-10-08)

When will it come out?

Michi (2018-10-08)

They’re working on it. Hard for me to say. I hope less than a year.

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