From: "[email protected] [FairfieldLife]" <[email protected]>
Re "How did God acquire the male sex ('Him')?":
Can't you guess?
Re "Russell and co., certainly did not care for metaphysics of the
scholasticism sort, but I doubt the arguments about being would have scared
him":
Funnily enough Russell himself once recalled that when he was a young man he
was one day mulling over the ontological argument and it suddenly hit him with
the force of a revelation that the argument was valid and so God must indeed
exist. That sense of conviction only lasted a few minutes and then he started
seeing flaws in the reasoning . . . He never looked back.
The ontological argument - which relies on using the semantics of language to
insist on momentous consequences - has always lent itself to parody. For
example:
God is the Perfect Being, so . . .Nothing is more perfect than God, so . . .God
is more perfect than Barry, so . . .Nothing is more perfect than Barry, so . .
.Barry is God.
Silly wabbit. Barry is FAR more perfect than God, for the simple reason that
God doesn't exist.
---In [email protected], <anartaxius@...> wrote :
---In [email protected], <s3raphita@...> wrote :
Re: "I do not understand how a vacuum cleaner would have an accidental
existence, considering what it takes to bring one into existence. This seems to
be an unsupported assumption taken as an axiom.":
By "accidental" they don't always imply a chance event. They mean "contingent",
ie "*not* necessary but dependent on something else". Vacuum cleaners had to be
invented by someone.
Re "Also defining something as having necessary existence does not prove that
that existence is necessary. For example eye liner makeup could be defined as
having necessary existence.":
Eye-liner could indeed by *defined* as having necessary existence but no one
would fall for it as it clearly doesn't. It's trickier with GOD as it does
strike one as odd that God should just *happen* to exist. Surely any God that
measures up to what the religious have thought of as the Perfect Being couldn't
depend for His existing on a lucky break or on something outside Him?
How did God acquire the male sex ('Him')?. That slip alone reveals a certain
limitation and bias imposed by thought on the concept, and would imply there is
something outside of God that shaped Perfect Being a certain way, in a
dependent way. To my way of thinking there is no way there could be a verbal
answer to the question of being.
I agree it's a sneaky argument. It is amusing though that modern logic was
developed in order to defuse the ontological argument so it clearly scared the
shit out of Bertrand Russell & co.
Russell and co., certainly did not care for metaphysics of the scholasticism
sort, but I doubt the arguments about being would have scared him a bit, and
Russell did seem to have a sense of metaphysics, though not of the religious
kind, but a priori knowledge, unlike some of his followers like Carnap and
Ayer, who sought to eliminate metaphysics entirely. The curious thing for me is
as a result of experiences resulting from meditation, my ability to conceive of
metaphysics simply vanished one day. Perhaps time will bring a different
understanding at some point, but the merging of what I used to call
transcendence with normal everyday experience makes it ludicrous to imagine
something beyond what is everyday life. This certainly seems contrary to what
people seem to expect from this process, but it would be a logical outcome of
unification. This does not mean new aspects of experience could not be
discovered, such as the kind of knowledge gained using a powerful telescope to
extend the senses and interpreting that using mathematics and logic, but these
things are not beyond the awareness but part and parcel of it.
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