'I Think, Therefore God Exists' | The Ontological Argument (AFG #5)

in the 11th century Anselm of Canterbury attempted to propose a deductive logical argument for the existence of God using rationality alone God is the greatest maximal being Anselm argued therefore he exists this came to be known as the ontological argument and here's a video from William Lane Craig cyou Tube channel attempting to explain it here it is God can be defined as a maximally great be if something were greater than God then that beam would be God and in order to be maximally great a maximally great being would have to be all-powerful all-knowing and morally perfect in every possible world so the first problem that we run into is that these properties are contradictory and paradoxical ok firstly we have omnipotence nothing can truly be all-powerful this is a common philosophical thought and you've probably heard it best exemplified in the famous dilemma could God create a rock so heavy that he couldn't lift it now this dilemma is usually brought up when discussing the nature of God's omnipotence on the presumption that he actually exists and the best solution to this problem - most people would seem to be that maybe God is a maximally powerful being but not all-powerful and if you're not familiar with the dilemma the two possible answers are either a that God can create the rock so heavy that he can't lift it but if he can't lift it he's not omnipotent and B that he can't make the rock which means he's also not omnipotent and the same thing goes for omniscience being all-knowing that is if you couple it with omnipotence because we come across another thing that God cannot do if God is truly omniscient then that means that he can see the future he knows every single intervention he will ever make and he knows of every single choice that he will ever make in advance but it then logically follows that God cannot change his mind if God was able to change his mind then that means that he can't have been able to foresee whatever the factor was that caused him to change his mind because if he could have foreseen it then he wouldn't have been changing his mind at all but if he couldn't foresee the factors that would cause him to change his mind then he's not on this year as for imagining a morally perfect being this is contingent upon already having some pre-existing idea of objective morality before we've gotten to the stage of proving god now don't get me wrong here if God did exist then there would be an objective moral standard but you can't say imagine an objectively perfect morality in order to prove God if you need that God in order to prove the existence of the objective morality you can't appeal to the objective morality of God as a stepping stone to proving that God these factors are contradictory or wrong there cannot exist a being that is fully omnipotent and fully omniscient it just leads to too many paradoxes now incidentally I'm actually using the exact same logic that William Lane Craig himself uses a lot of the time when he's talking about infinity you may have seen him do this when talking about the Kalam cosmological argument the idea of an infinite regress there can't be an infinitely existing universe it must have had a beginning and the reason that he gives for this is because if you think of infinity as a calculable number it leads to paradoxes for instance you can't take infinity and add infinity you still get infinity and this is just mathematically impossible and leads to a whole number of contradictions if the universe never began to exist then the number of past events is infinite but Alfa's Olli argued this is impossible because an actually infinite number of things cannot exist the way in which Cazale shows the impossibility of an actually infinite number of things is by imagining what it would be like if such a collection could exist and then drawing out the absurd consequences from it therefore applying it to something like the age of the universe the entire concept is absolutely no I'm using the exact same logic if the paradoxes of infinity mean that infinite things cannot exist then the paradoxes of omnipotence and omniscience means that an omnipotent omniscient being can't exist either possible worlds are simply ways the world could have been to say that something exists in a possible just to say that if the world were that way then the thing would have existed for example even though Unicom stones exist in the actual world it seems at least possible that they could have so we can say that unicorns exist in some possible world on the other hand a married bachelor does not exist in any possible world because the idea of a married bachelor is logically incoherent it could not possibly exist my point exactly you can imagine all you like things that may exist in possible universes from unicorns to leprechauns to Christopher Hitchens losing a debate as long as these things are not logically incoherent an omnipotent omniscient God is logically incoherent in the same way that you can dismiss a married bachelor in any possible universes I can also dismiss the god that you're presenting so if it is possible that a maximally great being exists then we can say that he exists in some possible world but wait a maximally great being would not really be maximally great if it existed in only some possible worlds to be maximally great it has to be all-powerful all-knowing and morally perfect in every possible world so think about it if a maximally great being exists in any possible world then it exists in every possible world and if it exists in every possible world then it exists in the actual world what you're doing here is you're assuming that existence is a perfection but this is a subjective analysis we might subjectively agree that existence is better than non-existence but we can't prove that existence adds intrinsic objective value to a concept this is what Immanuel Kant said in his critique of pure reason that existence is not a predicate thus the Atheist has to maintain not simply that God does not exist but that it is impossible that God exists no no just the God that you're presenting you can conceive of a maximally but not all-powerful God you can conceive of a God which is not on this yet which doesn't know fully what's going on in fact this could account for the problem of evil but the God that you're venting is logically incoherent and so yes we can say that it's impossible to even imagine such a being here's a summary of the ontological argument steps two through six are straightforward and largely uncontroversial which is exactly why I'm going to try to rebut them look at premises to a maximally great being exists in some possible world but by the logic that you've just presented this simply can't be the case you just said so yourself that for a maximally great being to be truly maximally great it must exist in all possible world so if it only exists in some possible worlds then it's not maximally great so whatever this being is that exists in some possible world it's by your own definition not maximally great so how could you possibly say that a maximally great being can exist in some possible world if to be maximally great it must exist in all possible worlds this is once again say it with me kids logically incoherent now this video goes on to present a possible response to the ontological argument and it may be a response that you're thinking of right now but it's not a very good one if you want to see the way that they put it it's in the description down below but I'll try to summarize it here at the time that Anselm was writing in the 11th century he had a contemporary called Gunilla or Guanella or however you want to pronounce it now Canelo was a believer but he didn't agree with the ontological argument it didn't sit right with him and his response to the argument was as follows he said well look I can imagine the most perfect possible island but that doesn't mean that that island exists and this may be a sort of gut reaction response you're saying well just because you can imagine the most perfect God doesn't mean that that most perfect God actually exists but the ontological argument it's worth remembering isn't trying to prove the most perfect that maximally great God is trying to prove the maximally great being okay there's no more perfect island than the most perfect island by definition there's no more perfect pizza than the most perfect pizza but there is a more perfect thing than both of these and that most perfect thing the most perfect thing of all according to Anton's logic is God so you shouldn't use this argument even though it instinctively seems to fit but fear not because the fallacy with this argument doesn't lie in the relation between the premises and the conclusion but in the premises themselves so let's lay out this argument in some no-nonsense premises premise 1 God has all perfections premise 2 necessary existence that is existing is a perfection premise 3 if God has necessary existence then God exists therefore God exists now we've already discussed that premise one and premise 2 are probably faulty but let's pretend that they're not what we're saying here is God has all perfections necessary existence is a perfection so God has necessary existence God exists but the problem lies in the very first word of the very first premise god God has all perfections we're assuming that God exists because for God to have something this God must exist so we need to make a very subtle change to the first premise and that is this we need to say instead of saying God has all perfections we should be saying if God exists then God has all perfections and it seems like a subtle change but it's really not so now we're saying if God exists then he has all perfections and necessary existence is one of those perfections so we're saying if God exists God has necessary existence if God exists then he exists hmm what about the second premise so we've merged the first two premises into one premise so the second premise becomes what the third premise used to be that is if God has necessary existence then God exists if God exists then God exists and then we have our conclusion so let's put all these together we have premise 1 if God exists then God exists premise 2 if God exists then God exists conclusion therefore God exists I don't know about you but this suddenly doesn't seem like such an appealing argument but even putting all of that aside this argument relies on the ability to firstly imagine an omnipotent omniscient morally perfect being the first to as we've already shown a logically incoherent and the third relies on God to give you the objective morality in order to prove God okay this simply doesn't work Thomas Aquinas one of the most famous and well-respected religious theologians of all time rejected this argument okay know that if you're watching this and you are religious you can believe in God without believing in this argument okay you can sympathize with its conclusion but you don't need to be an atheist to realize that this specific argument isn't even worth the time that it would take to discuss in a formal debate but anyway I'm sorry I know it's been a while since I've uploaded but it's currently exam season which I'm sure you can imagine is really really fun so I've been trying to get some last-minute revision in I also want to say sorry to the people in my philosophy class who've just sat there exam which contained a question on the ontological argument perhaps this video would have been a bit more useful this time last week but what are you going to do these things happen I want to say congratulations to Robert who is my patron of the month I've already been in contact with you Robert and I'm sending you a copy of God is not great as per request if you want to learn about being a patron and how to support the cosmic skeptic channel then all the links are of course in the description finally I've got some really cool stuff coming up I wish I could tell you but I really want to keep it a surprise and I'm talking really soon sort of in the next few weeks and across the next sort of few months and some really really interesting incredible things are happening with this channel and I'm incredibly excited you'll understand what I'm talking about when you see it but it's just reminded me how grateful I am for your viewership we just hit a hundred thousand hundred thousand subscribers that's insane five million views on the channel I'm really excited about where this channels going and I really couldn't appreciate your support any more your viewership if you're just a viewer if you subscribe if you comment if you're a patron whoever you are whatever you've done if you're here then thank you and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: CosmicSkeptic

Views: 393,771

Keywords: Alex O'Connor, cosmic, skeptic, cosmicskeptic

Id: E6yH0QgwR6Q

Length: 13min 31sec (811 seconds)

Published: Wed May 31 2017