Evaluating Ontological Argument part 1
- Created by: _bella_
- Created on: 27-05-19 09:42
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- Evaluation of Ontological Argument
- Support for Kant- G.E. Moore
- Demonstrated Existence could not be grammatically used as a predicate since the word doesn't function as other predicates
- Moore proposed the following statements- A- some tame tigers do not growl B- some tame tigers do not exist
- Statement A is meaningful however B uses does not in the same way we use do not growl- thus it's not meaningful in the same way
- Support for Kant- Russell
- Existence is not a predicate but rather a term used to indicate the example of something in the spatio-temporal world
- Furthermore, 'some tame tigers do not exist' doesn't tell us anything about their nature, but it does about their existence in the world
- Support FOR ontological argument- Planinga
- God is both maximally great and excellent
- A- there exists a world in which there is a being of maximal greatness
- B- A being of maximal excellence is omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient in all worlds
- Only succeeds in showing God is possible in all possible worlds not that he is an actuality in all possible worlds
- Support for Kant- Hume
- Considered Anselm's argument a failure as it made an assumption about existence i.e. that necessary existence was a coherent concept
- Support FOR ontological argument- Leibniz
- Since God is impossible to think of as lacking perfection he must exist.
- Since to possess all perfections but not to exist would be meaningless
- Support FOR ontological argument- Norman Malcolm
- Argued God's existence is either necessary or impossible but he cannot possess contingent existence
- Implications w/ Malcolms argument
- He observed that God is a special case, unlike w/ contingent beings (only having possible existence)
- However, if Humes view is adopted necessary existence might be an incoherent concept + malcolm's form of the argument will fail
- Support for Kant- G.E. Moore
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