Mick wrote: I wish some profs let me lecture on the OA. A lot of profs act as though Kant's 'Existence is not a real predicate' argument is conclusive, but it's not. It's poo.

From my own limited knowledge on the subject:

What Mick seems to be talking about here is Kant's rebuttal to one of Descartes' "proofs" of God's existence.

Descartes argument essentially runs:

God, if he exists, is perfect in all ways.
God could not be perfect if he was nonexistent.
Therefore God exists.

There are three main objections to this:

Firstly, that Descartes' argument is circular.

Secondly, that it would be patently absurd if applied to any other subject (the specific objection was the "perfect island").

Kant had a third objection, however. He pointed out that existence is not a predicate. For example if I am attempting to describe my car, I might list that it possesses such as qualities "a colour of white (if I ever got around to washing it)", "a brand known as Toyota", "a design of sedan", "poor maintainance" etc. I would not include "existence" in that list because existence is not a predicate.

Apparently, Mick has an objection more substantial that "It's poo." up his sleeve and I want to hear it.

It's honest of him to say "it's poo", because Kant's argument just doesn't smell nice, as a believer in god.

I'm off to work, a soup kitchen, church and family activities for the next two days fellas. I'm celebrating the birth of our Lord. I'll address this on Boxing Day.

In any case, the second version of the argument states, not that existence is an attribute of perfection, but necessary existence. This demolishes the 'perfect island' argument, and so on, which could argue that a perfect island must exist. But it does not exist via necessity.

This is the argument which intrigued Gödel, who attempted to formalize it in modal logic, thus saying, that if something possibly exists by necessity, then it exists. Ironically, Catholic theologians seem to reject this argument.

Mick wrote:I'm off to work, a soup kitchen, church and family activities for the next two days fellas. I'm celebrating the birth of our Lord. I'll address this on Boxing Day.

Thanks Mick. I'll look forward to it. I'm sure it will be a reasoned and well thought out counter to Kant's objection.

In the meantime:

Scar wrote:There is perfect omnipresent, pink, visible cloud of gas.

Proof:
The cloud of gas, if it existed, is perfect in all ways.
The cloud could not be perfect if it was nonexistent.
Therefore the cloud exists.

But... why can't I see it!?

This is a good example of the "perfect island" type of objection to the ontological argument for God's existence. That is not the actual subject of this thread. Specifically, the subject of this thread is Mick's assertion that existence is a predicate.

Can anyone think what the fuck he's on about?

Mick wrote:I'm off to work, a soup kitchen, church and family activities for the next two days fellas. I'm celebrating the birth of our Lord. I'll address this on Boxing Day.

Your overlord, sweetie, not mine. You are terribly inaccurate for someone who's interested in philosophy!

LucidFlight wrote:The "perfect in all ways" part is a little fuzzy. In all what ways?

All ways.

Descartes' conception of God is a being of perfect power (omnipotence), perfect knowledge (omniscience), perfect morality (omnibenevolence) and so on. He rounds it out with perfect reality (existence) and concludes that God exists. It's the sort of bullshit one comes up with by spending too much time alone fucking around with balls of wax.

...each time I happen to think of a first and sovereign being, and to draw, so to speak, the idea of him from the storehouse of the mind, I am necessitated to attribute to him all kinds of perfections, though I may not then enumerate them all, nor think of each of them in particular. And this necessity is sufficient, as soon as I discover that existence is a perfection, to cause me to infer the existence of this first and sovereign being...

Meditations on First Philosophy V.11.

Kant pointed out that this was a bullshit word game, because existence is not a predicate.

nunnington wrote:In any case, the second version of the argument states, not that existence is an attribute of perfection, but necessary existence. This demolishes the 'perfect island' argument, and so on, which could argue that a perfect island must exist. But it does not exist via necessity.

In fact Descartes himself used this counterargument. It is still open to attack, however, on the grounds that it has not been shown that God's existence is necessary. Descartes thought that God was necessary only because he thought that the "first cause" argument held water.

This is the argument which intrigued Gödel, who attempted to formalize it in modal logic, thus saying, that if something possibly exists by necessity, then it exists. Ironically, Catholic theologians seem to reject this argument.

In fact the majority of theologians of all major denominations reject this argument. Even if it worked it would open up a whole can of worms for them, as the God it indicates is not the God proposed by the Bible. Descartes didn't care about this as he had other fish to fry.

Nicko wrote:

Mick wrote: I wish some profs let me lecture on the OA. A lot of profs act as though Kant's 'Existence is not a real predicate' argument is conclusive, but it's not. It's poo.

Focusing only on Kant's position that existence is not a predicate, let's consider for a moment what if he was wrong. That would mean that there could be something which has the property of existing and no other property.

What would that something be like? It wouldn't be like anything. It couldn't be anywhere or anywhen. It couldn't do anything or be affected in anyway. It would neither have nor cause any sort of experience. It is literally nothing.

Such metaphysical gamesmanship, if allowed, can lead to all sorts of absurd conclusions about our world yet have absolutely no empirical relevance nor support. If you are playing with a metaphysic that does not apply to living a life in the world you actually live in, you're being much less useful than studying the lint in your bellybutton.

the PC apeman wrote:[Focusing only on Kant's position that existence is not a predicate, let's consider for a moment what if he was wrong. That would mean that there could be something which has the property of existing and no other property.

That doesn´t seem to follow. For example a frequency is a predicate, but anything with a frequency neccessarily also has an amplitude.
What Kants argument boils down to is a correspondence theory of truth, i.e. statements of the form
S is p are true iff S exists and S is p.
This does imply that statements of the form S does not exist are always false (to be true S would have to exist and not exist). That´s not true for any other p, where either S is p or S is !P is true. So existence here is not an ordinary p.
There are arguments against a correspondence theory of truth - mainly that we do not in general know whether S exist and thus can´t know whether S is p is true under that condition - it leads to epistemic nihilism. It´s also worth noting that the correspondence theory of truth does not meet its own criteria for being true.

So if we reject correspondence, then existence is a valid predicate. That doesn´t make the OA correct, because it does assume that the statement "God is perfect" is true and that perfection includes existence. We can certainly design metaphysical positions that are consistent and in which a version of the OA holds, but we can equally well build metaphysical positions in which it doesn´t hold that are also consistent. We then can note that we can prove a god in some, but not the others, just as we can prove that 1+1=2 in Zmod3, but not in Zmod2. In other words, the OA depends on the metaphysical system and thus not absolutely true.

We can then make statements about compatibility: There are some metaphysical systems that are compatible with theism but not atheism, some that are compatible with atheism but not theism and some that are compatible with both.

the PC apeman wrote:

Nicko wrote:

Mick wrote: I wish some profs let me lecture on the OA. A lot of profs act as though Kant's 'Existence is not a real predicate' argument is conclusive, but it's not. It's poo.

Focusing only on Kant's position that existence is not a predicate, let's consider for a moment what if he was wrong. That would mean that there could be something which has the property of existing and no other property.

What would that something be like? It wouldn't be like anything. It couldn't be anywhere or anywhen. It couldn't do anything or be affected in anyway. It would neither have nor cause any sort of experience. It is literally nothing.

Such metaphysical gamesmanship, if allowed, can lead to all sorts of absurd conclusions about our world yet have absolutely no empirical relevance nor support. If you are playing with a metaphysic that does not apply to living a life in the world you actually live in, you're being much less useful than studying the lint in your bellybutton.

Hi,

I have a few spare mins on my phone.

It does not follow that if existence is a real predicate (kant denied it to be a real predicate, not a predicate), then something could exist and have no other property. there's no line of inference which would allow you to conclude this.

Also: unless you wish to entertain impossible worlds, it'd necessarily be true that it has trivial properties such as being either F or not-F, where F is any property. And if it had only that one property of existence, then wouldn't there be a second property? Namely, being such that existence is its only property. But that'd be another property, and hence selfdefeating.