rationalskepticism.org

Paul Almond wrote:

Mick wrote:One thing which caught my attention is this idea that his claiming that 'possibly god exists' is just to claim that god exists. I think that's unfair. Firstly, Plantinga doesn't refer to god as a proper name or otherwise. He talks about a being- a general term.

That's a completely pointless reply. We all know what Plantinga means. You don't want this to be a claim for God? Fine - the possibility premise is that it is modally possible that a being with properties defined by Plantinga exists - and I view it is frankly bizarre to say that this isn't supposed to be God. We are doing theology here - not skiing. Whether Plantinga is claiming God's modally possible existence, some being's modally possible existence or Bugs Bunny's modally possible existence is absolutely irrelevant to the rebuttal that I gave. It doesn't matter what is being claimed to modally possibly exist. There is no plausible way in which we could regard any intuition of this modally possible existence as justified in any way that has anything to do with possible worlds or that is given anything by possible worlds. any such intuition is merely intuition about a necessary feature of the world - and anyone claiming to have such an intuition is merely claiming that he knows that something exists.

I think my point was quite simple - and I only went on for that long because some people (people like you, generally) seem to insist that modal logic is going to do anything of any use to anyone here. This is like the philosophical equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. If I showed people a wheel and claimed that if I spin it it will spin forever and generate free energy everyone will see that I am talking nonsense. However, if I build a complex machine with a complex path of causality inside it, with levers driving wheels which pull magnets and move things this way or that I can hide the fact that there is nothing on which to base such a machine - and the gullible may think that the more complex machine can give us free energy, even though we should be able to see that any simple machine we can imagine won't - and that therefore no part of this more complex machine can be producing free energy, and that the whole machine must be founded on nothing. Some people will never accept that, and will insist that there is something to be gained from an in-depth discussion of the workings of the fantastic free energy machine. If people aren't persuaded, the inventors of the machine can use mathematics to describe the behaviour of the free energy machine in the hope that this obscures the fact that it just can't work - as should be obvious from a simple consideration. Plantinga is doing nothing more than dozens of free energy machine inventors are doing on the Internet all the time - except he is doing it in philosophy instead. The whole thing is suspiciously close to the emperor's new clothes.