You touch on the difference between pure knowledge (pure knowing) and pure action (extending knowledge complete or incomplete by extension of principle). It is similar to the Euthyphro dilemma. Does God know essentially or does God know through infinite action?
What this question fails to realize is that God is both pure form and pure action. Both are the reflection of one another. It is God reflecting upon itself through infinite thought. The One gives birth to two. The Two give birth to Three. The Three give birth to Ten Thousand Things. (Dao De Ching)
Just so. And why would I agree to discuss your framing when I reject it. You are going to have to sell your framing before anyone is going to agree to use it.
Since Gödel includes unevidenced assumptions in his premises, to define the deity he prefers, any theist could pretty much do the same, not just for deities of course.
Both are subjective unevidenced claims, using them in an argument for that deity would amount to question begging.
The axioms are not rational, they involve unevidenced assumption about the very thing he’s arguing for, this amounts to question begging, which is fallacious.
Yes it really is, his premises use unevidenced assumption about the very thing he s arguing for, this amounts to question begging which is poor reasoning.
I asked you about faith and if it was possible to believe in the existence of a god-like object through faith and without evidence?
Would you therefore please answer my question as I framed without recasting it, rewording it or reframing in a word salad of your own making? My question isn’t difficult to understand and is quite easy to answer in plain English. Please do so.
I also asked you if it was only possible to believe in the existence of a god-like object through the use of a proof in modal logic?
Would you therefore please answer my second question as I framed without recasting it, rewording it or reframing in a word salad of your own making? My question isn’t difficult to understand and is quite easy to answer in plain English. Please do so.
Gödel makes several assertions in his argument, since the accusation this amounts to begging the question is being met with handwaving, semantics and repetition, lets dig a little deeper and examine those claims more closely.
Firstly lets define what a begging the question fallacy, and a circular reasoning fallacy are, as the latter is often what the former creates.
Begging the question fallacies occur when one makes unevidenced assumptions in an argument, about the very thing one is arguing for, this creates a circular fallacy where all or part of the conclusion of the argument is assumed (without evidence) in the opening premises.
“Axiom 3: The property of being God-like is itself a positive property.”
Gödel’s third axiom then, is widely considered to be question-begging. Since it essentially assumes the consistency, and by inference the possibility, of a “God-like” being from the outset.
“Axiom 5: “Necessary existence” is a positive property.”
This is a philosophical assumption of course, based on a subjective interpretation of the concept of “perfection”, no surprise then that it is widely criticised as a subjective debatable point, and not an objective truth. However note the circular nature of A3 and A5.
To further illustrate the circular nature of the argument, lets take another closer look at key points Gödel’s argument makes:
“Definition 1: An object x is God-like if, and only if, x has all positive properties.”
“Axiom 3: The property of being God-like is itself a positive property.”
“Axiom 5: “Necessary existence” is a positive property.”
It’s hard to imagine a more circular argument,
being god like (def 1) must possess all positive properties,
Necessary existence is a positive property.
Tadah…
Lets try it with mermaids:
being god like (def 1) must possess all positive properties,
Necessary existence is a positive property.
This is fun, what else shall we define into existence?
Many of you don’t seem to get that modal expressions are of higher definition than provisional expressions. Anything provisional that is posed as a counter argument is ultimately subject to the modal system from which it derives and, therefore, any argument that you pose against modal expressions as self-justifying is undermining the very framework you are using to base your arguments on.
Again, there’s the confusion between God and deity. But this would be even worse if the religious attempted this equivalence because they actually have a God-model that does not meet the necessary requirements for God.
Gödel’s Axiom 3 states:
Axiom 3: The property God-like is a positive property.
Where God-like is defined (earlier) as:
A being that possesses all positive properties.
Crucially, **Axiom 3 does not assert existence, nor even possibility in the modal sense. It asserts a second-order evaluative claim about properties: if there are positive properties, then the conjunction of all of them is itself positive.
Why Axiom 3 is not formally question-begging**
A. No existence is presupposed
Axiom 3 does not assume:
That positive properties are jointly consistent
That the set of all positive properties is non-empty
That any being instantiates them
That such a being is possible or actual
All of that comes later, and only if additional axioms hold.
Formally, Axiom 3 is a closure principle:
If each member of a set has value X, then the conjunction of the set also has value X.
This is analogous to non-controversial principles like:
“If each axiom of a theory is true, the theory is true.”
“If each property is good-making, their conjunction is good-making.”
**That is not a logical fallacy. It is a substantive metaphysical claim.
Axiom 5: Necessary existence is a positive property.**
This is a second-order value claim about modal status, not an empirical claim and not a definition. Gödel is not careless here—he is doing what Euclid did with his postulates: fixing the value-structure of the space in which the reasoning operates.
You may say, Sheldon….
“You just define necessary existence as positive.”
But Gödel does not do this.
He claims instead:
If positivity tracks perfection, then necessary existence belongs on the positive side of the ledger.
You cannot freely replace God-like with mermaid-like, because:
“God-like” is defined in terms of positivity itself.
“Mermaid-like” is not.
God-like (Gödel’s definition)
A being that has all positive properties
This definition is:
Second-order
Maximal
Value-closed
**It ranges over whatever positivity turns out to be.
Mermaid-like**
At best:
A being that has certain biological or mythic traits
(half-human, half-fish, aquatic, etc.)
These traits are:
First-order
Contingent
Biologically constrained
Not value-maximizing
Nothing about “mermaid” invokes maximality, necessity, or value closure.
Well you enjoy your category error then. “Heavenly realities are higher than physical realities because physical reality wouldn’t even exist if the heavenly realities I am asserting with no evidence did not serve as their basis”. This is just fundamentalist “positional truth” nonsense recycled with nicer terminology.
You’re using two different forms of the word “believe” here. One concerns the orientation of the will. The other concerns the orientation of the mind.
**
They answer different questions:**
Faith: Can I meaningfully trust this to be true?
Modal logic: Can I demonstrate this to be true essentially?
It’s not a category error, and it’s rather philosophical absurdity and hubris on your part to think that provisional systems can survive as valid systems in themselves without modal grounding.
There’s nothing spoken of Heaven here. Whether Heaven exists is an independent question to whether God exists.
Any valid system has to be grounded in measurable, quantifiable, testable reality. Ground it in anything else – religious dogma, modal systems, what have you – it is just rudderless speculation. I realize that this is not attractive to some who view reality as too “low” or imperfect or whatever to be worthy of respect, and so try to impose their version of idealism over the top of it. But it is still (sorry but I must say it) delusional.
I say this as an idealist by nature. At some point my idealism had to submit to reality. Just because I want or wish there to be an overarching order and purpose to things that suits me, does not make it so.
And how are you making those measurements? What system and what assumptions are you using to base your observations on? You’re using mathematics: a modal system.
It’s not idealism: it’s rationalism. Empiricists love to advocate the utility of their system until they are challenged as to the very foundation upon which their system is based upon.
And again, I’ve explained repeatedly why your objection does not hold.
You can see how this is a move of bad faith argumentation, surely? We are discussing a theoretical model and you are objecting to the model, not based on any objection in terms of internal contradiction or rationale, but because you assign subjectivity to the unevidenced?
No. Axiom 3 is a closure principle. It is a substantive metaphysical claim, not a physical claim yet.
So are you saying that you don’t believe that the existence of God is even possible?
No. A second-order claim is not about things directly, but about properties, predicates, or kinds of claims. A second-order claim talks about the structure or legitimacy of concepts, not about concrete entities.
A definition would be stipulative:
“God-like means possessing properties A, B, and C.”
“Positive property means property that entails perfection.”
But a second-order value claim says:
“Among all properties, this one belongs to the class that counts as ‘positive’.”
It is a normative meta-modal claim about which kinds of properties are eligible to ground necessity, rather than a claim about what exists or how words are defined.
Is it possible to believe in (meaningfully trust this to be true) in the existence of a god-like object through faith and without evidence?
Is it only possible to believe in (demonstrate this to be essentially true) in the existence of a god-like object through the use of a proof in modal logic?
The questions are now formatted in such a way that you should be able to easily answer them.
However, please do not answer them before you have first done what you definitely hoped to do.
Which is to answer the questions you left unanswered on your departure on Dec 26th.
Your input in this thread cannot do that so I hope you will do what you definitely hoped to do.
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