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The Gale-Pruss Cosmological Argument

Robin

Penultimate Amazing
Robin
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Apr 29, 2004
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I thought that maybe God needs a better champion than Yrreg.

This argument does not seem to have been discussed here before, so I thought I would run it up the flagpole

www.lastseminary.com/cosmological-argument/A New Cosmological Argument.pdf

and see what people made of it.

My impression is that it suffers from the problem of all cosmological arguments in that, even if sound, they are not proving God. So they add a kludge on the end to kid on that the thing they claim to have proved must be God.

The kludge here is from prop 8 onwards.
 
I don't know, if you can't explain it to a kindergartenner it is a complex concept. it seems to rely on a lot of "theer may be a univserse where a nessecary being caused the world to exist".
So it does not answer the question "How about this universe?"

The Objection to Our Principle of Sufficient Reason. Our argument employed a weak version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, namely:
W-PSR. For any proposition, p, and any world, w, if p is in w’s Big Conjunctive Fact, then there is some possible world, w1, and proposition, q, such that w1’s Big Conjunctive Fact contains p and q and the proposition that q explains p.
Click to expand...
 
Okay, I couldn't read anymore past the preface. A god that is not powerful enough to be omnipotent, yet powerful enough to create a universe? Why not walk among us and explain his very creation?
 
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mactonite said:
Okay, I couldn't read anymore past the preface. A god that is not powerful enough to be omnipotent, yet powerful enough to create a universe? Why not walk among us and explain his very creation?
Click to expand...

Oo. Oo. I can answer that -- because He is dead. Whatsamatter, you've never read Nietzsche?

:th:
 
I think this is what is called ... mental masturbation, right? What is worse is, it is an own goal.

There just is no libertarian free will. Period. (We have been over this on this board often enough.) It just is no meaningful proposition, in a similar fashion that a square circle is not a meaningful proposition. If it somehow is necessary for God to possess lib free will, (I would agree!) well then ... There is no God. *shrugs*


Although, they somehow do point out in the objections section that denying lib free will, ultimately leads to a rejection of the weak Principle of Sufficient Reason (W-PSR), i.e. one of the fundamental presmises of their argument. Or at least, they point out that it will lead there via the rest of the argument. Be that as it may, this is not my problem. If the W-PSR does not hold up, so be it. If you use the W-PSR as a premise, then explain that the W-PSR does not hold up ultimately, only to "solve" this problem by bringing up a magic, mystic, yet meaningless problem solver, then that is your problem.
 
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Robin said:
I thought that maybe God needs a better champion than Yrreg.

This argument does not seem to have been discussed here before, so I thought I would run it up the flagpole

www.lastseminary.com/cosmological-argument/A New Cosmological Argument.pdf

and see what people made of it.

My impression is that it suffers from the problem of all cosmological arguments in that, even if sound, they are not proving God. So they add a kludge on the end to kid on that the thing they claim to have proved must be God.

The kludge here is from prop 8 onwards.
Click to expand...

I'd say the kludge starts early:

A being is a necessary being (or has necessary existence) if and only if it is
necessary that it exists. Such a being is a self-explaining being in that there is a successful ontological
argument for its existence, even if we aren’t up to giving it.


A necessary being is a necessary being? A being is self-explaining and there's a good argument but we don't understand it?


This reads more like a parody than a serious attempt to argue for gods' existence.
 
I've often felt that ontological arguments are meaningless. After all, just giving properties to a word does not make those properties correct. And most ontological arguments for the existence of God seem to revolve around the "perfect being must have existence because non existence is imperfect" argument. Personally, I've often wondered about existence being perfect. After all, you could just as easily argue that to exist is imperfect and thus God must not exist.

Ontological arguments make kitty sad.
 
Weak Kitten said:
I've often felt that ontological arguments are meaningless. After all, just giving properties to a word does not make those properties correct. And most ontological arguments for the existence of God seem to revolve around the "perfect being must have existence because non existence is imperfect" argument. Personally, I've often wondered about existence being perfect. After all, you could just as easily argue that to exist is imperfect and thus God must not exist.

Ontological arguments make kitty sad.
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Yeah. Any argument in a form that can be turned around just as easily as it can be presented shouldn't be relied upon.
 
Weak Kitten said:
I've often felt that ontological arguments are meaningless. After all, just giving properties to a word does not make those properties correct. And most ontological arguments for the existence of God seem to revolve around the "perfect being must have existence because non existence is imperfect" argument. Personally, I've often wondered about existence being perfect. After all, you could just as easily argue that to exist is imperfect and thus God must not exist.

Ontological arguments make kitty sad.
Click to expand...

But ... But ... But ... It is a cosmological argument.

:mad:
 
tsig said:
I'd say the kludge starts early:

A being is a necessary being (or has necessary existence) if and only if it is
necessary that it exists. Such a being is a self-explaining being in that there is a successful ontological
argument for its existence, even if we aren’t up to giving it.


A necessary being is a necessary being? A being is self-explaining and there's a good argument but we don't understand it?
Click to expand...
How are we to know if there's a successful ontological argument for a given being's existence if that argument is not provided?

This reads more like a parody than a serious attempt to argue for gods' existence.
Click to expand...
Indeed it does.
 
A Very Silly Argument said:
The argument makes use of certain technical notions that need to be defined and explained at the outset. A possible world is a maximal, compossible conjunction of abstract propositions. It is maximal in that, for every proposition p, either p is a conjunct in this conjunction or its negation, not-p, is, and it is compossible in that it is conceptually or logically possible that all of the conjuncts be true together.
Click to expand...
Gödel's First Incompleteness Theory says: You're dead, fall down.

If, for sufficiently powerful system S and every proposition P, it is provable that either P or ~P, system S is complete and therefore logically inconsistent.

The incompetence on display here should be astonishing, but it's actually pretty typical for this sort of argument.
 
Oh well, looks like Messrs Gale and Pruss weren't such good champions after all.

Thanks for the excellent comments - but I fear this will be a short lived thread.
 
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