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10 June 2010

ontological argument for God

this is an idea I had about 5 months ago during a philosophy class.

The ontological argument for the existence of God was presented this way:
The idea of God is bigger than anything that could ever exist. Because reality is bigger than a mere idea, and the idea of God has to be as big as possible, the idea of God is not merely an idea, it necessitates existing in reality.
Most people rejected this. It doesn't make much sense to me either this way.

But here's a different form:
We have this concept of God which includes infinity. We had to get this concept from somewhere. We can't make up things on our own (that's the part people deny). So, it had to come from somewhere, right? That means something in our universe is infinite: God. It's kind of like that 'God shaped hole on our hearts' idea.


Now, a defense of two things: 1 we can't make stuff up, and 2 infinity is not found in the universe.

1 Making stuff up: someone from that class said to me "I can make something up, it's called a hortwibbler." Hmm... 'hort' is a prefix relating to gardening 'horticulture'. 'wibble' is a lot like wobble or wiggle, which are related words anyway, we get the idea from 'wibble', we make up words like 'guesstimate' all the time. The final part 'er' is a common English suffix denoting an agent-actor-catalyst-doer (see, I just made up another word).
If I really wanted to be nit picky, I could point out that his word can be pronounced by English speakers, is written in the English language, can be communicated visually, etc. Not very original.
Anyway, the conclusion is, we can't make anything up.

2 infinity in the universe: the same guy said "I can imagine a soup bowl that never gets empty, or a never ending row of soup bowls." but just recently, a Calculus book spelled it out pretty well (this is a direct quote) "Infinity [bolding not added] is not a number. It is the word used to designate a quantity that increases without bound." A never ending row of soup bowls onlynever ends, it isn't infinite, as in: all of the bowls are there at once and you can see them all at once, they're all collected into one group, one person, God (except God is a lot more than soup bowls).




Saxon Calculus: with trigonometry and analytic geometry" written by John H. Saxon Jr. and Frank Y. H. Wang

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