The second and possibly final procrastination

The design argument:

This doesn't work either.  However, in order to make it "not work" you have to posit the existence of parallel universes but for the bit about Earth being rare you just need to think things through astronomically.

The real issue with all of these is rather different and is more to do with adopting arguments to support a position one already holds for different reasons.  I tend to believe that this is what we generally do.

Update from today:  the Cosmological Argument, because once again the Alpha Centauri video has failed to come together, so you get another talking head:

In fact, over a minute of the Alpha Centauri video already exists but the trouble is coming up with graphics interesting enough to finish it off, which is to do with Windows 8 of course.  I had a nice lava field, which is now gone.

On a different subject, after demands for a print version of the ebook i have finally succumbed, but in my view it would be a mistake for anyone to buy a copy, so please don't!  I'm not even telling you where it is.  I have, however, succeeded in making it as boring looking on the outside as i could to avoid embarrassment, although of course it is purple. The entire point of it being an ebook was so that there was no physical copy of the thing to be discovered or hidden, but apparently people don't even care.  I think that's very strange.  Still, de gustibus non est disputandum i suppose.

Beachballs and the existence of God

Phew!  Glad i got that out of my system.

Anyway, here's today's video:

This is about the ontological argument, one of the most interestingly silly arguments for the existence of God.  Basically, the idea is that God is a perfect being, that an idea of a perfect being is possible, that existence is a quality of a perfect being which would be more perfect than the quality of not existing and therefore that God exists.  This was thought up by Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury.  This is Anselm:

And this is Canterbury:

(I actually wanted to find a picture of the Clocktower as this is too picturesque, but then so's the Clocktower).

Anyway, this bloke Gaunilo came along and wrote a dialogue about it where he pointed out, respectfully and carefully, that the argument was rubbish because it was possible to think of a perfect island without that island existing.  I would take that further, but not yet.

Later on, the question of whether existence was a property arose.  Here is a beachball:

(it's actually a Wikipedia beachball, not the one in the front room, because the camcorder's still plugged in and i can't take pictures with it at the moment).  This beachball has various predicates - it is round, made of plastic, inflated, multicoloured and similar to the one in the front room.  However, does it have the predicate of existence?  Is existence actually a predicate?  Does it add anything to the description of that beachball to say that it exists?

This is what's meant by "wrong for interesting reasons".  The ontological argument is wrong for much more interesting reasons than any other argument for the existence of God.  However, when they were younger the children used to express the concept of existence as a predicate.  Instead of saying that something existed, they used to say it "was real".  In other words, they used the predicate of having an instance, instantiation, instead of the concept of existence, but it seems to mean the same thing.

I have a completely different reason for throwing away the ontological argument.  Well, i have several in fact but they're not all interesting.  My main reason for rejecting it is that i see non-existence as more commonly associated with perfection than existence.  Perfectly spherical or flat objects, for example, do not and could not exist.  The very existence of an object makes it less perfect, on the whole, than its concept.  Therefore, far from being an argument for the existence of God, the ontological "proof" is more like one for God's non-existence.