Do you think it is possible to prove (or disprove) God’s existence? Don’t you think that if it were possible to prove philosophically God’s existence it would limit God’s infinity? And what do you think of St Anselm’s ontological argument who defines God as “being than which no greater can be conceived”? This is how his argumentation looks like (from Wikipedia):
Our understanding of God is a being than which no greater can be conceived.
The idea of God exists in the mind.
A being which exists both in the mind and in reality is greater than a being that exists only in the mind.
If God only exists in the mind, then we can conceive of a greater being—that which exists in reality.
We cannot be imagining something that is greater than God.
Therefore, God exists.
I think this sort of argumentation is actually quite fishy and I don’t really agree with St Anselm’s definition of God since it suggests that God can be conceived by human mind which is already a limitation of His infinity. I deal with this problem in my recent post God and philosophy: does God exist by using my own example of houseflies - since God is infinitely wise the difference between minds of human beings and houseflies is infinitely smaller than the difference between mind of God and mind of human beings.
Cosmological argument seems to make more sense since it refers to primum movens which cannot be really explained by deterministic causal chain (causal chain must have been caused by something/somebody). The quite important flaw I find in this argument is that it seems to support (to some extent) determinism which considerably limits people’s free will (and free will was to be given by God to His creation). What do you think about these arguments?
I’d like to see one that has predictive power and doesn’t run against Occam’s Razor when put against a scientific theory or just the same theory without god for the same phenomenon. I’m pretty certain it is impossible to disprove the existence of the Jewish/Christian/Islamic god because of the problems inherent in proving a negative combined with the problems with observing things at a quantum level where god could always just be asserted with no evidence to exist. That is of course useless if it doesn’t have predictive power, and the god part can very likely be razored out with no loss if it does have some predictive power.
The objection you have is one of the same I do to the reasoning of St. Anselm.
“A being which exists both in the mind and in reality is greater than a being that exists only in the mind.” This is also not necessarily correct because an omnipotent god in the mind is just as omnipotent as a god in reality. The location of an omnipotent god shouldn’t matter if they are truly omnipotent. If god is not omnipotent, this is still not necessarily correct because a god that is the most singularly powerful being in reality is possibly subject to being destroyed in a way that a god in the mind is not.
There’s also the problem that if a god in reality were actually greater than a god in the mind then since you can actually conceive of both of those by making that statement then the thing you would have to do to perform the last two steps would be to conceive of a greater being in reality than the greatest being in reality you can conceive of, which is a contradiction and makes the conclusion not follow logically.
Predictive power does not show something is true, while something with no predictive power can still be true. Materialism has no predictive power but people think it is true, even though there is not one jot of evidence for it. And Occam’s Razor is not a criterion for reality or have predictive power. So your idea of Occam’s Razor and Predictive power are mutually exclusive and contradict one another. Another point would be that Occam’s Razor does not say what is true or not, it says what you normatively should pick. And Berkeley basically showed that “idealism”, which had God at the center, is simpler than materialism.
What seems to have become a common misunderstanding concerning Occam’s Razor is that Occam’s Razor was merely a means for choosing which of two TRUE ontologies to hold onto for sake of further building and learning, not which is “more true”.
“Nothing must be affirmed without a reason being assigned for it, except it be something known by itself, known by experience, or it is be something proved by the authority of holy scripture.” Ockham
“We must not affirm that something is necessarily required for the explanation of an effect, if we are not led to this by reason proceeding either from a truth known by itself or from an experience that is certain.” Ockham
“4. We are not allowed to affirm a statement to be true or to maintain that a certain thing exists, unless we are forced to do so either by its self-evidence or by revelation or by experience or by a logical deduction from either a revealed truth or a proposition verified by observations.
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What Ockham demands in his maxim is that everyone who makes a statement must have a sufficient reason for its truth, ‘sufficient reason’ being defined as either the observation of a fact, or an immediate logical insight, or divine revelation, or a deduction from these. This principle of ‘sufficient reason’ is epistemological or methodological, certainly not an ontological. The scholastics distinguished clearly between a sufficient reason or cause (usually expressed by the verb sufficit) and a necessary reason or cause (usually expressed by requiritur). As a Christian theologian Ockham could not forget that contingent facts do not ultimately have a sufficient reason or cause of their being, inasmuch as God does not act of necessity but freely; but our theological and philosophical, and in general all our scientific, assertions ought to have a sufficient reason, that is a reason from the affirmation of which the given assertion follows. All created things can be explained ultimately only by a necessary reason, i.e. a cause which is required to account for their existence.” Philotheus Boehner
He could just create a realm which was very big. very very big, but not infinite.
Wouldn’t that be enough? Think about it.
Also one minor infinity : infinite rocks
Can be less of an infinity as infinite souls or infinite people.
They could do more, or be a higher quality infinite.
So infinites can have good or poor quality, too.
Why does God need to be certain things?
Because we want him to?
What is the proof that God is a good creator?
Plenty of things on earth are all imperfect and some of them are naturally causing suffering and stuff.
What if God was a crappy creator?
Then what?
There is proof of flaws in creation.
Isn’t that proof that the creator is imperfect?
So far, we have people saying all this stuff about what God is, basing it either on this old book the bible, or their rationalism. These are not empiracle.
Deductively we see that the universe is not a hospitable place.
Deductive wisdom applied to “Gods” creation shows a imperfect and not very loving God.
It is the closest we can get to knowing anything approaching a real “truth” of these matters. Any supposition of anything extra is for hypothesis to collect evidence to show predictive power, to research a simpler theory that could have the same predictive power as the leading theory, or for entertainment/emotional purposes.
I am not familiar with that argument of Berkeley’s, but it would seem that either “God” is simply not substantially different than a godless mechanical universe, with the fundamental properties or rules of the universe instead arbitrarily being labeled “God”, or that Berkeley is using an improper application of the principle behind the razor. In the former case, “God” would be limited by our capability to find those properties which would be counter to the conception of God found in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, among others. I don’t really have anything against defining “God” as merely “the actual natural laws of the universe” with no additions, but that seems to defeat the point of the concept of “God” as found in most theism. Arguably, this is the “God” of sorts of “godless” science. However, I am pretty certain that is not what is meant with the thesis question here.
Materialism is a premise so you’re right in that in itself and by itself as a premise it offers no predictive power. However, like arithmetic and logic, it is an extremely useful premise for building things that do have that power. Similarly, we also cannot know that the rules of arithmetic and logic we use are true or not and there is not one jot of evidence for that either in the same sense you say there is not for materialism.