Here’s something to nosh on when you get the munchies: spiegel.de/international/ger … 28668.html
“…by definition, God is that for which no greater can be conceived. And while God exists in the understanding of the concept, we could conceive of him as greater if he existed in reality. Therefore, he must exist.”
Sounds like circular logic to me.
However, I like it ; a hermeneutic outside the Bible ; but like the Bible a theorem that can’t be proven, but only accepted … by faith, by the way … the only way to God … in the end … like it or not.
I suppose the question is, whether or not we can really conceive of something existing vs. not.
Imagine a horse.
Now imagine a horse that exists.
Does it really change the conception?
I must be dim, because arguments like this seem to make sense to some smart people, but they look like gibberish to me. It’s like saying “I see blue, so do elephants; therefore, mustard tastes good on ham and cheese sandwiches”. Whatever…
This is an interesting story because it shows that those who have complained about the logical mechanics of Godel’s argument have been shown that an ideal reasoner, i.e. a computational machine, has shown that we have a necessarily true proposition known as the Ontological Argument developed by Godel. Of course people can complain about this being circular, but you can say this about any type of deductive or non-deductive reasoning.
Gödel was always a little off on a number of subjects. Even in promoting his own incompleteness theorems, he always presented them as if they established some sort of platonic truth beyond the formalism of mathematics, even though they did nothing of the sort.
Of course it’s circular, it’s a fundamental tautology. They are all circular. Theists and the computer agree. If the computer concurred with atheists, would it be newsworthy and significant? Of course it would.
Although I have my own issues with Gödel, you can’t get any more mathematically, formally correct than Gödel. But this whole story is just a strawman to get attention and taken advantage of the ignorant by those who care nothing for truth one way or another.
The computer was programmed by humans. It searched nested if this then that or this. It looked the way it was forced to. A computer cannot prove or disprove such a thing due to its inability to go against programming.
Kriswest, Computers have been used to prove non-trivial unsolved theorems in logic before. You’re incorrect about what a program can and can’t do.
Anyway, what people seem to be overlooking is this: This isn’t about theists vs atheists. If you look at how God is defined in this proof, “that for which no greater can be conceived,” this definition has nothing to do with atheism. If you ask an atheist “Why are you an atheist? What is it that you don’t believe?” you will NEVER get the answer, “Because I don’t think that that for which no greater can be conceived, actually exists.” You’ll get something more like “I don’t think it’s likely that a conscious being created the universe or the world.”
Just because you attach the word ‘God’ to some concept, and prove that that concept ‘exists’, doesn’t mean you’ve proved atheists wrong. To prove atheists wrong, the concept you’ve proven has to be something that atheists disagree with. Just calling it ‘God’ isn’t satisfactory. If it was, then I could disprove atheism by defining God as ‘That which wears sunglasses,’ and voila, Gods exist all over the place, usually in very bright and sunny places.
BREAKING NEWS, THIS JUST IN: GOD EXISTS, AND HE WEARS SUNGLASSES
no.
Well, if that’s true, so am I … 
Fj I know from the ground up how computers work. Not the more recent works but, enough. The math used to prove this and attach the title god or not god is well known but, there is bias in scripting. The macbook they used is highly susceptible to internal script. You or I can tweak it.
Its a crap story because there is no hard backup. A computer can be changed by knowing its scripting. A personal computer is far too easy to change. I trust it not. Their objective taints the proof.
Kriswest, I’m sure there are many good objections to this proof. What you just said is not one of them.
The ability to change personal computers…doesn’t…mean anything in regards to the experiment. Of course you can change them. That’s what a program is, ffs. They wrote a program, and installed in on a computer (thus changing the computer), and this program presumably involves algorithms that consults a variety of legal logical functions and, using those legal logical functions as well as a set of premises, it finds some sort of path from the premises to the conclusion. Yes, you have to change the computer to do that. I don’t see how that’s an objection to the proof. What are you talking about?
I was reading a pdf about this, and that is indeed part of what it does, but it also does a bit more apparently.
Anyway, the validity of the proof doesn’t hinge on silly questions like, ‘Was it done on a changeable personal computer?’
It hinges on questions like, ‘Are the algorithms in the program in line with deductive logic, and can they be depended upon to output valid (though not necessarily true) conclusions?’
It doesn’t matter if it was run on a personal computer or a quantum computer or a super computer or a hand-cranked turing machine. What matters are the algorithms.
Ok you are right.
How can you honestly prove that God exists, when he never existed? What are you trying to imply that you can substantiate non existence?
Philosophy, which is where Science gained their insights regarding God explained in their texts that you will never know the Name of the Creator for the fact that it cannot be factored. You cannot factor something which has never existed. What you propose is that you can factor non existence…then please explain to me what this factor implies, which proves in its theoretical evidence that you cannot apply it, because you cannot factor it.
This Philosophical insight provides evidence that to Know God, you can only Be God and God is in the Light as stated and was never in the material realm. They demonstrated that sound was lost out of light, that Light lost an angel. The angel lost caused the circle O to be created inside of the light mass. This formed the angel of God who spoke by sound the creative act by causing the falling light sound that came out of the O to act for it through the SYMBOLIC values of a G (spiralling from a point) forming the O as the created cell in light that created a new sound inside of it D. Therefore they explained that GOD formed the expression for the first light sound bodies O that created the Suns and planets in the first creation.
G O D therefore created light sound in the falling evolving space cell as it separated into many new sound bodies. When these sound bodies released themselves they were created by the Act of GOD. Hence God only created once, as the first creative act and cannot ever be replicated, as this relates to the origin itself of first creation. Creation can only be created once.
The Philosophers therefore proved in their Theosophy that you cannot replicate the Acts of God and only identified this themselves by and through the applications of wisdom that they applied to Time as O circular calculations via ANGLES.
Welcome to the Religion and Spirituality Forum. I don’t understand most of what you wrote. But, it seems to me that you contradicted yourself by first denying and then affirming the existence of God.
Anyone who thinks that science can prove things like the existence of god needs to go to science class and remain there until further notice. The article might illustrate a proof for some statement, but it can’t make a proof for the existence of god.
I don’t agree with that at all. There’s no in principle reason why science couldn’t prove the existence of god, if a god existed. It’s very easy to imagine a universe in which a god exists, and humanity developed the scientific method as it did in this one, and god was scientifically obvious.
One such universe is a universe in which god routinely and unambiguously interacts with the people in it. Though this is not the only possible universe in which science could produce an overwhelming amount of evidence for god, it is the easiest to think of when confronted with the question, ‘Is it in principle possible for science to prove that a god exists?’
I think you probably have the idea of ‘separate magisteria’ going on in your head. I don’t think that concept is a particularly valid one. To suggest that we have one epistemology for everything except religion, and a separate, more…let’s say loose…epistemology for religion specifically…well, that’s very convenient for religion. I think a single well-formed epistemology covers everything, and anybody who requires a more forgiving epistemology for a particular set of beliefs they hold dear…well, you know, it’s clear why they require a separate epistemology (because the rigorous epistemology that works for everything else rejects what they want to accept), but it’s certainly not clear why it’s in any sense justified.