Stranger Fruit is a blog on ScienceBlogs I don’t usually read, but this particular post was brought to my attention just now.
Today in 1978, the logician Kurt Gödel died in Princeton, New Jersey. Gödel, of course, is remembered for his incompleteness theorems but also took the ontological proof for the existence of God serious enough to express his own version of it in modal logic.
Which he then follows with the proof itself. You can look at it if you like, but it’s essentially Anselm of Canterbury’s with more maths to confuse the layperson.
The general form of the ontological argument (and a simplification of Anselm’s version), of course, is this:
1. God is, by definition, a being than which nothing greater can be conceived/imagined.
2. Existence in reality is greater than existence in the mind.
3. God must exist in reality, if God did not then God would not be that which nothing greater can be conceived/imagined.
Analogously, it is possible to conceive of a perfect ham sandwich. A ham sandwich which, by definition, is better than any other such sandwich. For such a ham sandwich to exist in reality is greater than for it to simply exist in the mind. Therefore somewhere must exist the perfect ham sandwich.
I’m expecting that sandwich to arrive any moment now.
Anyway, Lynch then goes on to say that because Dawkins refuted the Anselm of Canterbury version but not the Gödel version, clearly The God Delusion is an infantile piece of crap.
John Lynch is apparently an atheist, and he’s bringing this up because he feels the chapter in TGD dealing with the ontological argument is ignorant of sophisticated theology (never mind that all of the various version of it have at its base the same single flaw), and that this weakens the book as a whole.
It’s a textbook example of the Courtier’s Reply, and he reinforces it in the comments.
“I freely admit to not understanding Godel’s argument – I was merely using it to make a broader point about Dawkins’ willingness to caricature the ontological argument.”
“Thanks for playing. Come back when you have actually read something substantial on the ontological argument. And that excludes Dawkins.”
“I’ll stand by my claim that Chapter 3 greatly weakens the overall work and that it does not reflect anything interesting that’s happening in philosophy of religion.”
The ontological argument doesn’t need caricaturing, and Dawkins doesn’t. Essentially saying “other people have written more! I don’t understand it but they can’t all be wrong!” is intellectually void. “Philosophy of religion” is a euphemism for “theology”, and arguably nothing interesting has happened in that area in many, many centuries.
I hope for the sake of ScienceBlogs in general that this is an attempt at satire, but I doubt it. We (and secularism everywhere) have about as much to fear from appeasers as we do from fundamentalists themselves.
Edit: Larry Moran takes apart another one of Lynch’s posts. This is relevant.
