William Lane Craig’s Ontological Argument Debunked

Yes, exactly what I was trying to point out. Craig is a cunning linguist.

I actually did just read what Craig had to say at that link, and surprisingly, instead of trying to defend it logically, he resorted to argument from ignorance in essence by asking, which do you think is more plausible. So, a logical proof that doesn't prove anything. That's just pointless.

There is no good reason to think that God exist. Thus, withhold belief in anything supernatural until concrete evidence it presented.

This refutation is not sufficient. Only a being with certain properties can be maximally great. If the being is material (like your teapot), it could always be bigger. Hence, only God can be maximally great, since He is immaterial. This is only 1 characteristic, but it's enough to show your refutation is inadequate.

You have no idea what you are talking about. The reason it works has nothing to do with anything being maximally great. You can remove “maximally great” from either argument and it will still be valid. The problem is, it is using modal logic to prove something that modal logic was never intended to prove.

So, go brush up on your understanding of modal logic and then get back to me.

To do block quotes, surround the text you want quoted with

and

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Anyway, as for it being needed, modal logic was never meant to be used for this type of thing. Because of that, it can be used to show all sorts of things to be true, like a thing and its opposite existing at the same time for example.

To do block quotes, surround the text you want quoted with blockquote and /blockquote tags, surrounded with regular html type brackets. (I can't show them, they are parsed out.)

Anyway, as for it being needed, modal logic was never meant to be used for this type of thing. Because of that, it can be used to show all sorts of things to be true, like a thing and its opposite existing at the same time for example.

None of that has been demonstrated.

“”A coffee pot is by definition a limited, finite entity.”"
“It doesn’t matter if it’s limited or finite. My coffee pot has the abilities I ascribed to it, and you can’t prove otherwise. I can further define my coffee pot however I would like, and it doesn’t make it any more likely to exist. If I said my coffee pot was omnipotent, you would still have a problem with it for the same reasons I have trouble with your imaginary friend.”

You claim that your only goal with the coffee pot is to demonstrate the baseless nature of belief in a supposedly imaginary entity. You think that if people can presuppose the existence of a God with whatever attributes they prefer, you can do the same with a coffee pot, as a means of illustrating the foolishness of that endeavor. What you are ignoring is that responsible theists are not inventing a God to suit their preferences, but rather are deducing/confirming his attributes by observations of the limits of nature’s explanatory power in areas of science that are fully defined. Coincidentally, what we have learned from science has fallen right in line with how the Biblical God has described Himself and His Creation. It is not a God of the gaps. It’s a God of the substance. Many scientific disciplines were started under the assumption that a rational God would create a rational universe, a hypothesis which science continues to affirm. The assumption and confirmation of design is behind all real science. God will never be fully understood by natural means, as He is inherently supernatural, but what we do know from nature will never contradict any part of Who He is.

There is evidence that a supernatural, free-willed, creative entity created the universe. That conclusion is based on observation of what nature cannot do on its own, yet which has been done by something. If nature could not have come from nature, it must have come from something super-natural.

“”I don’t see how a coffee pot can arbitrarily replace an infinite, omnipotent Being in any logical formulation. The flippant equivocation of two fundamentally different entities is what strikes me as mockery.”"
“Do you not realize that I’m not saying my coffee pot is a god? I am saying it has what would be considered magical powers, but that doesn’t mean it’s a god. The thing that is equivalent is the fact that if we allow presupposition that a proposition is true prior to having any evidence, my magical coffee pot is just as valid of a proposition as your magical god. You have taken what I have said further than intended.”

If I have taken the coffee pot further than you intended, that is because I saw implications in it that you had not considered, and which affected its intended usefulness. You are making the presupposition that we don’t have evidence for God. We do have considerable evidence that the Creator of the universe must be the Biblical God, which negates your claim that an unsubstantiated coffee pot is interchangeable with God. You could define the coffee pot however you like, but anything short of the full attributes of the Biblical God would make it frivolously irrelevant. A coffee pot that lacked His qualities would be insufficient to suggest as the Creator of the universe, a role which is essential to any conception of God. And if you have to define the coffee pot to be like God in order for it to be useful in the formulation, you might as well believe in God Himself, who already possesses all the attributes indicated by our observations of nature – supernatural, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, atemporal – specifically, all the qualities that nature lacks in order to explain itself.

It is the practicality of Who God is and how He has been shown to be the best ultimate explanation for the universe that makes His inclusion in the formulation useful. God’s inclusion is not a presupposition, but is based on many lines of evidence and reasoning, one of them being the implications of the First and Second Laws.

“Second of all, even if I were to go the extra step and say that my magical coffee pot is the equivalent to your god, how would that be mockery? Who’s to say that I don’t really believe in my coffee pot? If I do, would it not be mockery of you to propose another imaginary entity to replace my coffee pot? If you don’t think it would, you shouldn’t consider any proposal for a replacement for your deity mockery.”

The only point of the coffee pot is to make the idea of belief in anything supernatural look silly, a goal supported solely by deliberately obfuscatory, invalid equivocations. When the evidence for God is not presuppositionally ignored, it’s the coffee pot that sounds ridiculous, not God. When intellectual honesty is employed, the hypothesis of God’s existence is far from silly.

“”First Law of Thermodynamics – “Energy cannot be created or destroyed.” Nature has no means of creating energy from nothing, yet energy exists. Thus, something super-natural must have created it. Quantum voids are no exception, which I’ll get to in a minute.”"
“The first law of thermodynamics doesn’t say where energy comes from. We could make a logical proposition though. If we are to use that law, the only conclusion we could come to is that energy is not created, which includes creation by a god. In order for you to say that energy was created, you must first show that at one point it didn’t exist.”

As a Law of nature, it applies only to nature, so I don’t see how you can claim to use it to limit the actions of a supernatural God. As I’ve said elsewhere, the Laws of nature can indicate God’s activity, but they cannot limit Him. What else would you expect from a supreme being’s activity in a lesser realm? From the Second Law, we see that energy must have come into existence in a high-intensity state, from which it is gradually “cooling” via entropy. Energy made a grand entrance and is now winding down. Secularists acknowledge the inevitable “heat death” of the universe. If energy had existed from eternity past, the universe would have completely run out of gas eons ago. In addition to the deducible origin of energy, we also know that no natural mechanism can create new energy out of nothing. The naturalistic universe could neither have created itself, nor have sustained itself if it had always existed.

“”Second Law of Thermodynamics – “Over time, energy dissipates, leading to entropy.” The way in which the natural world is winding down implies that it was once wound up. Since nature can only unwind, something super-natural must have done the winding.”"
“What makes you think something needs to be wound up? What makes you think that energy actually exists? What exactly is energy? Where did God get the energy to “wind up” the energy?… No matter which way you look at it, there are things that we don’t know, and aren’t explained by your god hypothesis.”

In light of the First and Second Laws, a finite, depleting amount of something implies that there has always been a finite amount of it. If it were of infinite or self-sustaining character, it wouldn’t be spiraling into entropy.
When you question the existence and definition of energy, I begin to wonder if you’re interested in a scientific discussion.

Given that scientific observation demands a supernatural origin for the universe, it is nonsensical to ask where God got the energy. In the supernatural frame of reference, things only have to come from God, whose omnipotence makes Him the only true example of perpetual motion and limitless energy. When God wills it, new things can simply come into being from non-being. Such was the case for the universe and everything in it.

Can you actually give an example of something that we don’t know, and which contradicts the God hypothesis? If we don’t “know” it, I’m not sure how we can be sure that it contradicts any hypothesis or Law. After centuries of inquiry, everything we have come to thoroughly understand has been consistent with the hypothesis of an ordered universe created by a rational God. There will be strange phenomena, for sure, but there will always be a context of predictable law. For example, the laws governing electrons will not suddenly change, making those minuscule particles easy to locate. Our understanding changes, but the laws and the phenomena themselves do not. At the same time, there are many laws we know well enough already and it’s virtually impossible our understand of them will ever change.

“”How do you know that “poof” isn’t an answer? If an all-powerful Being of fundamentally pre-natural character wanted to create something totally new, it would essentially “poof” into existence, from His perspective, which at that moment would be the only perspective that mattered.”"
“”Poof” is not an answer because it has no explanatory power. What is “poof”? With no explanation of what “poof” is, you have no explanation.”

I don’t understand why you have such a problem accepting the idea of things “poofing” into existence. Isn’t that the very thing that atheists are hoping they can prove occurs in the quantum void, however incorrectly they understand it? How can you deny the idea that something could come from nothing in a supernatural context, and yet support that same idea in the much more limited natural context? “Poof” happens when the supernatural God decides to create anything that is not part of His own substance. Since He is self-fulfilled, all of His creative works fall into that category. As with any work of creativity, His creation will bear his stamp and will have some marks of His character, whether it is the supernatural realm of the angels and human afterlife, or the natural realm of the universe.

“The rest of that paragraph makes little sense whatsoever. Who was talking about god being within anything. I said natural. If something is explainable, it is natural by definition.”

You are saying that God is limited by the natural realm, which I equated to a character in a novel claiming that the author is limited by the world of the novel. Do you think that we can explain the supernatural to any degree?

“”This is another a priori assumption, which results from an insufficient understanding of the character attributes of the Biblical God. The comment isn’t even accurate for the human experience, where people do many things that bring them joy which do not relate to their needs.”"
“It seems you have no idea what “a priori” means. A priori is something deduced by logical means, without observation or experience of the thing itself. It doesn’t mean “speculation”.”

Fair enough. I got it mixed up with “begging the question”. You were saying (and still are) that God is limited to natural means, a conclusion seemingly derived from presumptions.

“If something is perfect, it is lacking nothing. Given that attribute, we can deduce what a perfect thing would and wouldn’t do since, the characteristic of perfect gives us enough information about a thing to make such a deduction.”

Exactly what about perfection prevents a perfect being from doing something unneeded? He wouldn’t have to do such things, but what would prevent him from choosing to do them?

“Now, you can try and say that your god enjoys some sort of limited perfection, where he still needs the worship of lesser beings, or needs something to love, or whatever other way you want to limit it, but that wouldn’t be perfect, since those would be flaws.”

I would never say that God’s perfection is limited. He doesn’t need human worship. He doesn’t need anything to love. He is by nature triune and already exists in perfect relationship with Himself. In my understanding, it’s more like God said to Himself, “why not?” rather than, “I must.”

“Now, how about you give me one example of something that could give a person joy that doesn’t relate to their needs? If I give a gift to my son and see his joy from it, that fulfills a need in me to see my son happy. I am not perfect in that regard, since there is something in me that is unfulfilled that my son’s joy fulfills.
I really don’t think you understand the implications of perfection.”

I mentioned two such things in my first message – frosting on a cake, and a jam session between musicians. People don’t need the sugar in frosting (they get plenty from the cake batter), but they enjoy it. Similarly, musicians don’t need to jam, but they seem to especially enjoy it, despite the fact that it takes up time that they could otherwise apply to meeting their practical needs. It seems strange that you would claim that everything in the human and divine experience would revolve strictly around necessity. We do have some emotional needs, but we also have an appreciation for things that are entirely unnecessary.

“”I like facts. My beliefs are based on them. It’s one of the unique aspects of Christianity. It’s a faith based on facts, reasoning, history, and many scientific disciplines, which is what one would expect, considering the character of the Creator God that is the faith’s focus.”"
“You haven’t given a single fact that supports your beliefs yet. You have given unfounded assertions. A fact would be that I felt warmth on my skin today when I was outside. An unfounded assertion would be that the warmth came from radioactive fallout from the damaged nuclear power plants in Japan. The difference between my claim of radiation coming from the power plant can be observed and demonstrated, even if I can’t show that the warmth came from that radiation rather than the sun… Let’s look at your law of thermodynamics problem for a second. You see what you think is a problem with a natural explanation for energy and you have asserted goddidit. Let’s assume you are correct in that the things you pointed to are problems. How can you prove, even logically, that there isn’t some other unknown force at work that nobody would consider a god? What if there is a creative force that has no mind? It just does what it does because that’s what it does. It has no ability to think about it. In order to say that there is no other explanation besides a god, you would have to rule out all other possibilities, including the unintelligent force.”

Like I said, there are many branches of evidence and the problem of energy in the First and Second Laws is just one branch. The existence of objective moral values gives us more insight into the unique personal character of God. The fine tuning of the laws of the universe to allow for embodied intelligent agents demonstrates that He intended to interact with His image-bearers. These and other evidences give some indication of the specific character of the Creator, beyond Him/it being an unknown or unintelligent force. In science and deductive reasoning, it is necessary to take what you do know, and consider how that knowledge limits the possible unknowns.

“”Theoretical physicists, including Dr. Lawrence M. Krauss (an origins specialist and author of “The Science of Star Trek”) refer to the quantum void as a “type” of nothing, and describe it as a boiling cauldron of energy. Since it is filled with energy, it does not constitute the pre-natural, true “nothing” from which everything must have first sprung. True nothing would require complete non-being, a criterion which the quantum void does not fulfill.”"

“Why would you even invoke Krauss’ name in a discussion on cosmology? Look up a youtube video titled ‘A Universe From Nothing’ by Lawrence Krauss, AAI 2009. If you think that he agrees with your warped view of cosmology, you’re sadly mistaken… Further, Krauss didn’t say that there ever was a “true nothing” which everything must have first sprung. There is no reason to assume that a “true nothing” is even possible.”

I referenced Krauss to make the point that the activity of quantum voids is not equal to something coming from nothing. All physicists can do is call it a “type” of nothing, while admitting that even the “void” is full of boiling energy. Origin from “true nothing” (a.k.a. non-being), is the only possible conclusion that can be drawn from the evidences of the universe’s finite past. A supernaturally enabled emergence of being from non-being is necessary to account for why entropy has not already brought about the heat death of the universe. To say that non-being is impossible again reveals your unfounded bias against supernaturalism.

Despite the prideful struggles that take place in the human heart and mind, if we are wise we will acknowledge that there are forces at work in the universe that indicate that we human beings do not hold the ultimate authority. It behooves and blesses us to search out and acknowledge God, who created our reality and wishes to live in relationship with us in this natural world and in the supernatural world to come. That search begins with observations of our awe-inspiring reality, and ends with placing one’s faith in the person and atoning work of Jesus Christ. God could have left us to ourselves after we introduced sin into His Creation, but instead Christ died for us while we were still sinners, to offer His innocence to us.

As I understand it, the argument only works if the object being presented is not impossible/self-contradictory. For instance, you couldn’t use the ontological argument to prove the existence of a married bachelor, or of a square circle. 

So  the argument about the all-powerful coffee pot doesn’t work because a coffee pot is, by definition, a physical entity and so is constrained by the normal dimensions of space. Something constrained by the dimensions of space is therefore not all-powerful and is self-contradictory, meaning that the argument won’t work for it.

The second argument, the one used for the non-existence of God, seems more cogent. I’ll have to investigate further.

That is, one of the criterion of being maximally great would have to be, existing in every possible world.

Your idea about positive attributes requiring the existence of a thing, while negative ones do not, is illogical. Indeed, logic could not work if what you are saying were true. The statements “S is P” and “S is not P” are equally valid constructions regardless of whether S exists, or whether P is a positive or negative descriptor.

To use your example of “blue” as a positive attribute, I can say “the Tooth Fairy is blue.” The Tooth Fairy may turn out not to exist, and in that case it could not ACTUALLY possess the attribute of being blue. But “the Tooth Fairy is blue” would still be a LOGICALLY possible statement, even if the Tooth Fairy turns out to be fictitious. However, “The non-existent being is blue” is not LOGICALLY possible or ACTUALLY possible, because something that is defined as non-existent cannot possess any attributes. But the Tooth Fairy is not DEFINED as being non-existent, even if it turns out that it actually is non-existent.

Now moving on to negative attributes. I can describe a hypothetical object (HO) as “cold,” which is really just the lack of heat. I have not described any attribute that the HO positively has… only an attribute that it does NOT have. And yet to describe the HO as cold is a coherent, logical statement, that requires the existence of a HO in order be cold. The same would go for something that is “Dead” (the lack of life) or “Invertebrate” (the lack of a spine). Even when the only descriptors you have for an thing are negative, ANY descriptor at all requires the existence of that thing, in order for it to be described.

Now the final piece in your argument is that things that are immaterial are no different from things that do not exist. But this is both logically and scientifically false. By your assertion, the statement “the non-existent being is immaterial” would be a valid construction that is equivalent to “the non-existent being is non-existent.”

The last statement is self evident. The first one is logically false. For if something is defined as non-existent, then there is nothing to hold the qualifier “immaterial.” Essentially your objection attempts to assign the meaning of “non-existence” to the descriptor “immaterial” and then apply the quality of non-existence to the MGB. But this is a misuse of the word “immaterial.”

“Immaterial” merely describes something that lacks mass and location. Thoughts are immaterial. I believe consciousness to be immaterial. Pure energy is immaterial. Spacial dimension is immaterial. And I gave examples from string theory that scientists now recognize “particles” that are immaterial, in order to explain atomic gravity. Scientists speculate about how much “mass” these extra-dimensional particles have, but we cannot even know what “mass” could mean on other dimensions. They only use words like “mass” to describe the effects that these extra-dimensional “particles” have on the particles we can see. THESE THINGS ALL HAVE NO MEASURABLE MASS OR LOCATION, AND YET THEY ALL EXIST.

“Timeless” describes something that exists independently of the linear, physical chain of events that we refer to as time. This is really just an extrapolation of immateriality. Since time is expressed through a chain of physical events, it could not affect something that is not physical.

“Timeless” and “Immaterial” are both descriptors, and like all other descriptors, they require a subject which they describe. We have examples of things that exist immaterially. And by our definition of time, we propose that immaterial things are not subject to the effects of time.

Thus timelessness and immateriality are coherent and do signify something that exists, though probably not a type of existence that we can experience or directly observe. But there are many things in the universe that we cannot experience or directly observe, and yet have determined to be true. Therefore, the existence of an immaterial and timeless being remains possible, unless it is shown to be illogical.

To say that immateriality and non-existence are synonymous would be to render quantum physics a mere scientific fantasy. I think I have established clearly enough that these terms denote qualities that can be used to describe a thing, and that such a thing would need to exist in order to hold these qualities.

Further, it is not necessary to describe any other attributes of the MGB. The MGB could have many other qualities, but none of them are relevant to the argument at hand, which is simply meant to determine if it is logically possible for a being to necessarily exist without mass, location, or time. The argument can be evaluated on those grounds, and any other attributes would only further complicate the argument.

Here is the argument and it’s negation:

Argument: “It is logically possible for a being to necessarily exist without mass, location, or time.”
Negation: “It is logically impossible for a being to necessarily exist without mass, location, or time.”

We can determine which one of those is more plausible without any further information about the MGB.

“If we are to get to the existence of a thing, we must determine that it
actually is something, and immaterial and timeless just don’t cut the
mustard.”

I don’t know what your background is in logic and philosophy, but this is a very basic fallacy. In any argument about an object or an idea, the subject is assumed to be “something” and is assumed to exist. Then logical argumentation can be used to determine the logical possibility (or lack thereof) of that something.

You can’t argue that the premise hasn’t been described well enough to determine that it is “something,”… and therefore can’t be said to exist… and therefore any logical arguments are invalid. That’s patently ridiculous.

I can make the statement “something exists” and stop there. It is completely valid.

But I haven’t described it at all! How can we determine whether it might exist? Are we to just assume that I’m right when I say it is something? Yes! An argument can only be invalidated using the definitions provided. We CANNOT argue that the “something” might not be “something.”— I defined it as “something,” and any evaluation must be on the grounds of that definition.

I can go further and say “Something immaterial exists.” Now we have more information, and we can determine through argumentation whether the existence of an immaterial “something” is logically contradictory. But you CAN’T say that immateriality doesn’t adequately describe the something. My argument was valid BEFORE I added that descriptor, so we’ve established that I don’t even NEED that much description to form an argument. You certainly can propose that “exists” and “immaterial” are logically contradictory… but you’d have to make an argument which shows that immateriality necessarily negates existence… which I doubt anyone can do.

Unless a premise is identified as “nothing” or as “non-existent” we must assume that the premise denotes something that supposedly exists, and argue from there. We cannot demand greater description to establish the “something-ness” of the premise before we consider the argument valid.

If you do not accept this, then you are not employing logical at all… just throwing meaningless words around.