the end of the ontological argument, for now
It brings us to the problem of infinity I suppose. Infinity can be mathematically presented to us, and we can understand it in this, I think limited way, but an infinity of extension and power, and understanding, and ‘goodness’, for this is often how gods are defined, I’m not sure that this can be understood in any concrete sense. I’m not sure that we can do anything other than present the concept, despite the resemblance here to Plato’s ideal forms. After all, did Plato ever do anything other than present notions of virtue and courage, abstracted from particular instances?
Religious thinkers and philosophers, it seems to me, are always slipping between the abstract idea of an infinite god and the more concrete (eg gendered), anthropomorphised realisation of this entity. A personal, personned god. This god knows every hair on our head and intervenes, apparently capriciously (but really according to a system or an understanding far beyond we mere mortals’ ken), to deliver people miraculously from the grip of cancer, or to sweep innocent babes to their deaths in tsunamis.
I just wonder myself if there isn’t an impossible contradiction between this personal, intervening god and the conceptualised infiniteness that so many philosophers from Anselm on down claim to be necessary attributes of a necessary god. If this infinite being intervenes, then it intervenes everywhere, in everything, always. Probably impossible then to attribute morality, or even meaning, to this intervention, this total control. Remember that the big bang has been calculated to have occurred 13 billion years ago (and that may not have been the ultimate beginning) and humans have been inhabiting this paltry planet for a mere million (actually homo sapiens isn’t much more than 100,000 years old), so god’s been busy interfering and manipulating with largely inanimate matter for many millions of times longer than it’s been controlling or guiding human lives. It seems to me that the philosophers’ gloss on an entity (or set of entities for multiple-god religions) invented to provide comfort and a sense of significance to human lives has only resulted in transforming these concretely considered entities into necessary but remote abstractions, so that their ‘proofs’ become more and more irrelevant to simple on-the-ground believers. This is I think where the ontological argument founders, in its own irrelevance. Yet it also shows how these inventions called gods start to crumble and break apart when any intellectual weight is brought to bear on them.
Finished reading a book! The first book read to the end since Alan Moorehead’s ‘The March to Tunis’ back in November or so. This was Shane Maloney’s ‘The Big Ask’, a crime novel of sorts, wonderfully well written and full of fun about labor party haplessness and union standover tactics – though Maloney’s no right-winger, check out his doozy of a speech to Scotch College, which has been doing the rounds.
I need to spend more time trying to figure out the technical side of blogging, since there are obviously no white knights out there who will save me. I want to be able to do those neat links within my blog, in blue and underlined just like in everyelse’s blog. And then onto something more topical, the scandal of the detention of Cornelia Rau, and government responses to it.
Religious thinkers and philosophers, it seems to me, are always slipping between the abstract idea of an infinite god and the more concrete (eg gendered), anthropomorphised realisation of this entity. A personal, personned god. This god knows every hair on our head and intervenes, apparently capriciously (but really according to a system or an understanding far beyond we mere mortals’ ken), to deliver people miraculously from the grip of cancer, or to sweep innocent babes to their deaths in tsunamis.
I just wonder myself if there isn’t an impossible contradiction between this personal, intervening god and the conceptualised infiniteness that so many philosophers from Anselm on down claim to be necessary attributes of a necessary god. If this infinite being intervenes, then it intervenes everywhere, in everything, always. Probably impossible then to attribute morality, or even meaning, to this intervention, this total control. Remember that the big bang has been calculated to have occurred 13 billion years ago (and that may not have been the ultimate beginning) and humans have been inhabiting this paltry planet for a mere million (actually homo sapiens isn’t much more than 100,000 years old), so god’s been busy interfering and manipulating with largely inanimate matter for many millions of times longer than it’s been controlling or guiding human lives. It seems to me that the philosophers’ gloss on an entity (or set of entities for multiple-god religions) invented to provide comfort and a sense of significance to human lives has only resulted in transforming these concretely considered entities into necessary but remote abstractions, so that their ‘proofs’ become more and more irrelevant to simple on-the-ground believers. This is I think where the ontological argument founders, in its own irrelevance. Yet it also shows how these inventions called gods start to crumble and break apart when any intellectual weight is brought to bear on them.
Finished reading a book! The first book read to the end since Alan Moorehead’s ‘The March to Tunis’ back in November or so. This was Shane Maloney’s ‘The Big Ask’, a crime novel of sorts, wonderfully well written and full of fun about labor party haplessness and union standover tactics – though Maloney’s no right-winger, check out his doozy of a speech to Scotch College, which has been doing the rounds.
I need to spend more time trying to figure out the technical side of blogging, since there are obviously no white knights out there who will save me. I want to be able to do those neat links within my blog, in blue and underlined just like in everyelse’s blog. And then onto something more topical, the scandal of the detention of Cornelia Rau, and government responses to it.
posted by Stewart at 3:51 pm
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