The only Ontological Argument worth wanting

January 1, 2015 • 7:56 am

Over at Evolving Perspectives, reader Pliny the In Between made a cartoon inspired by the discussion we had (which was, in turn, inspired by a Jesus and Mo cartoon) about the Stupid Ontological Argument for God.  Pliny has his own version that is much improved over the old one:

Toon Background.001

Studying the philosophy of religion, I’ve always said—and here I agree with John Loftus and Peter Boghossian—is a worthless endeavor. If you disagree, and think that there’s something worth divining from thousands of years of made-up stuff and confirmation bias, please weigh in below.

99 thoughts on “The only Ontological Argument worth wanting”

  2. I don’t agree that it’s completely worthless to study the philosophy of religion. I think there’s a “know thine enemy” factor worth considering.

    I don’t think anyone needs to make a career of it; I do think that having enough knowledge to refute the BS can be useful. L

    1. Concur.

      I think back on when I was a callow youth sitting in the Southern Baptist pew or choir loft, hearing the minister read (a claim in) the Bible and (being dismayed at my doubt in) thinking, “Is that true just because someone thinks/says so?” We don’t accept “just so” statements in any other domain of life. As I’ve gotten older I’ve marveled at how human primates will say most anything.

    2. There’s no end of bullshit though so it’s better to ignore it and simply know enough about how reality works to dispel the gospel.

      1. I tend to agree. However much one reads (short of the whole thing) some believer can come up with something else.

        Besides, do we also have to read the Koran, the Torah, Velikovsky, von Daniken, Nostradamus, Ayn Rand, yadda yadda yadda (the list is endless) in order to be able to refute whatever nutty beliefs some enemy of rationality might come up with?

  3. I think meta-theology is interesting to study. Studying theology objectively, we might learn quite a lot about our subconscious desires, fears, and aspirations, and how they vary across cultures.

  4. Although I’m not a religious person, I find the philosophy of religion to be very interesting and worthwhile, not only because of it’s obvious historical significance but also as Sam Harris says in his book End of Faith, “There is, of course, much that is wise and consoling and beautiful in our religious books.”

    1. Perhaps, if you first cherrypick among the texts to make them “books” and then cherrypick away the atrocities between the more sane parts.

      I would never call them “wise” though, because secular morality and wisdom has historically been greater the whole period these texts existed. “Insane”, “dumb” and “violence porn” would be more like my opinion.

      My own idea is that religious texts belong in museums, and that especially abrahamistic text sales should have an “over 18” label due to the violence (and insanity) espoused.

    2. “There is, of course, much that is wise and consoling and beautiful in our religious books.”

      History and literature of religions != philosophy of religion.

      1. Well but there’s no bright white line between them. A study of old testament ethics could be philosophy if you’re motivated to understand the ethical system the ancient Hebrews developed, or it could be history if you’re motivated to understand the ethical system the ancient Hebrews developed. Exact same material, just a different motivation or goal.

        Seems like splitting hairs to say one motivation renders the study useless, but the other motivation makes it worthwhile.

        IMO, some specific studies of religious material (like the example above) could be worthwhile regardless of what academic label you put on it, while other studies (the classic ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin’ is an example) may not be. It depends on the specific academic question or topic you’re talking about.

  5. If a sterility virus emerges which is only effective if one has the ‘god gene’ ( propensity to superstition) then the need to study these vestigial traits would slowly devolve! And we might cure our Plague Phase in a way not involving the Four Horsemen. Wouldn’t that be a shockingly positive wild card?

    1. I’m sure they’d warm up to stem cell research in a jiffy if the children of Yahweh became childless.

  6. I don’t have to know anything about Greek mythology to intelligently argue that it’s not real. I can do without an in-depth knowledge of modern religions in the same way. I would also argue against taking the ‘know thy enemy’ stance as well. The concept that to intelligently argue against religion is by taken an opposing view strengthens their arguement.

    1. Agreed.

      And my willingness to discuss the contents withered quickly as I started to read the religious texts. How do you discuss insane ideas from within? It takes a certain mindset to absorb them, and I find while I don’t fear to thread there I have no patience for it.

    2. I agree as well. It’s easy and tempting to tut-tut Xtian warmongers and capitalists with the “but Hippie Jesus said …” routine, but it’s a mug’s game. If one doesn’t care what scripture says, there’s no point in parsing what scripture really says: believers don’t care about cognitive dissonance, it’s a feature not a bug.

      I think Boghossian’s has the truth of it: faith is the foundation, so start there to take the house down. Ask questions and let people come to their own conclusions in their own time. Not that I have any idea how to do that myself! I don’t have the patience or skill, but I do think it is more likely to be effective that debating whether Jesus meant feed the hungry when he said, you know, feed the hungry.

  7. Hegel, employed by a university to teach a course in logic and one in theology, had to write a textbook for each. He wrote to a friend that it was like being employed as a chimney sweep and a white washer at the same time.

  8. “Worthless endeavor” is fine by me. Or as Sam Harris says somewhere in Letter to a Prohibitionist, “The history of theology is the history of bookish men parsing a collective delusion.” Correct.

  9. I only have so much time; I’m going to spend it learning about things that are real.

  10. So much money to be made on both sides of this fence. Why would anyone say it is a waste of time?

    1. Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James Goodfellow, when his careless son has happened to break a pane of glass? If you have been present at such a scene, you will most assuredly bear witness to the fact that every one of the spectators, were there even thirty of them, by common consent apparently, offered the unfortunate owner this invariable consolation

      “It is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Everybody must live, and what would become of the glaziers if panes of glass were never broken?”

      Now, this form of condolence contains an entire theory, which it will be well to show up in this simple case, seeing that it is precisely the same as that which, unhappily, regulates the greater part of our economical institutions.

      Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage, and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier’s trade – that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs – I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen.

      But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out,

      “Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.”

      It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.

      Frédéric Bastiat ~ Ce qu’on voit et ce qu’on ne voit pas (1850)

  12. “think that there’s something worth divining from thousands of years of made-up stuff and confirmation bias”

    only thing I can think of is that humans can be quite ignorant, selfish and violent.

      1. Well we all know that already. So we might just as well take that as a fact and skip the Bible study… 😉

  13. “..thousands of years of made-up stuff and confirmation bias”
    This is one of the most succinct & useful definitions of religious history I’ve heard.

  14. “thousands of years of made-up stuff and confirmation bias”

    If it were only philosophy of religion……sigh! can you say “unfalsifiable”?

        1. Ant, to find entertainment news so obscure you must really Krell the industry rags

  16. I get this Blog too. Amazing how if you speak up or have questions, you are a sinner. Great letter to editor in News Sen. this week. I’ll try to save it for you. Very rare that the paper prints anything but letters with bible verses in them. The writer will get hate mail and death threats, I imagine.

  18. It would seem to me that they have to go to philosophy to make up something close enough for them to believe in. Because if they stay with the text (the bible) they have almost nothing. It is crammed full of bad stuff that only a bunch of old men in the iron age could create.

    Sitting around in a world of philosophy…maybe that is the religion.

    1. Excellent point. Religion is religion, but arguing for it is more of a philosophical debate which could be made for anything. It’s evident when you watch debates with the likes of William Lane Craig or other such “notables”. They seem to almost always end up debating semantics more than religion.

      1. Yes. If Christianity is founded on this book then the attention must be on that and not a lot of junk you dream up in philosophical discussions and arguments. We atheist are too quick to be diverted to these other attractions that are mostly just that – diversions.

        If you focus on the great book they claim to follow it is much easier to expose the fraud that religion really is. I believe that is what Dawkins and Harris generally do best. This book, Christianity is not Great, spends a lot of time on the book.

  19. The Talmud says that a Roman centurion ordered Rabbi Hillel to recite the whole of the Torah while standing on one foot. Hillel replied “Do not do to others that which you find hateful to yourself. Now go and study!”

    This is a wonderful insight into the philosophy of religion: two millennia ago, theologians already talked about the book as if they’d never actually read it; even The Golden Rule is not an Xtian innovation, and was probably an old chestnut embroidered into pillows in Jesus’s day; and a story about a believer always had to have a little persecution to sauce it up.

    So, no, I don’t think religious philosophy has value. To the extent there is beauty or wisdom in religious texts, it is are right there on the page – and if you extracted those nuggets from the Old Testament and Gospels, you might get to exactly that, one page. A religious philosopher might bristle at “made up stuff” and “confirmation bias,” but s/he is deluded to think that is not exactly what the field is about.

      1. Indeed! I should have googled the story before I recounted it, as I left out two key features: the centurion told Hillel he would convert to Judaism if the latter could do the recitation standing on one foot; and after reciting The Golden Rule, Hillel said “The rest [of the Torah] is commentary.”

        So I was a little off with my persecution comment, and left out the punchline.

        Google also yields several other Hillelisms which are attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. People apparently wonder whether JC was “influenced” by Hillel, which is an odd question to ask if you think JC was God incarnate. If anyone is concerned about plagiarism or whether this supports the idea that JC is an invented pastiche of 1st century religious ideas, I did not see that in the first page of search results.

  20. Studying the philosophy of religion, I’ve always said—and here I agree with John Loftus and Peter Boghossian—is a worthless endeavor. If you disagree, and think that there’s something worth divining from thousands of years of made-up stuff and confirmation bias, please weigh in below.

    Well, of course, the only way to be sure that there’s no “there” there is to go and have a look-see for yourself.

    But it doesn’t have to take much, and wouldn’t were it not for the historical circumstances that resulted in the widespread delusion of religion in the first place.

    The religions themselves are based on texts that are so obviously fantasy that you’ve got to be completely blinkered to miss the fact. Anybody who makes it past the first chapter of the Bible and still thinks it has something to do with reality is either not a competent adult or has left his brains so open they’re falling out.

    So, then you turn to the “sophisticated” theology that excuses the incoherent idiocy of the Bible as the primitive gropings of ancient people towards a greater truth…and it turns out that they’re all still stuck on the same scientific problems that Aristotle couldn’t for the life of him figure out. This is sophistication?

    And, of course, at no point has there been any presentation of any evidence — let alone even any serious attempt to counter the centuries-older-than-Aristotle evidence of the impossibility of the religious claims.

    That leads us to the only two possible uses for the study of religion and theology and related subjects: anthropology and abnormal psychology. Of course, neither are exactly the type of study the religious have in mind….

    b&

    1. As you say at the beginning, you have to know something about a subject in order to know it’s not worth studying. I’ve decided I know enough though to make that decision. However, knowing and understanding the arguments used by believers is, I think, useful when you’re debating them. (They’re useless in any other context.)

      And although many here are naturally uninterested in such debates, they do help people who don’t have access to the information and arguments any other way. There are many communities even in modern Western countries where people are trapped by lack of access to knowledge and information. Hearing a debate can and does change the lives of such people

  22. “At it’s best, religion gives people bad reasons to do god things, where good reasons are available.”

    Sam Harris

    Happy New Year.

  23. “Imagine a perfect first mover.”

    Sorry for my immaturity, but I just can’t get rid of an image of God shitting out the universe.

    Great comic Pliny the In Between!

  24. May I just say that I think Philosophy of religion is very interesting? I find arguments like the Ontological Argument, and the Cosmological Proof, and Pascale’s Wager etc fascinating, and the same goes for the attempts to define God without contradiction, and solve the so-called Problem of Evil. Of course none of the ‘proofs’ stand up, and the very notion of the omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, eternal, omnibenevolent and uncreated God is probably incoherent and certainly inconsistent with the existence of evil and suffering. But it’s a lot of fun taking these arguments apart. I taught Philosophy of Religion on an A-level course a few years ago and found it very enjoyable; as I think did the students, although the religious ones found it rather discomforting.

    Of course there are people who do Philosophy of Religion in the wrong way; they are predisposed to finding these ingenious but faulty arguments to be valid. (Alvin Plantiga is obviously an egregious case in point.) But that’s not a problem with Philosophy of Religion, but with its being practised in an unphilosophical manner.

    1. I’m with you on this. I commented upthread before I read your comment – it would fit in just the same here.

    2. I sort of agree.

      I enjoy parsing the arguments for god and identifying their flaws as well.

      But only because I’m very invested in seeing the negative effects of religion go away, which most likely means seeing religion itself go away. I don’t think I’d remain interested in debunking the arguments for god if religion indeed had gone away and no one was actually making those arguments.

      1. After a little thought, I think it might be fair to say that studying “philosophy of religion” could still be worthwhile and/or interesting even if religion had gone away because you could treat it as a survey of logical fallacies, biases, and other forms of flawed reasoning. And those are things one really should be educated about.

        Of course, that education need not come from tackling the arguments you encounter in “philosophy of religion”. But it can.

    3. Completely agree, if you have the time it’s fun to do, and can come in handy (f.i. birthday party discussions).

    4. To each his own, I guess. Such preoccupations sound to me like just a waste of time that could be spent much more enjoyably and/or productively. Good thing we all enjoy different things.

  25. There is no other argument for the purpose of studying religion or theology in any way, except maybe some extreme psychological experiment in anthropological reversion. I mean, there isn’t a degree in palmology, phrenology or astrology – as far as I know – unless some Moonie dude who got an honorary internet professorship set up a scam university on the internet, but I digress.

    Yep, it’s all storytelling, mythology and crap.

  26. I can only say that “philosophy of religion” !*broadly construed*! (to include Kierkegaard and Lao Tzu and Walter Kaufmann- analysis of religious experience, religious language etc) is potentially a huge improvement over theology, the latter of which I generally agree with Professor Decke Katze’s views upon. There are foolish philosophers (Craig and Plantinga). But I would definitely classify Walter Kaufmann as a philosopher of religion.

    The monster in the cartoon seems to be modeled on the invisible monster in the science-fiction classic “Forbidden Planet”.

  27. The thought occurred to me that we, as human beings, are not perfect and are thus incapable of imagining a truly perfect being. We would be mistaken about any being we imagined to be perfect.

    And thus the ontological argument fails.

    1. I don’t see how you know your first sentence to be true. I can imagine many things that I’m not. And I can imagine perfect things such as ‘a perfect circle’ without much trouble at all. So I don’t see any logical or deductive reason to accept the ‘imperfect human cannot imagine a perfect got’ assertion.

      And we can even turn that relationship around in order to disprove it: if God’s perfect, then he would be able to fashion a theology book that would be able to communicate his perfectness to imperfect beings. If he can’t do that, he’s not perfect.

  28. Study of any and, all, thoughts and/or understandings of the universe (including tendencies to create gods) by humans throughout time is worthwhile being relatively knowledgeable about. Philosophy and religions are not the only areas of human study that
    have large proportions of wishful thinking and imagination. Study any realm of human endeavor, including history and science,and you will find misunderstandings, errors and outright lies. The human being with all his/her thinking, and modus operandi, are worth examining if one has the time and interest.How can one know humanity without knowing the paths that have been taken, right and wrong?

  29. I wouldn’t call philosophy of religion worthless. Futile seems a better word, because the kind of “God” the arguments can demonstrate even if successful (and it’s highly questionable whether any argument is successful), the gap between the kind of God the argument demonstrates and the kind of God that people believe in is huge. So even if philosophy of religion brought up the kind of argument that could be a serious contender to demonstrate God’s existence, there’d still be all the confirmation bias and cultural contingency in play that’s alive today.

    If one were to say something positive about philosophy of religion, though, it would be that reason and argument is what’s needed to address the question of God’s existence, and philosophy of religion is just applying the basic tools of thinking in the direction of God. So by arguing against God, we are in-effect doing philosophy of religion. And to that extent, it’s good to have the best epistemic tools at our disposal to make that case. And that’s what philosophy of religion tries to do.

  30. It is good to study it to the extent needed to understand the main arguments and why they are bad. This is true simply because so many everyday believers lean on what they view as the intellectual giants of religion. “Well, all this doesn’t quite make sense to me, but many people have done their homework and come to understand what makes all this true.”

    If we don’t study the arguments enough to at least point out the flaws (this doesn’t require a lifetime of study, that is surely a waste of time), then we’ll continue to see more people get duped by bad thinking rather than the current trend towards secularism we see now. I’d say this type of study is worthwhile and exactly what Jerry has done for his upcoming book which I am greatly looking forward to.

  32. As others have remarked, it’s handy to have enough information about the usual arguments to be able to refute them. That doesn’t take much time.

    In responding to Christians, it’s also handy to recall some of the inconsistencies, incoherencies, and atrocities in the Bible.

  33. I agree. There is no more selfish and worthless pursuit than Theology. All it seems to be is finding new ways to pretend ones beliefs are real, simply to claim that you are more right than other people about something that can’t be tested or detected – and all in an effort to save your own skin from death.
    I truly can’t see a value in it. I have no idea what Theology has done for the world.

  36. Studying things that don’t exist can be fun. I read philosophy of religion books in the same frame of mind as I read Holmesian speculation about whether Moriarty was twins or notions about extreme sexual dimorphism in time lords. Next someone will be suggesting that time spent researching the ventilation ducts on the NSEA Protector is time wasted.

  38. Maybe the scriptures are composed of material from the waste paper basket of Jesus & Mo & Co? It looks like rough drafts, they wrote it, looked at it, thought,”No, nonsense” crumpled it up and threw it in the bin. Someone later found the texts and revered it because they heard that the author was a hero.

    “God is love” then how come there are so many unloving, cruel & barbaric ideas attributed to God ?
    How about let the ideas & technology which maximize human well being and minimize human suffering be viewed as the ones to serve, worship, adore ? Well until improvements come along.

  39. Yes, this is some to be learned, human Phycology. If we accept the hypothothis that religions are mass delusions, or that some revelations are the result of mental Illness produced hylucinations, or even manipulative sociopathes; then yes, the study of the philosophy of religion is worthy as an academic pursuit.

  41. I think that philosophy of religion is worth studying well if only to have some idea what the intellectual mercenaries like Plantinga (who would be a decent philosopher if he didn’t suffer from his religious bias) and worse like Craig. It also from time to time makes for interesting innovations along the way, like Patrick Grim’s discussions about “truth collections” (or “sets” in the venacular).

    1. Oh, but it does! It’s <insert favorite OA of apologist />, and to understand its true perfection, you must first read two millennia of apologetics, starting with Anselm and Aquinas….

      b&

        1. Oh, but it is self-contained! And, to understand why it’s self-contained, you only have to read two millennia of apologetics, stop being so strident, and recite the Sinner’s Prayer right here and now with me! And, did I mention? Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, either!

          b&

          2. See, you’re a smart guy, and you know I’m going to try to trick you. So, if I tell you I am, you’ll think I’m not. Unless, of course, you’re smart enough to know that I know that you know that I know about Craig’s cocaine addiction…

            b&

          10. I don’t get the undercurrent of this conversation. I just keep thinking that Polyphemous, the Cyclops was from Italy.

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