This House Asserts That Ontology Necessitates God!

Pro told me he believed this debate will be interesting to a number readers. I hope so.I believe I am not introducing any new arguments in this final summary. I am saying the same things one more time, only now as direct responses to Pro's debater's points. Pro says, “Now as for concessions, I believe Roy has conceded that ideas are in fact not propositions for he no longer carries on that attack.” The problem for Pro is that he specifically claimed that the idea of God is either true or false. Since only propositions are true or false, if he wants to strictly maintain that ideas are not propositions, then the claim of his proposition is meaningless. What he meant to say was “either the God, as conceived, exists or does not exist.” That is the proposition he must prove. I established that either an idea or a proposition can be meaningless. Pro says “Any argument against God's existence, a negative argument will not be counted here.” says, I think Pro is confusing a point about the nature of arguments with the validity of the arguments. Pro has to prove that the existence of tri-omni God can be established based upon thought alone. That means that no reference to the real world can be made in imagining or proving the God. My argument is that it is not possible to imagine an omni-benevolent all-powerful God without referencing the real world, and in fact referencing the real world a comprehensive way. My point is that the Argument from Evil and the Argument from Non-belief, which deal with the contradiction between the two claimed properties of God, are inherently outside of ontology. God cannot have infinite power and universal benevolence without expression in the real world. A volcano god can be imagined as existing or not existing, because the volcano god might exist but conceivably never act on volcanoes. A God-concept supposing that an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God might exist solely in the realm of thought is unimaginable, because benevolence is only defined by action upon humans. “Now secondly Roy says he has the right to be inconsistent, and launch individual attacks. This is a load of bull. The burden is on me to show necessarily O, but as soon as Roy makes a an argument the burden shifts on him to prove his statement.” Pro must prove four independent propositions, with proved premises logically yielding his conclusion. I pointed out that in general, if I use some argument against premise 1 and another argument against premise 2, there is no need for my two arguments to be consistent with each other. this is done all the time with arguments that say "suppose x is true, then..." All that matters is that one or the other argument be a correct argument that shows that one of the premises is false. Moreover, I might make two arguments against one premise, and have those two arguments be inconsistent. It does not matter, so long as one of my two arguments is valid. I must make any single argument self-consistent. But Pro must argue the specifics of that particular argument, not give a lecture on debate principles and leave a homework assignment to figure out where he thinks it applies. Pro says, “I win this debate for one simple reason, that this was the most important premise and I supplied three proofs for this premise.” Pro's argument depends upon four premises. He must prove all four, not just the one he considers most important. If any premise fails for any reason, the logic of the entire argument fails. Pro says “My opponent has only tackled one of these premises, alongside a negative argument. He has left out the other two and these should win me the argument.” No, if any premise fails, the entire argument fails. That's the way logic works. There are no major premises and minor premises, nor major rule among premises. it's all of them true or the argument fails. Pro says, “Now the first contention that is brought up is that the idea of God is not simple. .... Now tell me what is the taste of an omni-benevolent God (give me an answer which has the conceptualization of necessity: that it is universal to all people who possess the idea of God). What is the smell of omniscience, what pray tell is the sound of omnipotence?” I pointed out the error in equating “sensation” with the senses of taste, smell, and so forth. The error is than humans imagine complex things that ultimately experienced as simple sensations. The idea of omnipotence cannot be tasted, but the only way we can maintain the idea of omnipotence is imagine how it is realized. “Omnipotence” is simple only in that it is a single word, but any imaging of the concept behind the word requires recognizing the enormous complexity of controlling everything. I don't know what Hume would say, but Pro never responded in any way except to repeat what he originally said and to falsely claim I granted it. I claimed that an idea was nonsense if it either had no direct experience in the real world or could not be mapped into a potential experience in the real world. Pro attempts a counter-example to my objection, “In any case lets take a few examples which would be nonsensical to Roy now. Lets recall the example of pain. Now pain only has one distinction: that of touch, so it is again a simple idea. Now pain does not have a sound (the person experiencing it might), nor does it have a taste.” But that is not a counter-example, because that meets my definition of something sensible. It corresponds directly to a real world experience. I cannot guess why Pro thinks it a counter-example. What is nonsense is an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God that exists without interaction with humans. Ontology attempts to prove such a God. Pro says, “Roy also pseudo-appeals to Logical Positivism, there is a drifting sense of it in his words. I remind the voters he never proved this theory.” Pro's assertions are both false. I made no appeal to logical positivism, direct or indirect. I never mentioned logical positivism nor did I reference any result from it. I claimed that Pro's premise which includes his claim that “a certain God either exists or does not exist” is not valid. Pro's error is that there is a third alternative. Rather than true or false, the God concept can be meaningless. I proved that a concept can be meaningless by giving three examples of concepts that are meaningless. Pro attempted to prove that the Jabberwocky example was meaningful, but when I pointed out that no creature could be either judged “twill and brillig” or not “twill and brillig” because those are nonsense words, Pro dropped his argument. Pro never attempted to prove that a “green colorless idea” could have meaning. I gave the example of a “God that can make a rock so big he can't lift it” as an example of a nonsense concept. It's nonsense to demand a logical contradiction be performed. I think Pro took it as an example of a disproof of God rather than an example of nonsense, but in any case it stands as a nonsense concept of God. Pro seems to suppose that the argument was about whether ideas are propositions or not. It was never about that. It was about whether there was an alternative to Pro's concept of God "existing or not existing." Whether considered either as an idea or or as an idea claimed to exist, it was reality. All it takes to prove that a concept can be meaningless is one example, so I proved my claim redundantly. Pro's premise that a concept must be true or false is thereby shown to be a false. All that's necessary to win the debate is for me to show one of Pro's premises false, and I have done that. Pro has littered this debate with false claims of my making concessions or making contradictions. I have no objective to Pro saying that he thinks my saying A concedes B, or that my saying C contradicts my saying D. If he as ever made such pointed claims, I've missed them. He seems content to let both me and the reader guess what he is talking about. When he says that I somehow invoked logical positivism without proving it, that's an inexcusable. Logical positivism holds some things to be meaningless, but I never made any references to logical positivism, and I went no further than to prove that some concepts and propositions are meaningless.What readers should take away from this debate is that there is an inherent and unresolvable problem with ontological arguments. Ontological arguments exist solely in the world of imagination, and it is not possible to get from imagination to reality without stumbling over the meaning or a God that is proved solely in imagination but acts in reality. To be a sensible concept, the God must either not act in reality or be inherently subject in concept to empirical testing. Thanks to Pro for a vigorous debate.