Gödel's Ontological Proof

Very interesting, thank you for sharing this! About this proof, quoting from a talk by John W. Dawson Jr., an internationally recognized authority on the life and work of Kurt Gödel: "And a final example of this sort of unfashionable pursuit is Gödel's proof of the existence of God, which is a formalization in modal logic of an argument — traces all the way back to Anselm — but in particular an argument due to Leibniz. Gödel was very much…

The difference between Anselm's original ontological argument and modern ones like Goedel's or Plantinga's is that while Anselm's is full of terrible reasoning, Goedel's reasoning is (unsurprisingly) watertight and all the terribleness is concentrated in the axioms. Specifically, I think the idea of classifying all properties as "good" or "not good" is hopeless: I do not believe there is any such classification that fits anyone's intuitive ideas about goodness well enough that calling something "godlike" if it has…

"The conventional view of the task of the philosopher is to solve seemingly intractable problems of philosophy using logical analysis (for example, the problem of free will, the relationship between mind and matter, what the good or the beautiful or the true consist of, and so on). However, Wittgenstein argues that these problems are, in fact, "bewitchments" that arise from philosophers' misuse of language. In Wittgenstein's view, language is inextricably woven into the fabric of life, and as part of…