Timeline for Gödel's ontological proof & Benzmüller's work
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
16 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 13, 2020 at 17:13 | comment | added | Asaf Karagila♦ | @PhilippeGaucher: God would not be busy calculating the answer to the wrong question. People always forget that part. | |
| Aug 13, 2020 at 16:31 | comment | added | Philippe Gaucher | @AsafKaragila God is calculating the question for the answer 42. He or She's busy. Therefore He or She (or It ?) exists. | |
| Aug 12, 2020 at 22:39 | comment | added | Sylvain JULIEN | I'd be personally interested in a proof of the equivalence between the existence of God and the truth of RH :-) | |
| Aug 12, 2020 at 22:03 | answer | added | Timothy Chow | timeline score: 10 | |
| Aug 12, 2020 at 21:38 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | @Joël : One of the traditional formulations of the ontological argument relies heavily on the word "necessary." So it is natural, when formalizing the argument, to use a logic where the word "necessary" has a direct formalization. | |
| Aug 12, 2020 at 11:04 | comment | added | Joël | A very naive question. Why do we need modal logic to formalize the ontological argument? Already Gödel uses modal logic, but why is the argument nor formalizable usual logic? | |
| Aug 12, 2020 at 9:22 | comment | added | David Roberts♦ | If you look at the article, he says one could rephrase the statement to be about the following property: "An entity $x$ is maximally-rational ($\mathcal{G}$) iff it has all rational/consistent properties." What looks particularly mathematically interesting is that an automated theorem prover was used to explore ways to trim down the assumptions and the needed logical strength to go from them to the conclusion. In this way Benzmüller also reduced unintended side effects of the conclusion that followed from the stronger logical axioms. | |
| Aug 12, 2020 at 7:15 | comment | added | Francesco Polizzi | The title of Science and Vie is "Existence de Dieu : les mathématiques ont enfin la réponse", that is clearly a big deformation of the (mathematical) onthological argument. My personal point of view, with all due respect for Goedel, is that "Mathematics" and "existence of God" should not stay in the same sentence. | |
| Aug 12, 2020 at 7:00 | answer | added | Bjørn Kjos-Hanssen | timeline score: 4 | |
| Aug 12, 2020 at 5:36 | comment | added | Denis Serre | @LSpice. Oups! Of course, I meant He recently posted. | |
| Aug 12, 2020 at 5:34 | history | edited | Denis Serre | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Aug 11, 2020 at 20:58 | comment | added | Asaf Karagila♦ | @G.Rodrigues: Dipping our toes into philosophy, one can say that according to Descartes, if God thinks about the proof, then he exists; but following a more Douglas Adams route, if God knows that he exists, then he doesn't have to think about it, and therefore disappears from existence! | |
| Aug 11, 2020 at 20:36 | comment | added | G. Rodrigues | The Ontological argument, in its modern modal versions, hinges on the premise of whether God is possible or not, the rest being in my view mostly distractions including discussions of S5 and what not. As a fairly old-fashioned Thomist, I think Aquinas' criticism is decisive which can be construed as saying that the proof works but only God knows it. | |
| Aug 11, 2020 at 19:30 | comment | added | LSpice | You say "I recently posted a preprint", but the link is to a paper "A (Simplified) Supreme Being Necessarily Exists, says the Computer: Computationally Explored Variants of Gödel's Ontological Argument" by Benzmüller (not, I guess, you). Is that intentional? | |
| Aug 11, 2020 at 19:24 | comment | added | Ben McKay | My recollection is that Goedel's proof is fine, given his axioms, and that there is a single axiom that almost all philosophers do not find convincing. | |
| Aug 11, 2020 at 19:16 | history | asked | Denis Serre | CC BY-SA 4.0 |