#for rants

Thyroid scan is back and if the doc isn’t planning to remove it, I’m definitely getting another biopsy done bc it’s labeled sus. I wanna stream cuz I’m letting kiddo stay up late since tomorrow he’s got off school. But we’re sharing this one room. We’ll see how it goes. Ngl, your girl takes clonopin and thank God i just remembered that fact. Bc i want to connect w friends but I also don’t want to cry live on camera 😅

I’m just mad that all of this is holding me back. I can roll my eyes and grit my teeth and deal with being called a liar (i wasn’t even fking talking to him. I was explaining to cops the night i called them on my sister bc she was busting into the bathroom, and her husband buts in “that’s a lie by the way”. EXCUSE ME??!”)

I can deal with his dumb ass. I don’t like how it’s stopping me from doing work that I love, that is actually gainful and helps pay the bills which right now I absolutely need.

Ugh. Ok I’m done. Out of my system and into paper(ish).

     So an ontological proof for the existence of God is, as you might imagine, is an argument that purportedly proves God’s existence through the use of axioms based in ontology, which we can consider to be the study of being, reality, or categorization of the various objects that seem to litter the reality in which we seem to exist. Of course, this word most probably came about in the 1600s, and so much of what was once only scrutinized under the umbrella of metaphysics and ontology is today much better explained through empirical scientific investigation, but bear with the old philosophers here for a minute. Since the philosophical study of ontology is so focused on the definitions of commonly-used words, it has avoided being eclipsed by scientific inquiry at every age merely by the nature of science’s inability to fully encapsulate reality thus far: ”What does it mean to exist?”, “What are things”, and “What is being?” are all pretty serious, if elementary, questions to be asking in ontology, and it seems as though no matter how much we study the world, there will always be a place for these questions, because there is always some portion of existence that we cannot understand scientifically. I’m not saying that science is doomed to fail as a tool for understanding the universe, just that science has never fully encapsulated reality, and so there’s always some wiggle room for speculation. But, I digress.       With this very brief introduction to ontology behind us, it may seem pretty obvious that this is the only way to argue for the existence of God, because God’s existence is clearly outside of the realm of modern science. While it is true that whether or not any god exists is outside of the realm of scientific inquiry, there are other ways that people have tried to logically prove God’s existence, including using the beauty of our scientific understanding of physical systems and laws in such arguments as the “fittedness argument” (which is even worse than any ontological argument), or a “cosmological argument,” which I rather enjoy except that I believe that you preclude yourself from actually defining what God is in any meaningful sense if you take it up as your argument for God’s existence. But you can research those things on your own or I can write about them at another time. Here, I’m only concerned with the ontological argument.  An ontological argument, at the very least, has to give a reason why we should believe that if we believe that certain things exist, then we must also believe that God exists, because the existence of those things is only possible through the existence of (and/or actions of) God. Now, of the two famous ontological arguments for the existence of God, Descartes’ makes me angrier cuz he wasn’t even being funded by a Church when he decided to write his Meditations. He had just gone on a fucking bender and then realized that being so fucked up for so long actually wasn’t a great way for one to live one’s life. So he locked himself in his room for a week or two and just kinda wrote everything down to make himself feel like he wasn’t such a fuck-up. He could have done anything more interesting to kick off the mind-body problem in Western Philosophy, but he was just hungover and thinking that God must have been pretty good, I guess.  Anyway, Descartes give us no explicit proof for his argument, relying instead on some pithy prose which formulates the proof in at least two ways that I can recall. I’ll write down both versions of his proof and talk shit about them as soon as I find my old notes, starting with a passage from his Fifth Meditation:  Pithy Prose 1:        “But if, from the mere fact that I can bring forth from my thought the idea of something, it follows that all that I clearly and distinctly perceive to belong to that thing really does belong to it, then cannot this too be a basis for an argument proving the existence of God? Clearly the idea of God, that is, the idea of a supremely perfect being, is one I discover to be no less within me than the idea of any figure or number. And that it belongs to God’s nature that he always exists is something I understood no less clearly and distinctly than is the case when I demonstrate in regard to some figure or number that something also belongs to the nature of that figure or number. Thus, even if not everything that I have meditated upon during these last few days were true, still the existence of God out to have for me at least the same degree of certainty that truths of mathematics had until now.”   Breaking this down into a proof format yields...

Proof 1:  1. Anything I clearly and distinctly perceive to be contained within the idea of a thing is true of (the idea of) that thing.

2. I clearly and distinctly perceive that “necessary existence” is in the idea of God. 3. Therefore, God exists.       Now, René goes on to explain that this is merely how a human should reasonably develop the idea that God must exist, and does not actually constitute an argument that God actually exists. However, this caveat doesn’t really save this proof from criticism, because we can still identify flaws in the reasoning of this proof. There are two basic ways in which we can analyse a proof: by looking at its logical structure, and by looking at the content and internal logic of its premises. The overall structure of this proof is solid, following a classic logical law of inference called modus ponens: If p implies q and p, then infer q. If premise 1 and premise 2 are true here, then premise 3 is inevitable. The actual content of the premises is where the problems lie, in my opinion. Now, I’m by no means the first person to criticize Descartes, but even as an undergrad student his premises struck me as absurd, because it looks like he’s just engaging in circular reasoning, or at the very least being disingenuous about human cognitive capabilities. 

     First, Descartes doesn’t seem to give any rigorous reasoning as to why necessary existence is in the idea of God itself, other than his own intuition. Intuition is all fine and good, but unexamined intuitions cannot lead us into knowledge. At best, they can be coincidentally correct or useful, and at worst, unexamined intuitions cement ignorance. Second, anyone can claim that the idea of any thing contains necessary existence (or some similar quality that would be purported to entail their existence in a simple proof like the above), and then claim that they perceive that quality of an idea clearly. Think of any other creator God; it’s likely that you could make an identical proof for their existence, and then find that now you have reasoned that there must exist two different Gods which both contain necessary existence in their very idea but which then each negate part of the very definition of the other, because I imagine that each of these Gods are also thought of as the sole creator of the universe. If either one of them were the sole creator, then the other could not be, and we’ve wound up in a paradox that results from applying just a little pressure to this proof. Anyway, since Descartes does have other formulations of his argument, I’ll wrap this part up by saying: This proof fails even with Descartes’ caveat that it is merely a descriptive psychological proof because he doesn’t provide definitions of what it is to clearly and distinctly perceive something (other than to have unshakeable belief in it), and so this proof is just an example of classic religious faith stretched out into a semblance of logic. You can know God through faith, but don’t pretend it’s a logical proof, René.       There is another formulation that we can find by looking back to the Third Meditation. This is also the formulation that gets more attention, so I’ll spend some more time with it. Here, Descartes writes... Pithy Prose 2:

    “...[T]here can be in me no idea of heat, or of a stone, unless it is placed in me by some cause that has at least as much reality as I conceive to be in the heat or in the stone. For although this cause conveys none of its actual or formal reality to my idea, it should not be thought for that reason that it must be less real.”

     “[R]egardless of what it is that eventually is assigned as my cause, because I am a thinking thing and have within me a certain idea of God, it must be granted that what caused me is also a thinking thing and it too has an idea of all the perfections which I attribute to God. And I can again inquire of this cause whether it got its existence from itself or from another cause. For if it got its existence from itself, it is evident from what has been said that it is itself God, because, having the power of existing in and of itself, it unquestionably also has the power of actually possessing all the perfections of which it has in itself and idea, that is, all the perfections that I conceive to be in God. However, if it got its existence from another cause, I will once again inquire in similar fashion about this other cause: whether it is the ultimate cause, which will be God.”

     We can take these passages, in conjunction with some other ideas that Descartes sprinkled throughout this meditation, and generate the following proof: Proof 2: 

1. I have in me the idea of a supremely perfect being, infinite and containing all perfections. 

2. Existence is more perfect than non-existence.

3. Thus, a supremely perfect being exists, i.e. God. 

     This proof seems to work quite a bit better than the first one which we mentioned, but it is far from perfect. Before I really dig into it, though, I should clarify that if you think that there is an issue with the first premise (Why should it matter what is in Descartes’ mind?), that his meditation does do some work to ground this proof. As you can see in the first excerpt of Pithy Prose that I provided for this version of the proof, Descartes was operating off of something of a framework in which he thought that any knowledge or ideas that he had seemed to come from the world outside him. He only ever had the idea of a rock because he encountered rocks, he only knew what heat and cold were by experiencing them, and so he thought that the idea of a God was the effect of some kind of contact with a being greater than himself. It doesn’t really pass muster today as epistemological grounding, but he really kicked off Western Philosophy, which hadn’t been doing very much in the way of innovation since the Greeks, and so I think I can forgive him for that. Aside from that grounding, though, it has a solid logical structure, quite similar to the first proof. However, the problems inherent in its premises run deeper than the first. The first issue that jumped out at me when I saw this formulation of the proof was the second premise, that existing is more perfect than not existing. This seemed counterintuitive to me, because I thought that if you accept that you can compare existing and non-existing things to each other with value statements like this, then you have to accept a lot of very weird concepts into your ontology. For example, if you accept that there can be two identical things, except that one thing exists and is more perfect where the other is only imaginary, you have to explain how it is that those two things can be compared in that way, and what exactly that imaginary thing lacks. 

     To make it more concrete, let’s say that we have an piece of art. You can use any piece of art, but I’ll just choose Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Now, if you accept statements such as premise 2, it would be perfectly okay to say that there is the Starry Night that you hang on your wall (or the wall of an art museum), but there is also a Starry Night which Van Gogh did not make, exactly the same in every way. Except for the fact that it doesn’t exist. He only created the one, and the fact that he painted that one that is hung on a wall somewhere makes that one more perfect than the nonexistent one. But that’s not how we use language, is it? Nor is it how we think of nonexistent things. How can there be a thing that doesn’t exist? If something exists, it seems, we can think of it and interact with it in other ways (including imagining it), but with things that do not exist, we can only imagine them, and cannot interact with them in any other way. We have one original Starry Night. We don’t have any number of non-existent Starry Nights to compare it to, and trying to explain why we don’t have non-existent things seems like some absurd philosophical word-twisting to describe something that we know intuitively: Objects either exist, or they don’t. You can’t compare an existing thing to a non-existent thing, much less upon the basis of its (non)existence. It just infuriated me that Descartes thought that there are existing things and nonexisting things, rather than just admitting that things either exist or they don’t.