[whatshisface]

The parent is referring to the (actually, legitimately, really bad) philosophy that you can find in the most puffed-up theology books. It comes from the same process of domain envy that makes some philosophers put the worst math ever in their papers, except it started several hundred years earlier. To cut one slice through it, I can point you to a page of 100% fallacious arguments[0] that only survived as long as they did because they had a popular conclusion.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/

[User23]

The very page you link lists a logically sound ontological argument[1]. It appears to me that you're judging the argument fallacious because you don't like the conclusion.

[1]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/#Go...

[whatshisface]

The fallacy in that one is thinking that accepting those axioms is any different than directly accepting the conclusion. :) Stating a bunch of axioms and deriving something doesn't prove what you derived, except in a technical sense of the word "prove," not in a useful sense related to determining the truth. Even if we accept that Godel's logic was sound, there is plainly no more reason to believe in his starting point than there is to directly believe in the end.

[medstrom]

What? You contradict yourself several times. Does accepting the axioms obligate you to accept the conclusion or not? First you say it does, then you say it doesn't. And proving something is of course quite literally "determining the truth", you can't just dribble it away like that. This comment looks like word salad intended to let the reader believe whatever they want.

[whatshisface]

Proving that some axioms imply a conclusion does not prove the truth of the conclusion, when the axioms themselves remain unproven. For example:

Axiom 1) All comments by whatshisface are right.

Theorem 1) This comment is right.

Proof: Whatshisface wrote this comment.

That's a proof in the mathematical sense and there's nothing wrong with it in that way, but that it has nothing to do with the truth of the theorem.

[medstrom]

Axioms are not something you ever prove, as in, they're not provable even in principle. I would not call this an axiom, this is simply a premise. It can be determined. You'd trace this premise back up a chain of premise-based arguments, and if all are valid, you eventually reach some of the 5-10 (I forgot) core axioms that underlie all of logic. And those are not provable, but you'd generally be considered mad not to accept them.

I'm not sure what you want to achieve by focusing on this topic. You just saying you don't agree with the axioms in the article, right? So just say that.

[Mediterraneo10]

Claiming that Anselm's ontological argument "survived" for centuries is rather misleading. Being known as a thing did not mean it was viewed as a viable argument. It was subjected to some harsh criticism literally as soon as it appeared, and whenever it was brought up in later centuries (and not very often, because it was something of a curiosity) it was treated more critically than reverently.