This is also what I find most frustrating about philosophy. Most of it seems to be like mathematics but where you don't properly outline your definitions and as a result the logic is riddled with hard to identify contradictions. Similarly, I think that proving or disproving the existence of God would be pretty trivial if anyone would willingly give a good definition of God.
If you're unhappy with unclear definitions in philosophy you might appreciate Wittgenstein's Tractatus: http://philosurfical.open.ac.uk/tractatus/tabs.html, in which he uses formal logic to present a proof that all moral philosophy is nonsense. It's considered by some to be the greatest work of philosophy of the 20th century.
"The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science--i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy -- and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person--he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy--this method would be the only strictly correct one."
Wittgenstein himself went on to criticize parts of the Tractatus later in life.
It's a bad idea to treat philosophy as a menu from which one can choose the most appealing items and be left with a satisfactory understanding of the problems at hand.
>It's a bad idea to treat philosophy as a menu from which one can choose the most appealing items and be left with a satisfactory understanding of the problems at hand.
Why's that? All moral propositions ultimately rest on either circular reasoning or unjustified assumptions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument, also see the argument in Wittgenstein's aforementioned Tractatus), so searching for absolute philosophical truth is doomed to failure. There's even a school of philosophy based around this approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism.
I didn't intend to imply that one should search for absolute philosophical truth. In fact, such an idea comes readily into conflict with my statement: it's just the search for an item on the menu that satisfies one completely extended to menu items that have not yet been written.
If you define the success condition for the search to be arriving at the final truth, then yes, you are doomed to failure. That's definitely not my success condition for philosophical inquiry, but now we are getting into why I think philosophy is valuable, which is a bit out of scope here I think, because we both agree that philosophy is valuable. I was just saying that stopping at the Tractatus as if it would satisfy the previous commenter is, well, not good. At the very least one should put the Tractatus in context with Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. The Tractatus is very assailable.
>I was just saying that stopping at the Tractatus as if it would satisfy the previous commenter is, well, not good.
I didn't mean to imply this, rather I meant it as a starting point, to give the commenter an example of a philosophical text that is more formal in its definitions, and hence might frustrate them less. I should probably have made it clearer though that I was just presenting the quote from Tractatus, not necessarily endorsing it.
Well, then it seems that I take issue with your statement purely because I'm a jerk who thinks that the idea that philosophy should leave you less frustrated rather than more frustrated is a bad idea ;)
Yes, in my experience, the religious are fond of saying, "You atheists can't prove God does not exist." Yet it's quite simple to prove that a particular God with a particular set of attributes [edit: does or] doesn't exist.
Interestingly many people (including Gödel) have made logically sound proofs that a particular God with a particular set of attributes do exist. But the way they end up defining the god usually don't fit any religion's god.
Yes, indeed, it's all about defining the attributes. It seems to me that the gods believed in by proponents of extant religions were "created by committee" and don't have completely coherent, logically-consistent, non-contradictory properties.
Gödel's ontological proof certainly derives its conclusion correctly from its axioms. But the problem isn't only that the conclusion isn't really "God exists" if you want that to match the god of any actually existing religion; it's also that the axioms are ... well, let's just say "not obviously true".
In particular, he relies on this notion of "positive properties". It is not at all clear that there is any notion of "positive properties" that satisfies his axioms, still less one for which "positive" is actually a good name.
(The axioms are certainly false if, e.g., we take "positive" to mean something like "regarded as good by some particular person" or "regarded as good by a majority of intelligent and thoughtful people". Gödel wants the conjunction of all positive properties to be positive, which in particular implies that it isn't outright impossible. But it's easy to find properties generally regarded as good that are not mutually compatible.)
What he's getting at is probably along these lines:
I define the "God" I'm looking for as an invisible green humanoid. Because something cannot be invisible and green at the same time, this "God" cannot exist.
It's naturally much harder to do this with Gods that correspond to particular religions, but from time to time it is possible. E.g. a jealous God that will destroy civilization if we don't offer it human sacrifices has not done this, so it can't exist.
Do you mean "which reflects or emits light of these particular wavelengths", or do you mean something about human perception?
Also, similar questions apply wrt "invisible".
If "green" is based on human perception, why would not an entity which, when a person looks in their direction, does not really see them like any shape, but rather, perceives some greenness in that General direction?
Why would this entity not be considered both green and invisible?
Alternative, does "invisible" mean to the naked human eye?
You can determine if those attributes are consistent with each other. Also, if they have observable properties, you have an angle of attack - whether to prove or disprove (or rather, to ascertain likelihood of) the existence of a being with such attributes.
