I’m sure you did demonstrate all of this. Care to do it again?
I remember you mentioned the impossibility of a perfect circle in the physical world–is this an example of what you mean?
See, here you seem to be switching back and forth between two different arguments. Your last argument was that God being absolutely perfect is driven by competition and politics, not some logical necessity. Here, you’re arguing that the existence of evil is incompatible with God’s perfection (which isn’t such a bad argument, but it gets sticky where defining evil, perfection, in what way God is perfect, etc. is concerned).
True, bringing in dictionary definitions is useful if you want to show that a particular definition you are using is indeed a commonly used definition. And I’ll agree that one meaning of ‘perfect’ is: absolute, total, unqualified. This is a useful definition when we want to say that the closer one gets to one end of a certain measure (for example, the less evil you cause, the more benevolent you are), the better. In that case, ‘perfect’ just means as close to that end as possible, which, if the measure in question has no limits, can mean infinite.
I’ve never heard these definitions of ‘concept’ and ‘idea’ before. We can work with these if they are your (or Kant’s) definitions, but I don’t think it makes a difference. We could just say: there are empirical concepts (drawn from the physical) and there are non-empirical concepts (abstractions). Your point is that non-empirical things (abstractions) don’t exist, therefore neither does God. Doesn’t matter what we call such non-empirical things.
But it is a different argument from that which you were making before. Before you were saying that a god must be perfect (at least in terms of omnipotence) otherwise a greater god would destroy it, so if it wasn’t perfect, it would not exist. Unless you’re arguing this: the idea of gods always evolves towards perfection (by way of competition and political motives on the part of believers), and certain kinds of perfection are only possible in terms of asbolutes or infinities; this places them in the camp of abstractions, which are impossible, therefore such gods cannot exist.
True, but the point is that the drive to prove one’s god to be perfect is not logic or reason but competition and politics. Therefore, it is not logically necessary that the gods be perfect, which is what I was getting at with the Hellenistic gods. Of course, I don’t believe in them, but there’s nothing logically wrong with saying that they need not be perfect in order to exist.
No, it would just mean an empirical god would be imperfect. Of course, this depends on how you’re measuring perfection. I agree that in a physical context, it makes little sense to say that measures like the quantity of matter or energy are infinit. What does it mean to be infinitely powerful though? Doesn’t it just mean capable of doing anything? ← I think this is impossible too but not because of the limitations on physical quantities, but because of how the laws of physics work. However, a concept like omni-benevolence might be possible. All that would mean is that the god in question has not a single manevolent bone in his body. I don’t see why that’s impossible.
Again, the Hellenic pantheon is a good example of the idea of imperfect gods (at least in terms of omnipotence), some of which are more powerful than others, who get along without the most powerful one necessarily destroying the less powerful ones.
I may be supporting your point, but I wasn’t exactly saying that such a god is impossible. I was saying that the ontological argument doesn’t prove God’s existence. I was arguing that attributing existence to God (as part of what it means for such a god to be “greater than which cannot be conceived”) only forces one to believe in such a god, but belief alone doesn’t prove existence.
Yep. And your point is that perfection in such a god can only amount to absolute or infinite qualities (omnipotence, for example), which is necessarily abstract, which therefore doesn’t exist. ← Is that right?