iwpoe wrote:

Yeah, I see that. I think this is one of those cases where for me he's so wrong I'm having a hard time understanding how you could be that wrong, which makes me think I made a mistake somewhere. The citation for that argument he's using comes from a peer-reviewed journal of some status, doesn't it? Or did I remember that wrongly?

It's a good argument perhaps if he's making it in response to some other argument that claimed that abstract objects necessarily require causes to exist and, perhaps, only God could be the cause of such things and, ergo, there is a God? But still the argument misses the point completely by reducing God's omnipotence to an abstraction or abstract object and could only be relevant if the original argument claimed that anything abstract requires a cause in the sense that it is always an effect. So does he understand by abstraction something like being in principle intelligible? If so, he is sorely confused in thinking that something's being intelligible requires a cause. Existence as such - being intelligible - would then require a cause; but to argue that would, I suspect, lead necessarily to a something from nothing argument or cosmology. Perhaps the original argument was more to the effect that man doesn't know without abstraction and this process requires or necessitates God. But it's still a mistake to confound an abstraction with the nature of something's being or existence - again, we abstract say horseness from horses but we don't think horses exist as (or are) abstract objects.

Last edited by Timocrates (3/05/2016 8:40 pm)

Didn't Plato also believe in abstract objects and God as well(or the Form of the Good which is pretty much the same things)?. How come people thing Platonism and Theism are at odds with one another as this articles stipulates:
http://www.iep.utm.edu/pla-thei/

 

AKG wrote:

Didn't Plato also believe in abstract objects and God as well(or the Form of the Good which is pretty much the same things)?.
 

=17pxYes, although if one identifies the Form of the Good which is beyond-being with God one arguably has something akin to Theistic Activism with the forms depending on God for their existence. As it stands the objection is only a problem for Xtians who have a doctrinal problem with abstract objects.

iwpoe wrote:

Oh, also, forms aren't universals. See:.

I don't think the objector or the proponent of Theistic Activism care that they are using the term in a different way from that which Plato may have intended. Not that the latter isn't import; it's just a completely different debate.

 

iwpoe wrote:

We might also point out that it's open to us to stop thinking about the things in question as "abstract objects" in the normal way we think about it. 

I generally find it preferable to use the term 'abstract object' as opposed to 'Platonic Form' precisely to prevent the confusion with more historically accurate understandings of that latter term. At the end of the day we have to meet their challenge head on however much we might decree their phraseology. 

Here's my stab at how this argument is [probably] supposed to work:

1) If God exists, then he is either an abstract of object or he is an instance of an abstract object (premise)
2) If God is an instance of an abstract object, then he is caused to exist (premise)
3) God is not caused to exist (premise)
4) Therefore, God is not an instance of an abstract object (from 2 & 3)
5) No abstract object has casual powers (premise)
6) Thus, if God is an abstract object, then he has no casual powers (from 5)
7) God has casual powers (premise)
8) Therefore, God is not an abstract object (from 6 & 7)
9) Thus, God is neither an abstract object, nor an instance of an abstract object (from 4 & 8)
10) Therefore, God does not exist (from 1 & 9)

Now, I think 2 is quite questionable unless you broaden the sense of the word "cause" into explanation; but if you do that, then I think 3 is no longer much of a problem, since all Theists admit that God is self-explanatory.

One of the key premises here though, and the one that astounds me with the sheer credulity that Analytic philosophers hold this with, is 5. There are literally Analytic accounts of abstract objects that are predicated on the idea that something is an abstract object if and only if it has no casual powers (i.e. that's their criterion)!

I mean really, why should we ever have believed this? How are we to explain how math explains anything in the natural world without giving it the power to do so?

My only guess about why this continues to be such a popular idea is that it is a hold-over from Berkeley: images are non-casual for Berkeley, ideas are synonymous with images, therefore, etc...

Really though, that premise needs to die; it leads Analytic philosophers into all sorts of strange conclusions.