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Peter Gerdes's avatar

What about this: The reason that limits the possibility of god is that if god was possible he'd be necessary and thus actual. God doesn't exist so therefore he isn't possible.

I mean sure, it presumes that God doesn't exist but so what? I'm not trying to argue for the claim merely show it doesn't lead to a contradiction -- so I can assume it and show it implies a reason for limitation of possibility exists. And water is necessarily H2O shows you must be able to include facts about what's actual as reasons.

I think this shows the argument really needs formalization in some modal logic with a clear explication of what counts as a reason.

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Peter Gerdes's avatar

You aren't being sufficiently careful in explicating your notion of possibility. Sure, if you have a syntactic notion (being possible is a property of something like sentences) then the bit about limits on possibility needing a reason isn't implausible. But once you try and fully spell that out it doesn't even really make sense to talk about a being which exists necessarily if it exists. Possibility talk is all just talk about certain descriptions so you just can't say: Is it possible there is a being x with properties...and s.t. if x is possible then x is necessary. That's because possibility isn't a property of things but descriptions.

OTOH exactly the reason you might think a semantic account is preferable is to not collapse it all down into some formal sentence properties ...but doing that is giving up on the restrictions need a reason in the sense you need (still might have a reason like...just not how possible world facts are but u need reason to mean an argument we can identify)

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