Godel's proof of God's existence

[Ken Spagnolo]

A question for you.  I'm reading a book called A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein, about the relationship Kurt Godel had with Einstein during the last 13 years of Einstein's life.  Its very good and focuses on Godel's contribution to relativity, namely a proof that time does not exist.  The author says that this is little understood even after so long, like it took a while for his inconsistency theorem to be understood, but unlike that work, has also been largely ignored. 

Anyway, I'm just getting to the description of his thinking on this, which starts with a high level summary which includes these paragraphs:

But the dance is not over.  For the Godel universe, after all, is not the actual world, only a possible one.  Can we really infer the nonexistence of time in this world from its absence from a merely possible universe?  In a word, yes.  Or so Godel argues.  Here he makes his final, his most subtle and elusive step, the one from the possible to the actual.  This is a mode of reasoning close to Godel's heart.  His mathematical Platonism, which committed him to the existence of a realm of objects that are not accidental like you and me - who exist, but might not have - but necessary, implied immediately that if a mathematical object is so much as possible, it is necessary, hence actual.  This is so because what necessarily exists cannot exist at all unless it exists in all possible worlds.

This same mode of reasoning, from the possible to the actual, occurs in the "ontological argument" for the existence of God employed by Saint Anselm, Descartes and Leibniz.  According to this argument, one cannot consider God to be an accidental being - one that merely happens to exist - but rather a necessary one that, if it exists at all, exists in every possible world.  It follows that if God is so much as possible, He is actual.  This means that one cannot be an athiest unless one is a "superathiest", i.e., someone who denies not just that God exists but that He is possible.  Experience teaches us that ordinary, garden-variety athiests are not always willing to go further and embrace superatheism.  Following in the footsteps of Leibniz, Godel, too, constructed an ontological argument for God.  Then, concerned that he would be taken for a theist in an atheistic age, he never allowed it to be published. (p.130)

Now the first thing I did was look up the bible, I mean The God Delusion, to see what Dawkins says about this, but he really on deals with Anselm's version, dismissing Godel's as only adding mathematical obfuscation.  But it seems a different argument to me than Anselm's.  Also, Godel, as possibly the greatest mathematician of the 20th century, was no minor thinker when it comes to logic and I'm not comfortable with such a brief dismissal.  I've looked on the web for refutations, but what I've found seems to require knowledge of modal logic to understand fully.  Does anyone know of a plain English refutation to this they could pass on?

Thanks,
Ken

--

I believe that one ought to have only as much market efficiency as one needs, because everything we value in human life is within the realm of inefficiency  – love, family, attachment, community, culture, old habits, comfortable old shoes.    - Edward Luttwak

[Jubal John]

Hi Ken,

What about the info at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_ontological_proof

which has a few further references as well?

cheers
Jubal

[John Shaw]

Can't help you Ken, but when/if you find an answer please share it.
Never mind the mathematics I struggle with ontological argument!

Good luck,

John

[Ken Spagnolo]

I haven't had time to search further on the net, but came upon this later in the same book:

When the proof itself finally materialised, posthumously, problems were found in the details.  Whether repair is possible is an open question, as is the problem of whether an amended proof, with its revised premises, would be convincing.  What is beyond dispute, however, is that the appearance of Godel's version of the ontological argument has had little effect on the confidence of philosophers that a formal demonstration of God's existence is impossible. (p.156)

No further details are given on who did this work, but it does seem that Godel's proof has been properly refuted.

Ken