Talk:Ontological argument for the existence of God

down with ae ligature?

I am all for good fun, but i think it's a case of rather gratuitous pretentiousness to use the ae ligature in medieval (or anything else, really :) ). It's just not a valid letter of the english alphabet, and there is no reason to complicate things with it. comments? --Daniel Folkinshteyn

I always use it when writing or typing, I'm certainly not alone in that, and it's still in use in various contexts (see the Encyclopædia Britannica for example). (I'm not sure that accusing another editor of pretentiousness is quite the Citizendium spirit, but let that pass.) It's not a separate letter, no; as the Wikipedia article has it: "In modern English orthography Æ is not considered an independent letter but a spelling variant, for example: 'encyclopædia' versus 'encyclopaedia' or 'encyclopedia'." --Peter J. King  Talk  18:21, 15 March 2007 (CDT)

That lower-case g

This article should be fun.

But I have to say...I have never encountered a discussion of the traditional arguments for the existence of God that did not upper-case 'God'. Is this a case where we can agree to use the upper case, purely on grounds of common usage? --Larry Sanger 18:07, 15 March 2007 (CDT)

Well, the way that the argument works is to argue for the instantiation of a concept, then to declare that that instantiation is a god, and then sometimes to assume, but usually explicitly to argue that there can only be one such being — that it's the god of Christianity. As we discussed at Talk:Philosophy of religion, neither Anselm nor Aquinas capitalised "deus"; I haven't yet had a chance to check the original typography of the early-modern philosophers (Edward Buckner's research tends to indicate that capitalisation had become common by the mid-seventeenth century. All my enquiries among mediævalists and early-modern historians have so far come up blank; they're all fascinated, but none of them actually knows anything about it). As there, I won't battle over it, but my opinion is that the lower case is correct, whatever the current common (and mostly unreflective) usage hapens to be... --Peter J. King  Talk  18:21, 15 March 2007 (CDT)

Whether or not a philosopher writing in Latin capitalized the Latin word for 'God' is irrelevant to the fact that today in English, when philosophers write about these arguments, they almost always use the upper case. (As I confirm for myself as I look through my philosophy of religion books, now finally unpacked. Even George H. Smith, in Atheism: The Case against God--a polemic if ever there was one--uses the capitalized form.) Whether there is some recondite philosophical argument that it is incorrect--because, as you and others say, philosophers, and particularly non-theists, want to say that 'god' is a job description not a proper name--the fact is that the lowercase form in this context is jarring to virtually everybody. It instantly raises a suspicion in many people's minds (regardless of our scholarly explanation): "If these people can't see fit to capitalize the name of my God, they certainly won't do a good job of explaining anything about God." We ought to take such considerations into account, I think: they are part of the constituency of such articles as this and thus the neutrality policy acts as a constraint.

Besides, what we are talking about is, after all, whether 'god' is a proper name (in the sense that philosophers of language use 'proper name'). If an ontological argument establishes the existence of the Christian God or a reasonable facsimile, then we're talking about God, not god--because 'God' then names an individual, according to the conclusion of the argument. In short, nobody argues for the existence of god; they only argue for the existence of God, i.e., something that can be named/denoted.

So...and since you say you won't battle over it...I will go ahead and move the page. --Larry Sanger 19:05, 15 March 2007 (CDT)