Mestroyer comments on Rationality Quotes October 2012 - Less Wrong

8 Post author: MBlume 02 October 2012 06:50PM

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Comment author: Mestroyer 06 October 2012 09:27:41AM *  6 points [-]

Why, I wonder, didn't he say something like: 'Great Scott, the ontological argument seems to be plausible. But isn't it too good to be true that a grand truth about the cosmos should follow from a mere word game?

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My own feeling, to the contrary, would have been an automatic, deep suspicion of any line of reasoning that reached such a significant conclusion without feeding in a single piece of data from the real world.

--Richard Dawkins on the ontological argument for theism, from The God Delusion, pages 81-82.

Comment author: Larks 06 October 2012 04:18:19PM 2 points [-]

That sounds like the sort of thing you'd say if you'd never heard of mathematics.

Comment author: gwern 06 October 2012 06:38:22PM 5 points [-]

And that sounds like the sort of thing you might say if you were unaware of countless examples of analytic-synthetic distinction in actually applying math (say, which geometry do you live in right now? And what axioms did you deduce it from, exactly?).

Comment author: PhilGoetz 01 November 2012 09:04:34PM 2 points [-]

He has a point. It isn't obvious that Dawkins' objection doesn't apply to math. The ontological argument probably has more real-world assumptions used in it than does arithmetic.

Comment author: johnlawrenceaspden 09 October 2012 02:59:49PM 1 point [-]

Do people who've never heard of mathematics often say such things?

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