Review of the Ontological argument for the existence of God
Where the premise of crafting an ontological argument for the existence of God intersects with an epistomological understanding of possible knowledge was very conflicting for my attempt to intellectually asses these concepts. Nevertheless, having read Wittgenstein’s Tractus Logico-Philosophicus and understanding that he was simultaneously a logician and an advocate of the potential existence of the metaphysical, I deemed it worthy of more thought.
To craft an ontological argument of my own, I explored knowledge in every possible sense-mathematical, scientific, philosophical, spiritual, et cetera. What I came to was a conclusion that enabled me to confidently categorize a means of logical belief which does not assert anything unknowable.
In the development of the human species over time, one major break occurs in history: the dawn of an historic period upon the wane of prehistory. At this point, through the manifestation of language and its subsequent development into written systems, man was able to transcend his transitory nature by preserving his ideas for posterity to draw upon. Since this point in time, the collective body of historial knowledge has multiplied itself many times over, in order to create a massive well of insights, ideas, theorize, and facts into which any resident of the present age may tap. This is one understanding of something outside and truly larger than ourselves which may be connected with, to provide meaning and guidance; this could be called God.
Furthermore, if the theory of evolution holds, then the development of our cognitive species is the result of a mechanism which has guided constructive mutations since the earliest simple lifeforms. This mechanism is called Natural Selection, which, in its linguistic implications, characterizes Nature as a force (however scientifically explicated) which has guided the creation of the universe and of ourselves; this could be called God.
Lastly, and most obviously, is the sheer fact that the idea or concept of God exists. Thus, God must exist at least in that paradigm. But it goes further: through the historical development of means of expression, mankind has crafted various different forms of characterizing this notion of God. Though all of these differ in syntax and semantic meaning, the fundamentalk root concept is essentially identical. From this realization, two logical conclusions may arise: the first is that this is because God created man, man thus being in his image in the sense that man is a creative and intelligent being, and subsequently made himself (or better itself) known to man in some way; the second is that man, in need of making sense of his surroundings, coined the concept of God himself (after all, it must have been man who at least created the word for god), and thus, God is in man’s own image, freely creating the world in the sense that man himself created the idea to settle an unanswerable question that was unsettling to his cognitive and intelligent nature. In either case, the two are clearly co-dependent in the sense of having like characteristics, and in terms of reliance upon one another to be understood in some capacity, as well as to understand the world around us. In that sense, science itself could be characterized as a god, in that it is either a natural or a man-made means by which we may furnish a better understanding of the world.
Because of the necessarily ambiguous nature of exploring these concepts, the ontological argumant paradigm provides a good framework for analysis, but ultimately yields no new answers. In the end, it is epistomology 1, ontology 0.
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