A partially failed refutation of Gödel's logical proof for the existence of god

 I had heard of his proof before, but never actually looked at it.

Atheology, which gets updated occasionally and is also on Substack, actually offered up a refutation.

And, even my first, partial look said that said refutation wasn't perfect.

My comment.

I am certainly not here to support Gödel, but I am also nowhere near a pure empiricist. I don't have time to read everything now, but, I know your refutation of his Point 1 isn't itself on 100 percent pure ground. And your refutation of his Point 5 is on the wrong grounds. (And I hope this isn't part of your ground of attacking ontological arguments, either.) The better answer is that "existence" simply isn't a property.

And, it isn't. Whatever philosophy professors this guy had, their focus was on philosophers and issues from before the second half of the 20th century, if not earlier.

"Existence" is simply a descriptor. The simple fact of "being" (lowercase, no "Ground of Being") is not a property. To use the quasi-dialectic of the refutation, it really can't be a property. Besides, if this guy were as thorough-going a neo-empiricist as he claims to be, he'd accept that, from his Weltanschauung, there is no such thing as "properties" in general. 

He responded to me on Substack with more verbiage than in the original. On the first point, he said science is empirical not rational. Yes, but, Gödel, like his many forbearers, is offering a logical proof, not a scientific hypothesis. 

On the second? He says he could have cited Kant's famous phrase that existence is not a predicate. But, this is itself a fail. I wasn't referring to Kant, just as I don't refer to Kant in tackling Anselm's and other ontological arguments. Rather, I am riffing on existentialism. Existence simply "is." Hence it's not a property, and I make no reference to Kantian non-predicates.

But, I'm not going to respond to him, lest I get something even more long-winded back. See below.

A later, fuller reading?

Well, I first saw this piece about what Mr. Lyman calls "epirealism" and yes, we're in the land of pretty hardcore empiricism, updated for modern times. And, it's probably not worth arguing with his deconstruction of Gödel. And, as for who he is? By name, I've never come across him before.