J.R.R. Tolkien conceived of a being that was a giant, burning, glowing, and semi-omniscient eye that lived at the top of a tower and could speak to people across great distances even though it didn't have the physical tools for speech.

I'd say he conceived of a pretty great being... but what does this say about its reality?

Wave, if you haven't heard it, there's a brilliant proof that god does not exist.  It's a spoof of Aquinas' proof of god's existance, and doesn't actually disprove god, but it does illustrate the error of Aquinas' definition.

If god is a being of which no greater can be imagined, then we can imagine a god who could create the universe, rule over it, and have complete power over everything.

This is all good, except that I can conceive of a greater being than that!  This god is limited by the fact of his own existence.  A more powerful being would be one who could do all of that without existing.  Since there is nothing more non-existent than non-existence, a non-existent deity who could do all of that would be the most powerful being of which I can conceive.  Therefore, god does not exist.

A being has the quality of being red. What is red+1? I suppose you must mean qualities that have magnitude? Then there are such things as velocity. Nothing has velocity greater than the speed of light in vacuum. There is no speed of light + 1.

Where does this definition require a being of infinite extent? I think the weakness in the defintion is the word conceive. I can conceive of pink ponie shooting lasers from their eyes. But the plausability of such an entity's existence renders discussion of it as worthless. But it is plausible, even within the realm of science, to conceive of entities of greater sentience than human. So applied to the realm of the plausible, why is "god is a being of which no greater can be conceived" inadequate? But "THAT"S NOT GOD" is what I expect to hear.

Where does this concept of identity and finiteness fit in with cosmologies that allow for multiple universes?

This is the Ontoligical Argument for God. The original formulation of the argument comes from Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), who wrote in his Proslogium that God must necessarily exist, that it is in fact self-contradictory to state that he does not. Since self-contradiction is one of the fatal flaws in any proposition, we must take this challenge seriously.

He begins with the defination of god as "a being than which nothing greater can be conceived." In order to have a debate, the Theist and the Atheist, he claims, must have this conception. But where does this conception come from? There are only two possibilities: either from the mind or understanding itself (i.e.-subjectivity) or from eternal reality (i.e.-objectivity). Something that exists only subjectively (in the mind) is less great than something that exists in reality, because it lacks one quality - existence. Therefore, in order to be the greatest conceivable being, a god would have to exist. If true, then God's nonexistence is by defination inconceivable and self-contradictory; Atheism is not only wrong but absurd and literally unthinkable and therefore "dull and a fool."

The problem with this argument is that it begs the defination begs its conclusion, for if we define god otherwise than 'that which nothing greater can exist,' the implication of existence vanishes. For example, if we define god as an all-good, all-loving being, then it is quite conceivable to presume that such being does not exist. In other words, if you build existence into the defination of something, then existence would appear to be one of its qualities. If we define spaghetti as the food than which no greater food can be conceived, then by Anslem's reasoning, it would have to exist.

Anslem's logic assumes that a conception must have some correspondence in reality, yet we know that ideas can exist independent from reality. I can imagine a world with no religion, but it does not exist (well, not yet, anyway).

Then the Christian God is not God since I can concieve of a being that can create a perfect universe without suffering without having to infringe on any being's free will.  However, being that the world is not perfect, it suggests that God cannot possibly exist.  Therefore, this being many people call "God" must be an imposter if this being does in fact exist since this being was unable to create a perfect universe without infringing on a being's free will, thus, perferred to let the universe and his creations squalor in ignorance and suffering.

I already stated that conceiving something is not sufficient. Any conceptulization needs to be qualified to something that is at a minimum plausible. I can conceive of an entity that is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent and immediately give rise to lots of contradictory aspests of such a being that make its existence logically impossible.

It is not impossible to conceive of an entity of such stature that it is for all practical purposes god even if iwe limit ourselves to materialism.  Insisting that any god must have omni properties can be a strawman used to avoid other possibilities. The traditional god has been logically invalidated ad nauseum. But this only means that that conceptualization of god is incorrect. It does not follow that because a god defined as supernatural, omni everything can't exist that there is no entity that is, releative to humanity, god. 

I'm going to have to agree with randalllord who said that the argument fails since the supposed conclusion (god exists) is built into the premises.

I also agree that it fails since there is no real limit to how many times we can apply the word "greater". No matter what great being is proposed, we can ALWAYS say, "well what's greater than that?" It doesn't mean we have to know the exact answer, but it does mean that we have the capacity to one-up any great being that we imagine.

And even if the argument worked, it still wouldn't say which god.

Apparently it would be positive, if one could actually conceive of a being of which no greater can be conceived.

But is this actually possible?

(Hint: can there be a greatest possible number? If not, do you see that perhaps there is a hidden internal contradiction making the claim incoherent?) 

Two problems arise

1) Can you actually perform the task outlined in the statement?

2) If you can, don't you end up with a being, i.e. something natural, materialistic?

Both roads of the fork lead to refutation... my sense is that point 1 is actually impossible.

Correct. I am curious about the definition itself. The onotlogical proof offered by Aquinas has many well documented objections. 

Or Stephen Hawkings. The important attribute is the relation to humanity. 

So a jellyfish isn't intelligent?

Hmmm...

It's as if my words had no effect whatsoever...

And again...

It's almost as if wavefreak is glossing over this point, continuing on with speculations about this definition, even when the answer has been presented to him multiple times...

Wave... dude... You're a smart fellow.  Let your brain work, and admit to yourself that you simply can't gloss over these points.  There is no rebuttal possible.  Therefore, the definition is incoherent.

Also, please admit to yourself that adding your own caveats to Aquinas' definition is dishonest.  He wrote volumes about this.  Don't you think he'd have mentioned it if he meant it?  He was nothing if not thorough.

When you're done admitting that, you could also admit that your caveats still don't help the definition, because X+1 is plausible for anything that can have a quantity or a degree of magnitude.

Why are you hung up on some kind of super-alien who you can call god?

It's a serious question, and not rhetorical.  You've spent months on this site trying to justify belief that some super duper aliens somewhere are smart and powerful enough to justify your label of god.  You've been running around the scientific method and philosophy trying to find any little hole into which this superhero alien could fit, just because you can't explain something quirky that went on in your brain a couple of times, even though science offers perfectly good explanations for all kinds of hallucinations and all kinds of coincidental things that could be called miraculous.

Seriously, why do you need to believe a superhero alien did it?

How is ANY conceptualization of god not alien? Dropping all logic, if god was indeed supernatural omni everything, that is about as frickin alien as you can get. Why does it matter whether this alien is supernatural or material? It is still alien. 

Well lets look at how your definition fits the natural, material alien. We can just use a big headed gray dude since that is a common conception of an alien entity.

Your definition uses the concept of greatest possible living material intelligence, correct?

Well, we have a pretty darn good understanding of the nature of life. Life self replicates and adapts (non-intentionally) and diverges. We have no good reason to think any life would not function in this same manner as it seems a pretty simple conclusion that that which exists in an environment must either adapt to changes in the environment or cease to exist. So if there is life, it must adapt to change. Self replication seems to be the natural way this occurs (you may want to try and define a stagnant eternal life but there are problems with this we can discuss if need be) and divergence seems to be a natural extention of self replication and adaptation.

So if we are going to consider an alien life form it seems only reasonable that we would be, to a very high degree of probability, considering an alien population.

So should we consider the smartest and healthiest of these aliens our god, by your definition? Or would there be an entire race of gods in this case?

My last post doesn't really require a response. It is just attempting to show that when we try and take concepts which are part of a web of interlinked concepts that we know as reality we can't divorce them from their context by extracting the strand from the web and attemtping to allow it to exist on its own. We cannot really divorce life or intelligence from our understandings of life and intelligence as we know them to exist. So we end up with life andintelligence in the context we understand them which is in a population of natural material entities. 

When we boil down what you are attempting to do in this thread it comes down to the fact that you are attempting to define some unknown entity. Thats great. Sci-Fi writers make a living out of doing it. But when they do it they make up new words to label the entity. If we discovered a new entity that actually existed we would name it by constructing a new term we with which to refer to it. Trying to take a term 'god' and invent a definition for it makes absolutely no sense. This is a useless pursuit as any definition could be used without creating a contradiction if the term is currently without a referrent. The way this normally would work is one would find an existing thing and then apply a term.  

The referrent in this case is my experience of reality. Unfortunately, I cannot give you that experience. My hope is that at some point in the future I will have resolved my own interenal cognitive dissonance and hence be able to adequately communicate these experiences. 

What term would you like me to use. The big alien in the sky? Flarb? Mr. X? What does not using the term god gain us?

Vessel already answered this question for you.  "God" means some sort of super-duper non-natural being that lives in a magical place and has magic powers and tells people what to do.

What you're talking about is not god.  If it's from earth, it's a terrestrial life form.  If it's not, it's an alien life form.

Seriously, wave, how many choices do you have here?  It's not supernatural, so if it's alive, it's a lifeform.  If you believe it lives on earth, then it's some undiscovered super-thingy, but it's still got to have some effect on the world that can be observed.  If it's an alien, it's exactly the same thing, except we call it an alien.

You're looking for a natural lifeform that causes brain hallucinations, as far as I can tell.

Seems pretty nutty, but I'm not here to judge... just to try to keep the facts straight.

Well, you and I have talked about this before, and you said you had an experience that defied reality. That's a hallucination by all credible accounts.

Perception of reality, as you know, is a tenuous matter. You know how a slight injury to a particular part of the brain can cause massive personality change, paranoia, and even persistent hallucinations.

I've had hallucinations before. No, I'm not talking about chemically induced. I mean sober, awake, and seeing and/or hearing something that wasn't really there. Mine were nothing special, and I could easily recognize them as a hallucination, but it does happen.

The point is, you had some sort of as yet unspecified experience that you feel defied reality. The most logical answer is that your perception was not accurate. The question of your faculties... well, I think it's a little wacky to think a mystical experience means there are aliens making weird shit happen to humans, but all in all, you seem like a pretty together guy.

I don't know how else to say it.

That won't work. Just would need better and better drugs.