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?
...
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.
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?).
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.
...
--Richard Dawkins on the ontological argument for theism, from The God Delusion, pages 81-82.
That sounds like the sort of thing you’d say if you’d never heard of mathematics.
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?).
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.
Do people who’ve never heard of mathematics often say such things?