Archive for March 25th, 2007

An Ontological Dating Argument

Posted March 25, 2007 By Dave Thomer

I went to Neil Sinhababu’s site to research something for a longer, more serious piece I wanted to write. And I will still write that piece. Tomorrow. Because what I found on Neil’s site was a link to a webcomic called Lump of Clay, which did a long series of strips attempting to use the ontological argument to prove the existence of a perfect girlfriend.

(If you don’t know the ontological argument, here’s the very condensed version: if you can imagine a perfect x, then there must be an x in the world. Because a perfect x would have to be an x that exists. Why? Because existing is better than not existing. So an x that didn’t exist would have something wrong with it, and couldn’t be perfect. This argument is usually used to try to prove the existence of God. It is much more entertaining when used to prove the existence of a perfect girlfriend.)