The "Grounded" Ontological Argument: Part Two "Explanations"

I raised the issue of the basic weakness of the Ontological Argument in the sense of linkage of reality via definitions.  We have many words and terms of items that are imaginary, trolls, dragons, flying spaghetti monsters.  It would be a case of difference between these and words dealing with abstract objects and concepts, compassion, liberty, intuition.  With the latter, we could make demonstrations of these qualities to an extent.  We can make case studies of acts of mercy, perform outrageous acts to show we are not locked into determinant actions, review cases of blind guesses reaping positive results.  But there is a problem with pixies.  Such as these can not be pointed out.  Their stories would be charming, but we would be "in the know" that pixies don't exist.

Still, there is a matter of ultimate origins even of these creatures.  If a class of students were given paper and asked to draw a pixie to the best of their abilities, there would be a close similarity of appearances.  We probably have Tinkerbell to thank for this.  But I would like to imagine (pun intended, perhaps) the concept of pixie before Disney.  If drawings were made of pixies every decade for a few centuries, would the appearance change?  Let us go so far as to lock up all the Disney footage of pixies, and conduct this experiment.  Let us examine the origins when we first used the word "pixie," and study all illustrations from that point onward.

The crucial question behind the "grounded" ontological argument is this:  If such imaginative creature is current, how was it first conceived?  How came we by "pixie," or "dragon," or "elf," or whatever?  After all, something must have gone bump in the night to get us to think about "things that go bump in the night."

I would consider that midgets and short people got mankind to imagine leprechauns and dwarfs.  Certain reptilian creatures could have gotten us going with dragons.  But, in he end, something factual gave rise to these imaginary creatures.  I hold two rudimentary forces for this: 1) imaginative reconstruction, and 2) imaginative embellishment.

Unicorns would be a good example of imaginative reconstruction.  Consider that many animals are horned.  It could be that one beast was reduced to one horn after combat or injury.  Or consider that the angle of head or glare of the sun granted the viewer to see but one horn.  The man who saw this strange alpaca related this story to a friend who managed horses.  By transference, the animal with the horn was everything to the man.  Such an explanation is fanciful in itself, but it does satisfy the single requirement.  Is there anything in daily life that would draw people to consider the existence of unicorns?  Later review of the sightings would lead to an explanation of unicorn sightings, thus affirming the imaginary nature of the beast.

Santa Claus is a prime example of imaginative embellishment.  This man historically existed, a bishop of the church in Myra, now Demre in modern Turkey.  A man of generous disposition, the acts of giving gifts secretly developed into legendary proportions.  The creation of Santa Claus literally took on Hollywood-like proportions to the present wonder-worker of December 25th.  Even back in that day he was called Nicholas the Wonderworker.  We have even today to sift through the acts to see what actually occurred, and what has been embellished.

Thus there is a historical ground for such as these, granting a form of realism.  This is why our conceptions of these are usually uniform.

But the ground still centers on the imaginative, which was the lesson behind the flying spaghetti monster of Richard Dawkins.  We need one more point to offer on historic grounds of things identifiable.  This I hope to cover next time.