system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is 'Eric The God-Eating Penguin' "dilemma" incoherent and contradictory sophistry?

This is the "dilemma" as I encountered it online:  
*"God can’t exist because of Eric, the God-Eating Magic Penguin.Since Eric is god-eating by definition, he has no choice but to eat god.So, if God exists, he automatically ceases to exist as a result of being eaten.Unless you can prove that Eric doesn’t exist, god does not exist.Even if you can prove that Eric doesn’t exist, that same proof will also be applicable to God.There are only two possibilities, either you can prove that Eric doesn’t exist or you can’t, in both cases it logically follows that god doesn’t exist."*
gpt
It's no good as an argument, and it trades on a misunderstanding both of the ontological argument and about the nature of God. In particular, it doesn't appreciate that God is meant to exist necessarily: it's meant not to be a contingent fact whether God exists or not, but a necessary truth about existence. 

The point of the penguin argument is that if all that was required for something to exist was to include necessary existence part of the definition of something, then we could define all kinds of things into existence. This is true. However, that is not the way the ontological argument is meant to work. The ontological argument is meant to work by leveraging our understanding of how the universe is meant to be in its most fundamental nature--in Anselm's case, as flowing from some primordial source of existence--and we can see from that understanding of the fundamental nature that the existence of God is a necessary truth. Whether the Anselm-style argument succeeds or not depends on what the necessary truths are of the world, not of what sentences we can string together and be understood.

You may retort that we can say that Eric is necessarily god-eating, but this misses the point. This is to work upwards from some arbitrary assignment of properties (being a penguin, eating things, having gods as its diet). But the way we are meant to learn about God (insofar as we can) in the Anselm-style arguments is downwards from the most fundamental facts: there is existence, there is order, etc. It goes entirely the other way round.

One reason for the confusion about the ontological argument is that people think this is meant to be a proof for the conception of God they are familiar with: the god of the old and new testaments, who made a covenant with Abraham, is the godhead of which Jesus is a part, is the target of worship by the Christian church, etc. But the argument doesn't pretend to establish any of that. These are properties of the kind that Eric the god-eating penguin has: particular contingent facts. The argument at most can establish the most high-level things we can say about God: that there is a source for any existence and any goodness at all, and God is necessarily that source. This doesn't tell us any of the particulars of God, and many people have spent many centuries wondering about to what extent we can even talk about God having particulars or us knowing about them even in the firm conviction that there is a godhead that is the source for our existence and of the goodness in the world.