Recent findings on Gödel's ontological argument allowed to ultimately establish a couple of things:
- Gödel's original axiomata are inconsistent
- Scott's variation instead is consistent
- Scott's axioms imply the "modal collapse": every true statement is also necessarily true:$$\forall \phi(\phi \to \square \phi) $$
and it is said that this modal collapse is an unwanted/unacceptable consequence so that there have been proposal to slightly change the argument in order to avoid it.
I have some questions:
If in spite of the modal collapse the axioms are consistent why don't we just rephrase all the axioms without any modal operators at all and are happy with this new version of the argument? What would be so unsatisfying in a non-modal version of the argument? Maybe the axioms would become unreasonable/pointless?
Did anyone ever try to check if any of the proposed alternatives actually avoid the collapse?
Edit:
Here is how the argument would look like in the non-modal version:$$\begin{array}{rl} \text{Ax. 1.} & \left\{P(\varphi) \wedge \forall x[\varphi(x) \to \psi(x)]\right\} \to P(\psi) \\ \text{Ax. 2.} & P(\neg \varphi) \leftrightarrow \neg P(\varphi) \\ \text{Th. 1.} & P(\varphi) \to \exists x[\varphi(x)] \\ \text{Df. 1.} & G(x) \iff \forall \varphi [P(\varphi) \to \varphi(x)] \\ \text{Ax. 3.} & P(G) \\ \text{Th. 2.} & \exists x \; G(x) \end{array}$$
The theorems can be derived following the same lines of the original proof with omitted modal operators for every statement. For example to prove Theorem 1: suppose we had $P(\varphi)$ and $\neg \exists x[\varphi(x)]$ then $\forall x[\varphi(x) \to \psi(x)]$ is vacously true for any $\psi$ and by Axiom 1 $P(\psi)$ is true for any possible $\psi$, that implies also $P(\neg \varphi)$ would be true violating Axiom 2. Then Theorem 2 follows by Axiom 3 and Theorem 1 even ignoring Definition 1.
What is so undesirable in this shorter argument compared to the modal-logic original one?