Tools of Apologetics 1.17.8
God and Logic
In thinking about God, Calvinists almost immediately repeat the Shorter Catechism and say, "God is a spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable". Perhaps we do not pause to clarify our ideas of spirit, but hurry on to the attributes of "wisdom, holiness, justice, goodness and truth." But pause: Spirit, Wisdom, Truth. Psalm 31:5 addresses God as "0 Lord God of truth". John 17:3 says, "This is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God…." 1 John 5:6 says, "the Spirit is truth". Such verses as these indicate that God is a rational, thinking being whose thought exhibits the structure of Aristotelian logic.
If any persons object to Aristotelian logic in this connection –– and presumably they do not want to replace it with the Boolean – Russellian symbolic logic –– let them ask and answer whether it is true for God that if all dogs have teeth, some dogs –– spaniels –– have teeth? Do those who contrast this "merely human logic" with a divine logic mean that for God all dogs may have teeth while spaniels do not? Similarly, with "merely human" arithmetic: two plus two is four for us, but is it eleven for God? Ever since St. Bernard distrusted Abelard, it has been a mark of piety in some quarters to disparage "mere human reason" and currently existentialist, neo-orthodox authors object to "straight-line" inference and insist that faith must "curb" logic. Thus they not only refuse to make logic an axiom but reserve the right to repudiate it. In opposition to the latter view, the following argument will continue to insist on the necessity of logic and with respect to the contention that Scripture cannot be axiomatic because logic must be, it will be necessary to spell out in greater detail the meaning of Scriptural revelation. Now, since in this context verbal revelation is a revelation from God, the discussion will begin with the relation between God and logic. Afterward will come the relation between logic and Scripture. And finally the discussion will turn to logic in humans.
Logic and God
It will be best to begin by calling attention to some of the characteristics the Scriptures attribute to God. Nothing startling is involved in remarking that God is omniscient. This is a commonplace of Christian theology. But, further, God is eternally omniscient. He has not learned His knowledge. And since God exists of Himself, independent of everything else, indeed the Creator of everything else, He must Himself be the source of His own knowledge.This important point has had a history.
At the beginning of the Christian era, Philo, the Jewish scholar of Alexandria, made an adjustment in Platonic philosophy to bring it into accord with the theology of the Old Testament. Plato had based his system on three original, independent principles: the World of Ideas, the Demiurge, and chaotic space. Although the three were equally eternal and independent of one another, the Demiurge fashioned chaotic space into this visible world by using the Ideas as his model. Hence in Plato the World of Ideas is not only independent of but even in a sense superior to the maker of heaven and earth. He is morally obligated, and in fact willingly submits, to the Ideas of justice, human beings, equality and number. Philo, however, says, "God has been ranked according to the one and the unit; or rather even the unit has been ranked according to the one God, for all number, like time, is younger than the cosmos, while God is older than the cosmos and its creator".
This means that God is the source and determiner of all truth. Christians generally, even uneducated Christians, understand that water, milk, alcohol and gasoline freeze at different temperatures because God created them that way. God could have made an intoxicating fluid freeze at zero Fahrenheit and He could have made the cow’s product freeze at forty. But He decided otherwise. Therefore behind the act of creation there is an eternal decree. It was God’s eternal purpose to have such liquids and therefore we can say that the particularities of nature were determined before there was any nature.
Similarly in all other varieties of truth, God must be accounted sovereign. It is His decree that makes one proposition true and another false. Whether the proposition be physical, psychological, moral, or theological, it is God who made it that way. A proposition is true because God thinks it so. Perhaps for a certain formal completeness, a sample of Scriptural documentation might be appropriate. Psalm 147:5 says, "God is our Lord, and of great power; his understanding is infinite". If we cannot strictly conclude from this verse that God’s power is the origin of His understanding, at least there is no doubt that omniscience is asserted. 1 Samuel 2:3 says "the Lord is a God of knowledge". Ephesians 1:8 speaks of God’s wisdom and prudence. In Romans 16:27 we have the phrase, "God only wise" and in 1 Timothy 1:17 the similar phrase, "the only wise God".
Further references and an excellent exposition of them may be found in Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, chapters VIII and IX. A few lines from this distinguished author must he included here. God knows Himself because His knowledge with His will is the cause of all other things; … He is the first truth and therefore the first object of His understanding…. As He is all knowledge, so He hath in Himself the most excellent object of knowledge…. No object is so intelligible to God as God is to Himself… for His understanding is His essence, Himself. God knows His own decree and will, and therefore must know all things…. God must know what He hath decreed to come to pass…. God must know because He willed them … He therefore knows them because He knows what He willed. The knowledge of God cannot arise from the things themselves, for then the knowledge of God would have a cause without Him…. As God sees things possible in the glass of His own power, so He sees things future in the glass of His own will.
A great deal of Charnock’s material has as its purpose the listing of the objects of God’s knowledge. Here, however, the quotations were used to point out that God’s knowledge depends on His will and on nothing external to Him. Thus we may repeat with Philo that God is not to be ranked under the idea of unity, or of goodness, or of truth; but rather unity, goodness, and truth are to be ranked under the decree of God.
Logic Is God
It is to be hoped that these remarks on the relationship between God and truth will be seen as pertinent to the discussion of logic. In any case, the subject of logic can be more clearly introduced by one more Scriptural reference. The well-known prologue to John’s Gospel may be paraphrased, "In the beginning was Logic, and Logic was with God, and Logic was God…. In logic was life and the life was the light of men".
This paraphrase –– in fact, this translation –– may not only sound strange to devout ears, it may even sound obnoxious and offensive. But the shock only measures the devout person’s distance from the language and thought of the Greek New Testament. Why it is offensive to call Christ Logic, when it does not offend to call Him a Word, is hard to explain. But such is often the case. Even Augustine, because he insisted that God is truth, has been subjected to the anti-intellectualist accusation of "reducing" God to a proposition. At any rate, the strong intellectualism of the word Logos is seen in its several possible translations: to wit, computation, (financial) accounts, esteem, proportion and (mathematical) ratio, explanation, theory or argument, principle or law, reason, formula, debate, narrative, speech, deliberation, discussion, oracle, sentence and wisdom. Any translation of John 1:1 that obscures this emphasis on mind or reason is a bad translation. And if anyone complains that the idea of ratio or debate obscures the personality of the second Person of the Trinity, he should alter his concept of personality. In the beginning, then, was Logic.
That Logic is the light of men is a proposition that could well introduce the section after next on the relation of logic to humans. But the thought that Logic is God will bring us to the conclusion of the present section. Not only do the followers of St. Bernard entertain suspicions about logic, but even more systematic theologians are wary of any proposal that would make an abstract principle superior to God. The present argument, in consonance with both Philo and Charnock, does not do so. The law of contradiction is not to be taken as an axiom prior to or independent of God. The law is God thinking.
For this reason also the law of contradiction is not subsequent to God. If one should say that logic is dependent on God’s thinking, it is dependent only in the sense that it is the characteristic of God’s thinking. It is not subsequent temporally, for God is eternal and there was never a time when God existed without thinking logically. One must not suppose that God’s will existed as an inert substance before He willed to think.
As there is no temporal priority, so also there is no logical or analytical priority. Not only was Logic the beginning, but Logic was God. If this unusual translation of John’s Prologue still disturbs people, they might yet allow that God is His thinking. God is not a passive or potential substratum; He is actuality or activity. This is the philosophical terminology to express the Biblical idea that God is a living God. Hence logic is to be considered as the activity of God’s willing.
Although Aristotle’s theology is no better (and perhaps worse) than his epistemology, he used a phrase to describe God, which, with a slight change, may prove helpful. He defined God as "thought-thinking-thought". Aristotle developed the meaning of this phrase so as to deny divine omniscience. But if we are clear that the thought which thought thinks includes thought about a world to be created - in Aristotle God has no knowledge of things inferior to Him –– the Aristotelian definition of God as "thought-thinking-thought" may help us to understand that logic, the law of contradiction, is neither prior to nor subsequent to God’s activity.
This conclusion may disturb some analytical thinkers. They may wish to separate logic and God. Doing so, they would complain that the present construction merges two axioms into one. And if two, one of them must be prior; in which case we would have to accept God without logic, or logic without God; and the other one afterward. But this is not the presupposition here proposed. God and logic are one and the same first principle, for John wrote that Logic was God. At the moment this much must suffice to indicate the relation of God to logic. We now pass to what at the beginning seemed to he the more pertinent question of logic and Scripture.(Gordon H. Clark (One time Chairman of the Department of Philosophy, Butler University)
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