Logic Presupposes God: a Transcendental Argument for God's Existence

Thanks to Con for the excellent primer on what readers should expect from this debate in his round 1. I shall endeavor to make this debate worthwhile! I shall obviously be using Matt Slick's general outline argument as the basis for my TAG for logical absolutes (I shallow follow Con in abbreviating "logical absolutes" to LA and agreeing that the term "logical law" is, for all intents and purposes, equivalent to the term "logical absolute") but I hope by presenting the argument the way I do in this round I am adding more metaphorical "meat on the bones". I shall be splitting considerations for my TAG into two parts: epistemological [1] and ontological. [2] Slick does not make this distinction explicit in the way he formulates the argument but it seems to me that the implications can easily be drawn out if one looks hard enough. On to the arguments! ========== The TAG ========== If you'll recall I formulated the TAG for logical absolutes in a very simple syllogism: 1) If God doesn't exist, the laws of logic would not exist. 2) The laws of logic do exist. 3) Therefore, God exists. ----- 2) ----- I will defend the least controversial premise first. I take it as a given that LAs do exist - in fact I'd argue that to deny that LAs do exist is self contradictory - to do deny they exist would be to say that the statement "LAs do not exist" can be both true and not true at the same time in the same sense. That is just absurdity. Part of what it means to say *anything* is to imply that opposite is not true at the same time in the same sense. If I say, "there's a cat on the mat", and that is true, that implies that cat isn't not on the mat. Avicenna once decisively quipped, "Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned." [3] So I take nominalism [4] or non-realism about abstract objects (in this case LAs) to be a non-starter. Such a position cannot even get off the ground if taken in regards to LAs. ----- 1) ----- So, if we agree that LAs do exist it'd be useful to look at exactly what properties LAs have and why God is a necessary ground for them. LAs seem to be immaterial and non-spatial - there is nothing physical or material that one could point to and say "that right there is the law of non-contradiction". Tying into this point of immateriality/non-spatiality is the fact that LAs are also "transcendent" (per Matt Slick) in the sense that they apply everywhere - even in possible worlds [5] where there are no physical or material objects. In fact, we'd call the LAs necessary truths - that is they couldn't possibly be not true. In fact, LAs are what determine what is *possible* at all! We determine logical possibility by not being able to derive a logical contradiction from whatever proposition we are considering. LAs are "absolute" (per Slick) in the sense that there are no exceptions to them. "Things" with logically incompatible properties just can't exist. It seems to me to incoherent to say there could be an exception to the LA of identity. What would that even be like for something to not be identical to itself? Would it be like to say that something can both exist and not exist at the same time in the same sense? Or that that existent/non-existent "thing" can be in an intermediate state between existence and non-existence? This seems absolute nonsense. Assuming that above (short) arguments are sound it has been established that LAs posses the properties of being absolute, transcendent, immaterial, non-spatial, and necessary objects (among other things). This is automatically rules out positions advocating that the laws of logic are just conventions agreed upon by humans as 1) the LAs would have to be presupposed in order to make those conventions and 2) that would make the LAs contingent - meaning possible that they could have been different or not existed - objects which is incoherent. But what this doesn't rule out is Platonism. [6] What would rule that out is the last property that LAs are purported to have: conceptuality. As is argued by Slick the process of logic is conceptual (or mental) in nature. When we think in accordance to the LAs that process is necessarily something that has to be instantiated by a mind. It's not possible to think without a mind. The position that abstract objects exist in the mind is known an conceptualism. [7] ----- 3) ----- But looking at all the properties that LAs have it would follow that something with all those properties is the ground for them. A necessarily existent, immaterial, non-spatial, transcendent, absolute mind. I don't think it is a stretch to say with Aquinas, "and this everyone understands to be God". ========== Epistemological considerations for the TAG ========== Assuming that the above argument is sound the TAG can also be strengthened by arguing that God is not only necessary to ground the *ontology* of LAs but also the *epistemology* of human knowledge of LAs. It's obvious that humans have knowledge of LAs but given the nature of LAs it's hard to see how anything but could possibly ensure a connection between LAs and humans. One well worn objection against Platonism is the epistemological objection. Abstract objects (LAs) are *by definition* causally in efficacious. Meaning, they don't and can't cause anything. This immediately leads to an obvious problem; when I say I have knowledge of something external to me I mean that thing and I exist in some type of relationship. It has to be a factor in causing my knowledge of that thing. So, on Platonism, abstract objects (LAs) could never be *cause* me to know anything about LAs. But, this is obviously false as I do have knowledge of at least some LAs. We are left with an incredibly implausible position here. Another position typically brought up is that we know of the LAs through empirical observation. This on the face of it seems less than ideal. Observations based on empirical generalizations are contingent as empirical evidence is always (in principle) open to refutation and certainly the world as we see it could have been physically arranged different. This commits the empiricist to the position that the LAs are contingent and could have possibly been different which is a non-starter as I showed earlier. One could see that if there is a God who grounds LAs this position doesn't suffer from the same epistemological objections that other positions face. A Christian could, for example, argue that God created people in his image and as a result gives people the ability to have knowledge of LAs. In that way there's a causal connection between humans and LAs that other positions lack. ========== Sources ========== [1] http://carm.org... [2] http://carm.org... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org... [4] http://plato.stanford.edu... [5] http://en.wikipedia.org... [6] http://plato.stanford.edu... [7] http://en.wikipedia.org...