Answers to Sunday School Questions, Part 5

 Last Summer, we took up questions from our Adult Sunday School Class at First Presbyterian Dyersburg, Tennessee.  I have adapted the answers I gave in articles in the church newsletter, and I wanted to share them here.  I hope you find the short essays helpful. 

That’s your truth, not mine.

        There is only one truth.  Truth is the way things are in the real world.  Things can be both true and false at the same time and in the same way.  Religious things are no exception. 

Sometimes, this means that the problem is one of bias, so I will answer that as well.  People are Christians for a variety of reasons, humanly speaking.  Many of us were raised in a Christian home, by Christian parents. Many of us have attended church our entire lives.

Does this mean we are biased? Yes, but it does not logically follow that we are wrong.  The strength or weakness of an argument should be evaluated independent of the circumstances of the person or persons giving the argument.  Christians have good arguments.

We are intelligent, independent adults. We are not a ‘product of our raising.’  We are Christians by choice, and our religion is our own. God has changed our hearts to allow us to believe in Him against our natural inclinations.  This objection allows for one argument to be shared.  It is an argument from the way we think. 

One aspect of our thinking is our ability to determine the internal consistency of ideas, or whether the ideas ‘fit together.’  We need to be able to know whether our thinking method itself is accurate. This reasoning is the realm of formal logic.

Formal logic has always fascinated me. The laws of logic shape the way we think. They are an open window to the Christian God’s world.

Let us examine one law, for instance: the law of non-contradiction.  It says that something cannot be both A and Non-A at the same time, in the same relationship, and in the same sense. This law cannot be denied. To deny it is to affirm it. For example, if you say, “The law of non-contradiction does not apply,” you could mean, “The law of non-contradiction does indeed apply.” The meanings could be the same.

The noted theologian Gordon H. Clark explains:

If the law of contradiction is curbed, then a collection of letters, w-a-t-e-r, can mean not only sulfuric acid, but also at the same time and in the same sentence, tree, stone, Arcturus, the preposition because, and the cow jumped over the moon, ad infinitum … A word that means everything means nothing.

This law of logic, which leads us to all the others, is undeniable because to question it is to use it. It is the only way we can think. [Gordon H. Clark, In Defense of Theology, (Milford, Mich.: Mott Media, 1984) pages 98,99]

I hope the paragraph above gave you a bit of a headache.  It was intended to show just how silly the idea that truth is relative can be, and I tried to make the confusion of that idea obvious.

How would an unbeliever account for a law like this, or any other of the laws of logic for that matter?  These abstract laws are not the result of observable behavior of objects or actions. We do not observe the laws of logic occurring in nature.  They are “abstract,” not physical things we can touch.

They are not open for scientific exploration and study. We assume that logic’s laws work to evaluate scientific evidence. Using science to prove that logic works would be circular reasoning, meaning that you would have to assume that logic works to prove that logic works.

The laws of logic cannot come from science because science is based on inductive reasoning from things we see in our environments. For example, we cannot see the law of non-contradiction in the world. We would have to see the properties of a non-existent thing (non-A). The laws of logic are abstract constructions that exist only in the mind. We discover the laws of logic by thought, not observation.  The truth is that this is the only way we can think.

The laws of logic are not evolutionary in origin, either. Evolutionary processes governed by natural selection would not necessarily lead to the truth about our world.  As Alvin Plantinga points out, natural selection would only encourage behavior that would lead to survival. We could not be certain our beliefs about the world were true, only that they let us survive in any given situation. Further, genetics change from person to person. Therefore, the undeniable laws of logic would change from one person to the next.

If our thinking is a preconditioned response determined by our genetics, rational impulses would then be determined by genetics. There would be no decisions made in any traditional sense. We would all be pre-programmed to do what we do, and therefore there would be no sense in arguing. We could not change each other’s genetics, so no one could possibly win.

A Christian can account for the laws of logic by stating that they come from God. God has originated the laws of logic because He thinks logically. The laws of logic reflect God’s mind. They do not change because the God whose thinking they reflect does not change.

I do not find an adequate explanation for logic and rational thought outside God. Literally, my thinking about thinking drives me inescapably to God’s existence.