Does Christianity Violate Logic?

[Apologiaphoenix]

Do you violate logic with Christianity?

Link

[Cow Poke]

Just a thought --- I really enjoy that you write in a style that actually uses PARAGRAPHS where 'central thoughts' are presented. And usually your stuff is worth reading anyway!

[ReformedApologist]

[Cow Poke]

Where have you been, young man!!!!

[Juvenal]

None of those are laws, Nick. They're all assumptions, or axioms if we're speaking formally.

Because they're useful assumptions in a wide variety of applications, they're gathered together axiomatically, most notably in creating the classical logics. But like anything else in mathematics, it should be remembered that their existence is abstract, and any relevance to the real world, no matter the ubiquity, is strictly coincidental.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty, a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

--BERTRAND RUSSELL, Study of Mathematics

Logic is not something taught in a freshman philosophy course. That's the introduction. To know logic, one needs to know logics as universal algebras, and that means studying universal algebras.

Mathematical Sciences: Special Year in Model Theory and Universal Algebra

This project will support a special year in model theory and universal algebra to be held at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1991-92.

I was there that year.

"Holes" in classical logics show up in the literature centuries before the first halting steps toward a classical logic were made by Aristotle, and millennia before the axiomatic development of classical logics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

All of the following paradoxes are formally equivalent.

All Cretans are liars. I should know, I'm a Cretan.
The book of all books that do not cite themselves.
The set of all sets that do not contain themselves as a member.

Those last two share the same contradictory existence as believable liars, or more topically, tolerance of intolerance, which likewise belongs on the list.

I'm not a Cretan.

A liar's paradox can't be true. And it can't be not true.

The middle can't be excluded.

The best we can do is restrict our treatment to abstract realms satisfying the postulate. Mostly that means avoiding recursive structures. Any paradox that fits on that list can be resolved by forbidding recursion.

_____

But you can't forbid recursive structures. They're useful, and powerful, and relevant to the question in the OP. There is no calculus without them.

Still, if you've got recursive structures, you've got liar's paradoxes.

The liar's paradox can be generalized, much to the chagrin of the above-cited Russell and his colleague Alfred North Whitehead, whose Principia Mathematica was serially redacted between 1910 and 1913, before its summary execution in 1931. That was published his proof that the real numbers are not countably infinite in 1874, and the result was applied recursively. The wolves were loosed on all things infinite, putting all of axiomatic set theory in the cross hairs. This led eventually to the introduction of subtle refinements like the axiom of choice, and the further refinements of ZF and ZFE set theories.

And sporadically to the institutionalization of Cantor. Working on the infinite drove him nuts, repeatedly.

And immediately, we had that there can be no greatest infinite.

_____

Again, this doesn't have to have any utility at all, but to the extent one wishes to argue for the existence of a being that is both infinite and supreme using a formal logic, we can say things about that being that likely don't align well with the faith of tradents.

Please let me know if there's anything in the links you'd like to discuss.

Regards, J

[Apologiaphoenix]

Juvenal. I do consider those three laws as they are all aspects of how being behaves. I do note that nothing has been said that Christianity contradicts logic. I would really like to know if you have anything on that point.

[Juvenal]

Juvenal. I do consider those three laws as they are all aspects of how being behaves.

Your abiding faith in classical logics as an ontological standard may be endearing, but I can say from experience it's not sustainable in the face of graded homework assignments.

I do note that nothing has been said that Christianity contradicts logic. I would really like to know if you have anything on that point.

The Christian God is a supreme infinite being and a supreme infinite being is a married bachelor in any logic.

It's not a meaningful concept.

[Apologiaphoenix]

Your abiding faith in classical logics as an ontological standard may be endearing, but I can say from experience it's not sustainable in the face of graded homework assignments.

Which is just an assertion. There are plenty of classical theologians and philosophers who have graded homework assignments and PhDs in the field who would disagree.

The Christian God is a supreme infinite being and a supreme infinite being is a married bachelor in any logic.

It's not a meaningful concept.

Which is again another assertion given without any supporting argument.

[Christianbookworm]

Which is just an assertion. There are plenty of classical theologians and philosophers who have graded homework assignments and PhDs in the field who would disagree.



Which is again another assertion given without any supporting argument.

And the juvenile continues to prove your point.... Would it help to pray for his blinders to be lifted? Or is he better off in his ignorance?

[Juvenal]

Which is just an assertion. There are plenty of classical theologians and philosophers who have graded homework assignments and PhDs in the field who would disagree.

Name one.

Offhand, I can think of four who would laugh at that assertion.

John Baldwin
Willem Blok
Joel Berman
David Marker

And myself, of course.

No PhD in the field would ever claim a privileged position for classical axioms. It would be gross incompetence.

It's time to stop pretending you know more about math than the professor, Nick. You're decades of study short of a position to judge my understanding of the field, and will frankly never arrive at such a position without giving up these prejudices.

Which is again another assertion given without any supporting argument.

There's an actual discussion waiting for you the moment you stop digging in your heels and covering your eyes, hoping the arguments will just go away.

If you don't understand this, you can ask. But you don't get to claim it didn't happen.

Regards, J

[Juvenal]

And the juvenile continues to prove your point.... Would it help to pray for his blinders to be lifted? Or is he better off in his ignorance?

Shoo.

[Apologiaphoenix]

Name one.

Offhand, I can think of four who would laugh at that assertion.

John Baldwin
Willem Blok
Joel Berman
David Marker

And myself, of course.

No PhD in the field would ever claim a privileged position for classical axioms. It would be gross incompetence.

I said nothing about a privileged position. I simply said there are no laws of logic that Christianity violates. It doesn't violate the Law of Identity, Excluded Middle, or Non-Contradiction.

Right now I would say most any Thomist philosopher. Garrigou-Lagrange, Feser, Stump, Gilson, Wippel, etc.

There's an actual discussion waiting for you the moment you stop digging in your heels and covering your eyes, hoping the arguments will just go away.

If you don't understand this, you can ask. But you don't get to claim it didn't happen.

Regards, J

If you're talking about an infinite in math, then that is one of quantity. That's one reason also Aquinas would reject a Kalam argument as given by Craig, at least with regard to the philosophy, since there are some versions of infinite regresses he thought were possible. The infinite like that is not what is had in mind when talking about God. It's about a quality He has without limitation.

[One Bad Pig]

I dream of finishing that book one day. I've tried a couple times. I just need enough free time to plow all the way through it without having to put it aside for too long.

[Cow Poke]

I dream of finishing that book one day. I've tried a couple times. I just need enough free time to plow all the way through it without having to put it aside for too long.

My Pastor had a quarterly retreat - a friend had a deer camp, and during off season, Robby would go there all by himself, or with one or two pastor friends, and spend 3 days just catching up on reading, praying, recuperating.... I've tried that, but I'm not as disciplined.

[Christianbookworm]

And we can't know your credentials. It's the internet. Anyone can lie about credentials.