I was thinking about this question a bit more today, but no really good answers occur to me. Let’s assume for the sake of further discussion that God does exist and created the Universe. What follows are not arguments I am advancing, but thoughts that have occurred to me today, for whatever nuggets (if any) can be salvaged from them
I can certainly imagine an argument for God being bound by the laws of logic (i.e., they exist despite his not creating them, and it is an impossibility for him to contradict them).
But I can also imagine an argument for God transcending the laws of logic, because he did, in fact, make them. In the latter scenario, reasons for him not to contradict his created laws (and therefore appear to be limited by them) could include: 1) he is now unable to contradict these laws because his authority on these matters is somehow bound within the laws themselves (would this mean the laws are a part of him?), 2) he is unwilling to contradict them for to do so would be to make imperfect the perfect coherence of the universe, or 3) it doesn’t even make sense to say that all of God’s actions have some necessary relationship to the laws of logic, because the laws only apply within the spatio-temporal constraints of our present universe, of which God is not a part. (On this last point, I’ve never been clear on the question of whether God is part of our Universe or not, i.e., whether God occupies our Universe in part…)
Under possibility (3), it seems that the self-evident or a-priori nature of something within out own universe might not actually preclude the possibility that the something under question could have been created. If the creation of the laws occurred outside of our universe, and the universe was constructed in such a way as to abide by the laws, then perhaps what seems a-priori and self-evident to us only appears so from our vantage point. In other words, perhaps we lack the necessary epistemological and metaphysical perspectives to understand the origin of the laws, and God’s guidance through our senses leads us to recognize the laws self-evidently?
Thanks for your thoughts.
We cannot philosophically arrive at an answer if the answer is attributed to something created, unless of course our
induction (not deduction) is supported by some non-necessary being. For instance, science as it is studied today deals almost exclusively with non-necessary beings. Biology studies the workings of the body, but the workings of the body are non-necessary — meaning, they could be otherwise.
Mathematics studies necessary beings, since numbers have always been, though how we label them of course differs (roman numerals, arabic numerals, etc). But 2 added to 2 will always be 4, and this is necessary. It is not created, or else we could not arrive at this fact.
As a more complex example, if I have a triangle with side A = 6", side B = 8", then I can
always conclude that every single triangle in the whole universe, having sides A and B equal to the above, must have the hypotenuse equal to 10, because A^2 + B^2 = C^2. It’s impossible that it should be otherwise.
The difference is this: science studies things via observation. We see a bunch of specific examples, and induce from those a more or less universal law from them. But the law in most sciences does not need to be as it is. The speed of light could be different than it is. The human body could be different than it is. These conclusions cannot be reached philosophically.
Mathematics is an example of something we can reach deductively. Once we know the operation of addition, we can apply it to a bunch of specific examples and come out with sure results. These are also not self-evident, but they are necessary.
The philosophical first principles mentioned in this thread are self-evident, necessary principles. They are not, and could not be, created. Otherwise, how could we come to such conclusions deductively, or even intuitively in the case of these first principles?
I like what another poster said. If reason could not tell us anything about the universe, then we may as well not be having this discussion, as we could not, by reason, come to any conclusions. The very fact of our doing this suggests that reason is a useful instrument in coming to accurate conclusions in universal matters.
Also the thought comes to mind, if God was not inherently reasonable and rational, His nature could change over night; one day He could be good, and another day evil. We could have no relating with Him, because we could never know what to expect.
Yet, despite His reasoning being much, much higher than ours, we can at least see the necessity for Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, as well as the resurrection, and how that applies to our lives today. We can only do this because God is reasonable and we can more or less follow His reason. He does not make random, pointless decisions.
