Where Does Logic Come From?
Why many Christians are not aware of this, there is actually a god named Syllogism who created the laws of logic. Because there are laws of logic, Syllogism must be a real God. Of course that would be a circular argument, which is a fallacy of logic. Besides, I am obviously joking about the existence of such a deity.
I bring it this up because some Christians have tried to claim that their God, Yahweh, presupposed the laws of logic as well as the laws of physics and even morality. The idea is that these laws exist outside of humanity. The problem is that in a way they do exist outside of humanity, but the leap of logic to claim that because we call them laws must mean that there is a lawgiver is fallacious. There I go again, using that logic stuff.
So if Yahweh or Syllogism didn’t create the laws of logic, who did? We did, of course. People looked at the world and noticed how things seem to work. We noticed that if someone makes two or more statements about the state of affairs (premises) with a positive truth-value, that the concluding statement (conclusion) must also have the same truth-value. This is a logical syllogism (not a god). After years of argument and debate, people began to recognize patterns of reasoning and patterns of fallacy. We then organized those fallacies and called them names such as “The Straw Man Fallacy” and others.
The world exists with or without us, but we have to make sense of the world in order to function in it. As a result, we use our senses and reasoning power to examine the world. While our senses can be fooled and our reasoning can be faulty, it is all we have. Christians claim to have God, but yet how do they “know” God? Only by some sort of unjustified transcendental presupposition can they claim such knowledge and yet such a presupposition can be used to justify anything and so it becomes meaningless. The attempt to sneak behind logic and reason is an admission of the weakness of their argument. Logic isn’t a presupposition; it is a human observation about the world around us. Logic is a tool (much like science) for learning about the world and exploring ideas and thought.
Logic and science are the headlights, which enable us to see the dark street in front of us. If we cannot see beyond the light we simply admit that it is currently out of view until we build a better headlight. We don’t make up stories about how outside the light lie evil monsters waiting to steal out living essence or some such nonsense. And we don’t ask those who refuse to believe in the evil monsters to explain their lack of belief. What does lie beyond the headlight? If you don’t have the answer, than the answer must be evil monsters.
Filed under: Ontological Argument, Religion
