The seeming necessity of logical principles, such as the fundamental “law of non-contradiction”, has led many thinkers to consider these principles primordial, basic, and uncreated. I can sympathize with the attitude that gives rise to this belief. In my own personal history of studying logic, I can remember my initial disbelief that it could be so profoundly “common sense”, that it was so basic to the perception of reality I already had. Gradually this disbelief segued into a realization that much of my perception was based, for credibility, in an implicit assertion of the ideas that logic was making explicit. If I was experiencing the world as it was, then it seemed that everything in the world must inevitably bow to the “laws of logic”. For a Christian, however, there seems to be a profound danger in respecting any laws as prior to and necessary for the existence of reality.
In my case, the logic curriculum that first acquainted me with the subject was from Veritas Press, a popular classical educational home schooling publisher—that also happens to be Catholic—suppressed any doubts about the fundamental nature of logic right out the gate. In the first chapter, I can still remember their claim, “God is logic.” By an apparently simple identification of the “Logos” in John 1 with the “laws of logic” they added an exegetically unsound and philosophically troubling conclusion to my intellectual universe. I never bothered to question that conclusion again until I came up against Roy Clauser.
[...] to provide reasons why all theories are religiously regulated, and from these reasons will also demonstrate that both reductionism and also the common Christian cop-out that created whatever aspect(s) the rest of creation reduces are hopeless strategies for explanation, and, finally, he will show for what reasons most theists “have remained committed to adapting reduction theories” but have failed to “baptize (or circumcise) reduction theories into theistic acceptability” (185-186). Reductionism, which is the claim that one aspect[1] of reality either comprises the only genuine aspect of reality or that all other aspects of reality are generated from it, inevitably implies a divinity belief because it exalts its favored aspects of reality as “unconditionally non-dependent” (187).Why are theorists continually bothering to perpetrate reductionisms? [...]
[...] If God's perfections necessarily exist, then they “make God depend on realities He didn't create, over which He has no control” (205). The mental experiment that demonstrates the foolishness of this idea is the same one that Clauser used earlier to demonstrate the foolishness of isolating aspects of reality—neither those aspects, nor God's attributes can be conceived in isolation. They are defined and conceived in terms of each other—so that none of them could have independent existence, but they in fact depend on their connectedness to exist at all. [...]
[...] Clauser disagrees with this view. This view is distinct, however, from the claim that “there never was or will be a time God didn't have them and that they are not distinct from (202). It does mean that God no control over their existence or over the fact that He possesses them” (202). This view also often includes the further premise that God “possesses his attributes in an infinite degree” so that we may accordingly call Him greatest possible being” (202-203). [...]
[...] But Clauser sees a difficulty even beyond this. In the view which Plantinga tried to rescue with his proposal, there is another fundamental danger. Since, within this view, humans are described as having the same attributes as God, although to a lesser degree, so that “humans are thereby made to be (partly) divine because the qualities humans share with God would have to be uncreated in us as they are in (210). The claim that humans possess these qualities in a different degree than God—that our qualities are only God's—avoids the fact that for them to be alike they must share some quality of goodness—which would be uncreated in us as in God. [...]
[...] In short, by demonstrating the impossibility of the contrary, Clauser claims to have shown that God must have created even his own attributes. But there is a common reply to this argument (the modification mentioned above, that Clauser claims to be inconsistent with the testimony of Scripture), involving the claim that God did not his attributes—“He is them” (206). The medieval catholic philosopher- theologians Anselm and Aquina held this view, as a necessary modification to the view that perfections were thought of as independent of Him and necessarily possessed by (206). [...]
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