God's existence cannot be proven logically!

Any logical argument by definition follows a sequence of statements that are presented in a specified order. Therefore, the logical argument must proceed in time.God must exist outside of time. Otherwise, s/he would be constrained by time and could only act in a time sequenced manor. This would make god subservient to time and time itself a power higher than god. Thus, god, by definition the highest existing power, must be above, outside of, and independent of time.Therefore, logical arguments and logic itself simply do not have the power or purview to prove the existence of god or anything about god.On the other hand, this argument is itself a logical (time sequenced) set of statements and may not be applicable to its topic. Am I right or am I right? This logically belongs in Faith and Belief, I think.

I can see the idea which you espouse where God cannot be proven logically. We have always known that.God cannot be dis proven using logic, either IFyour premise is that He/She/It would by definition stand outside of time.If you want this to go in Faith/Belief, it might be helpful to also articulate your faith and belief in relation to your topic proposal.Other admins are welcome to also add feedback.

If you google on "logical proof of god's existence" you will get some idea of how limited your "We" is. I didn't bother to read all 1,100,000 hits, and many of these are refutations of various proofs or not really related to the topic, but there are hordes of sites espousing classical "proofs" or proposing new ones. Many of these make quite amusing reading, but are presented with complete sincerity. Now you are debating the topic rather than adjudicating its admissibility. Let's first get the topic promoted. Then we can start the debate. The proposed thread is not about anyone's personal beliefs about the existence of god. It is about the possibility of a logical proof (or disproof) of that existence, and, as a corollary, what constraints such a proof would have on the reality of any god that is logically provable. If that makes it inappropriate for the 'Faith and Belief" forum, than it is your call as to where it best belongs. My faith and belief concerning this topic proposal is articulated in the first three lines of the OP: that a logical proof of god's existence is inconsistent with a timeless god. My faith and belief concerning god himself (herself, itself, yourself, themselves, those-selves, etc.) is irrelevant to this discussion.What I am trying to do in this thread is to address all those people and arguments (and they are legion) that are convinced that god's existence is logically inescapable and that the agnostic and atheistic position can only be held by disregarding the compelling force of logic. In my OP, I propose to do this with a single, simple overarching argument (rather than arguing each 'proof' individually) that shows that all such arguments are necessarily invalid. It is this argument and position that I wish to see debated in this thread. I believe that my argument is valid. But I may be wrong. It's happened before. Well, okay, it's never happened before; I was just trying to show a little humility. But the discussion might be interesting.

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

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God must exist outside of time. Otherwise, s/he would be constrained by time and could only act in a time sequenced manor. This would make god subservient to time and time itself a power higher than god. Thus, god, by definition the highest existing power, must be above, outside of, and independent of time.

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Therefore, logical arguments and logic itself simply do not have the power or purview to prove the existence of god or anything about god.

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Hmmmn... I'm not sure I agree with you.The problem you have (if I am right?) is that you believe imperative statements about God to be invalid. By imperative statement, I mean a statement of the form if X then (it is required that) Y. You seem to mean that if we put God in the place of X then we are placent requirements on God, and that is not possible because God is by definition not subject to any requirements. I know this is far from how you have formulated it - you have talked about time, but I don't really see the relevance of time to your argument as opposed to any other kind of necessity. It is the imposition of logical necessity that is the problem, since God is presumably not constrained by necessity.Well, one problem I have with this general view is that we end up not being able to make any statement about God. We cannot define God as "the entity greater than which no entity can be conceived" because that statement puts an imperative requirement on God to be the greatest thing, and we cannot make simple statements like "God exists" or "God doesn't exist" because likewise they are imperative statements. God doesn't have to exist, if he doesn't want to!We cannot even say "God might exist" because we are implicitly saying that "It is a necessary attribute of God that he either exists or he doesn't exist".If my interpretation of your view on the relationship between God and logic is correct, it would seem to prevent us from saying anything about God at all! (Blessed be the day when that happens...). But I do find that an unsatisfying result, even if it is the correct one.MickEdited by mick, : No reason given.Edited by mick, : No reason given.Edited by mick, : No reason given.Edited by mick, : No reason given.

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God must exist outside of time. Otherwise, s/he would be constrained by time and could only act in a time sequenced manor. This would make god subservient to time and time itself a power higher than god. Thus, god, by definition the highest existing power, must be above, outside of, and independent of time.

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Aren't logical arguments supposed to start with something real? I don't see that anyone can be subservient to time. It is a nice poetic way of saying we can't stop time, but I don't understand time as something that can have power.I don't see why God needs to be independent of time.

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"Peshat is what I say and derash is what you say." --Nehama Leibowitz

Actually, a logical argument, by definition, is a collection of statements (called premises) and another statement (called the conclusion). What you are stating here is a method for determining whether an argument is valid (that is, whether the conclusion must necessarily follow from the premises).But the "real" way of determining whether an argument is valid is to construct its truth table. Now it is true that it takes time for a person to do this, but any argument consists of only a finite number of simple statements and so can (in principle) be done in a finite amount of time, and the results are, unlike the linear proof you are talking about, unambiguous.The reason that you don't see truth tables very often is that in real arguments, consisting of a very large number of premises (most of which are not even explicitly stated in the proposition), and so it is actually impossible to do a truth table in a reasonable amount of time.-The real reason that logic cannot prove that God exists or that God does not exist is that logic cannot prove anything about the real world. All logic does is determine whether or not a conclusion does necessarily follow the given premises. In the linear method of proof that you mentioned (the only one available in practice), one can (one hopes) show that a conclusion does follow the premises, and, in some cases, one might show that the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the premises.But that says nothing about the real world since there is no guarantee that the premises are accurate statements about the real world. As one example, given Newton's laws of motion and the law of gravity, scientists of the 19th century proved that the orbit of Uranus will follow a particular path. In actuality, Uranus did not follow this path. Clearly this meant that one or more of the premises were wrong: it could be that the law of gravity was incorrect, or that the laws of motion were not correct. Well, what actually happened was that the unspoken premise that there were only seven planets was changed to explicity state that there is an eighth planet...and Neptune was subsequently discovered. In fact, the history of science is really the history of how our premises about the real world have changed. Some of these changes were so profound, using Kuhn's ideas of paradigm shifts, that our very definitions and conceptions ended up changing.So the problem with the proofs for or against the existence of God is that, just like in the sciences, we cannot be certain that our premises, the assumptions that we make about the nature of God or reality, are correct. In reality, God either exists or he does not, and all we can do is try to come to the most reasonable conclusion whether he does or does not based on what we know or what we think we know about the real world around us. Logic is merely a tool to help us draw the correct conclusions based on what we know or what we think we know, but it will never be definitive since at all times our knowledge about the real world is limited and usually inaccurate to some degree.

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

If GOD exists, She exists regardless of logic that shows It does not exist.If GOD does not exist, He does not exist regardless of logic that shows She does exist.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

So we're talking typing about an omnipotent god. If you're putting constraints on god then its no longer omnipotent (and its no longer god, IMHO).An omnipotent god could exist in time without being subservient to it.

Well it all is quite interesting, really. I am not that well versed in logical arguments, but hanging around fundamentalists and charismatics will do that to you! ; I used to discuss this basic type of question with Jar. He convinced me that regardless of how much I argued otherwise, there was no real way to prove that God existed.I won't attempt to logically prove God except to say that if the premise is that God was, is, and always will be, He(She,It) was before time and will be after time.

I disagree completely, both with the statement in the topic title and with your reasoning.First the second. Your reasoning displays a fundamental misunderstanding of what logic is. Although it reads like a parody, I do not believe that you had set out to write a parody. Logic is not a function of time, but rather it is structured orderly thought characterized by the construction of a sequence (which implies order, not necessarily time) of reasoned arguments.In formal logic, these arguments are called syllogisms and are of the form, "If A and B, therefore C"; ie, if premise A is true and premise B is also true, then conclusion C is true. Now, these statements are of certain prescribed forms -- I had studied the subject 38 years ago, so I have to go light on giving examples. Only certain kinds of true premises taken together will produce a proven true conclusion -- all syllogisms so constructed are deemed valid. Certain kinds of true premises taken together do not produced a proven true conclustion -- those are deemed invalid and are considered formal fallacies.And then the conclusion of one syllogism can be used as a premise in another, and thus one would build a chain of syllogisms to construct a logical system. But, as has already been pointed out, real-world problems are complex and do not necessarily lend themselves well to solution by formal logic.All you can really determine through formal logic is whether a given form of an argument is valid or invalid. The question really isn't about whether it's true or not. If you have a valid syllogism and you apply true premises, then you will get a true conclusion. If you apply them to a fallacious syllogism, or you apply false premises to any syllogism, whether valid or fallacious, then you don't know whether the conclusion is true or false.Which brings us to my disagreement with your conclusion as stated in the title: "God's existence cannot be proven logically!".I disagree, because one can use logic to prove anything, anything whatsoever. Even something that is blatantly false, like "day is night" and "black is white". All that is required is to get you to agree with the right set of premises, for you to make the assumption that those premises are true, even though they are not. That is obviously misusing logic, even abusing it, and when practiced deliberately it is called sophistry, the practice of using logic to deceive. And when it's done unintentionally, then it's just called screwed-up thinking.So, if you start with the right premises then you can indeed prove God's existence. And if you start with the right premises, you can also disprove God's existence. Both proofs would be valid. What we would question, though, is whether they are true. And the answer to that question depends on the premises.And that is where, I believe, attempts to use logic to arrive at the truth of God's existence must fail. Because we are talking about a supernatural entity and very highly specific characteristics attributed to that supernatural entity, we cannot possibly construct premises that we know for a fact are true. We cannot possibly vouch for the truth of those premises. And since we cannot know whether our premises are true, we cannot know whether the conclusions drawn from those premises are true. Valid, yes. True? Who knows?

I'm really trying to understand the logical argument thing. So is this a proper set up?Tribal gods were personifications of nature
Yahweh was a tribal god
It follows that Yahweh was a personification of natureIf I understand correctly, what you are saying is that my conclusion (if written correctly) can be correct given the first two premises, but may not be a true statement if one or both of the premises are false. In the case of God, some may consider the first two premises true while others may not.So what really would need to be shown to be true would be the first two premises, correct?

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"Peshat is what I say and derash is what you say." --Nehama Leibowitz

dwise When did we establish that God was supernatural? Perhaps I missed the sequence of premises leading to that conclusion. I am also curious as to just what these 'very highly specific characteristics'might be that are attributable to God and the premises that are given to buttress that arguement as well.

That is more or less correct, pd. There are two things needed for an argument (like the example you gave) to be sound. One is that the argument must be valid, that is, the conclusion must be true whenever the premises are all true. The other is that the premises must all be true.Logic itself does not concern itself with whether the premises are true or false; as I tell the class when I teach this subject, the truth or falseness of the premises are the subjects of the other courses in history, physics, biology, and so forth. Logic is concerned with determining whether, assuming the premises are true, we can be certain that the conclusion is true.The example you gave is a variation of what is called in modern logic Modus Ponens. The typical Modus Ponens looks like this:p -> q
p
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Therefore, qIn modern logic, we know that this form is valid when we construct the truth table for it (it's a bit awkward to describe truth tables for arguments on the internet without being able to draw stuff -- if you're interested, you can look it up. If it's still not clear then I'll give a shot at explaining it).The exact form you gave is more of an ancient classical form:All P are Q.
X is a P.
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Therefore, X is a Q.This form actually has a name in the classic system, but I forget what it is, and I don't feel like digging out my logic text book to look it up. In the older classical systems of logic, I think these standard forms were determined to be valid or invalid simply by using common sense. But I think that you can see that we can rewrite this in the modern form of Modus Ponens if we wanted to.Now given that Modus Ponens is a valid argument, it is only left to show whether or not the premises are true. If the premises are true, then we can be confident that the conclusion is true (taking into account my earlier caveat that there may also be unspoken premises of which we are not consciously aware, at least not until we find out the conclusion is actually false!). If either or both of the premises are false, then we can't make any determination one way or the other about the truth of the conclusion.Does this help?

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

Does omnipotent mean that God can take any actions that are possible, or even actions that are self-contradictory?Can God create a stone too heavy for him to lift, and then lift it? Do we limit God if we say that even God can't make A = ~A?