The Logic of God

Abstract

be subordinated. The fact that this question remains unanswered forces us to face the problem of plurality of logics. Usually, it is tacitly assumed that the role of “superlogic” is played by classical logic with its non-contradiction law as the most obvious tautology. We briefly discuss paraconsistent logic as an example of a logical system in which contradictions are allowed, albeit under the condition that they do not make the system to explode, i.e. that they do not spill over the whole system. Such logic is an internal logic in categories called cotopoi (or complement topoi). I refer to some theological discussions, both present and from the past, that associate “God’s logic” with classical logic, in particular with the non-contradiction principle. However, we argue that this principle should not be absolutized. The only thing we can, with some certainty, assert on “God’s logic” is that it is not an exploding logic, i.e. that it is not an “anything goes logic”. God is a Source-of-All-Rationality but His rationality need not to conform to our standards of what is rational. This “principle of logical apophaticism” is formulated and briefly discussed. In the history of theology at least one attempt is known to reconstruct the “process of God’s thinking”, namely Leibniz’s idea of God’s selecting the best world to be created from among all possible worlds. Some modifications are sug-gested which we believe Leibniz would have introduced in his reconstruction, if he knew present developments in categorical logic.