Query:

Did God create logic?  How can God be bound by order when He is the creator of it?  Some people say God maintains His position as the creator of the universal order because He created logic.  But He must have a system by which he “thinks” -- even if it’s a different logic than ours -- so it seems that God’s logic must be prior to His thinking.  In that case, He would need to have a logic already in order to create one!  How can I make sense of this tangle?  Please let me know what you think!

Reply:

Good questions.  Let me suggest several converging ways to think about the matter.

God, suggests Thomas Aquinas, can do everything which is “absolutely” possible – everything which doesn’t involve contradiction.  To say that He created logic would be to suggest that He could have done differently and created illogic – that He could have allowed contradictions such as a man who is a donkey, or a two which is a three.  But if I make a sentence by placing the words “God can” before a string of nonsense, that doesn’t make the sentence true, would it?  Sentences like “Can God make a man who is not a man but a donkey?” or “Can God make a two which is a three?” wouldn’t even rise to the level of being meaningful questions.  They would be like asking “Can God moongoggle tweedledee?”  So we shouldn’t say that God cannot do these things, but that they cannot be done.  A lot of things are excluded from divine omnipotence not because God doesn’t have the power to do them, but because in their very nature they are not “doable” or possible.  As St. Paul says to the Corinthians, “God is not the author of confusion.”

You can think about your puzzle this way too.  The question “Did God create logic?” is a little bit like the question “Did God create good?”  An old paradox called the Euthyphro dilemma, after one of the Socratic dialogues, asks whether God loves the good because it is good, or the good is good because God loves it.  Neither alternative seems sound, because the former seems to make good higher than God, but the latter seems to make good arbitrary.  The classical solution is that both alternatives are wrong.  Both of them make out God and good to be different things, but they are the same thing.  God, the uncreated Being, who cannot be other than He is, is identical with His own goodness.  He cannot contradict that goodness which is Himself.

Now we can approach logic, along with other forms of order, in much the same way.  Does God love the order He has placed in things because it is orderly, or did He place it in things because He loves it?  The former alternative seems to make order something different than God, something to which He must conform – so that order is above Him.  But the latter seems to make it something different than God, something which could have been other than it is – so that, for example, He could have made a world in which the principle of noncontradiction is false.  But no, God is identical not only with His own goodness, but with each of His attributes, including the order in the divine Mind.  A man or woman can be good without being powerful, or powerful without being orderly, or orderly without being beautiful.  But in the final analysis, God’s goodness, power, orderliness, and beauty are identical with each other, and identical with Himself.  That doesn’t mean that He is an impersonal abstraction.  When one looks all the way into his goodness, or any of His other attributes, one doesn’t find a Something, but a Someone.

Here is a third way to untangle the matter.  Logical and geometrical relations are examples of “formal necessities” – cases in which the reason for a thing’s necessity results from its form.  St. Thomas offers the example that a triangle’s three angles are necessarily equal to two right angles.  Today we would qualify this – we would say that a triangle’s three angles are necessarily equal to two right angles in a Euclidean geometry, because we have discovered geometries, such as spherical and hyperbolic, in which this is not the case.  Now God could have created a physical space with a geometry other than Euclidean – in fact, as it surprisingly turns out, He has (the one we inhabit!).  But He couldn’t have made a triangle’s three angles not be equal to two right angles in a Euclidean geometry, because this is not absolutely possible – a Euclidean space which is not Euclidean is like a man who is not a man but a donkey.

Let me offer one more way to think about the puzzle -- and maybe this will be the most helpful.  You speculate about how God “thinks,” but we shouldn’t think of Him “thinking” the way we “think.”  Finite beings like you and me think of one thing now and another later.  When I draw an inference, for example, I begin by thinking of the premises, and then I think of the conclusion.  So I am not thinking everything at once – a lot of my thoughts aren’t “actual” but only “potential.”  The infinite mind of God isn’t like that, because he doesn’t have any unrealized potentiality.  Everything He can be, He is, and everything He can think, He is thinking -- all at once, in an eternal Now.  So He doesn’t need to think, “Gee, from this premise, what would follow?  Oh, now I see.”  In that sense, although the logical orderliness of created things reflects the order of His Mind, He isn’t “following a logic.”

If you’re interested, I also discuss questions like these in my new Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on the One God.  I hope you keep asking them!

Yet another “In this house we believe” yard sign has popped up in my neighborhood.  They come in waves.

There are several variations, but usually the residents assure us that they think “black lives matter,” “women’s rights are human rights,” “no human is illegal,” “science is real,” “love is love,” and “kindness is everything.”

What do you think?  If by way of neighborly reply, I put this sign in my front yard instead, would my house be burned down?

The exotic ideas I sometimes criticize are not just the fancies of our managerial and opinion-forming classes, as we might like to think.  I posted recently – but without explanation, a fault I will rectify now -- that ordinary people who decry the lunacy of our times often accept humdrum versions of the same delusions, even while denying their implications.

I notice, for example, that moderates and conservatives who protest lunatic versions of “marriage” such as polyamory quite often believe that cohabitation without vows and with freedom to change partners is equivalent to marriage.  Again, moderates and conservatives who would consider it totalitarian to forbid women to stay at home to raise their children commonly view women who do choose that way of life as dim bulbs.  And vast numbers of moderates and conservatives who find the ideas I criticize crazy try not to think so because they have internalized the crazy idea that making any judgment about craziness is intolerant.

This is one of the reasons why insanity can make way so rapidly, for the knife of the premises has already been slipped quietly between our ribs – and we have slipped it there ourselves.  And this is why, even though many of the outré symptoms which ordinary people find so ridiculous, offensive, or baffling – such as men in women’s locker rooms -- will eventually fade, the underlying fallacies are likely to outlive them and produce new symptoms, perhaps equally outré.

All too often what we mean in calling ourselves moderate is that we are only moderately lunatic; all too often what we mean in calling ourselves conservative is that although we complain about new craziness, we want to conserve the craziness we have swallowed already.

I have had five conversations with the renowned Dr. Peter Kreeft of Boston College on his EWTN podcast, "The Philosophers' Bench," and you can listen to them all:

The Differences Between Men and Women

The Natural Law

Human Conscience and its Sources

The Virtue of Tolerance

The Nature of Human Happiness

The entire Philosophers’ Bench series can be found here, and I've added a link to our five conversations to this website's Talks page.

BY THE WAY:

I'm told that First Things is migrating its archives to a new server.  For this reason, many of the links to the older First Things articles and book reviews on my Articles page don't function.  Sometime this spring, the problem should be corrected.

As you may have noticed, neither the social media links, the "likes" indicator, nor the RSS feed on my website work either.  I'm sorry, but I'm not tech-savvy enough to fix them.  Some day maybe I will be able to have a new website designed.

Query:

I've been reading some books about Nietzsche and Nietzschean virtues.  Since you're a nihilist-turned-Thomist, how do you now evaluate Nietzsche's list of virtues and his overall concept of virtue?  I'm interested in how Thomism can dialogue with Nietzsche on virtue.  Also, what were some of the major shifts that you had to make in your own thinking about virtue as you moved from Nietzsche to Christianity and then Catholicism?

Reply:

I'm glad to answer, but I’m afraid that Nietzsche doesn’t have a list of virtues, and people who tell you that he does are blowing smoke.  What he actually says is that each people has its own “table of values,” its own list of admired qualities:  For example, the ancient Persians admired telling the truth and shooting arrows straight.  To be sure, Nietzsche himself admires some characteristics, such as strength.  But he doesn’t think that there is any objective validity to any of these lists of qualities.  If by a virtue one means a quality of character it is objectively good to have, then he doesn’t believe that there are any virtues.

In fact, he denies objective truth not only in the moral realm, but in every realm.  To him, every doctrine of how things are is a conquest brought about by sheer power, because there is no “how things are.”  He claims that thought is only a relation among our drives, that rationality is only a kind of thought we cannot get free of, that conscious intentions are only a kind of symptomology, and that we at in at our best when we are in some sense unconscious.

Needless to say, if this were true, then it couldn’t be true.  Not even the statement “There is no objective truth” would have objective truth.

Dialogue is conversation in mutual pursuit of truth.  For someone who doesn’t believe in objective truth, every time we open our mouths we are uttering nonsense, and dialogue is nonsense squared.  Thus dialogue with Nietzsche is literally impossible, and there is no point in attempting it.

You ask what shifts I had to make in my own thinking about virtue as I emerged from the dark night of nihilism.  I would say that the biggest shift was believing again that there can be thinking.  The second biggest – though this took longer -- was learning to think again.

His reply:

Thank you!  That was my hunch.  What then do you suppose is the source and motive for the way writers like those I mentioned read Nietzsche?  Are they pointing to things that aren't really there?  Are they trying to make Nietzsche more palatable by rendering him seem more moderate?  Was Nietzsche just inconsistent?  Or all of the above?

My further response:

Since Nietzsche is so incoherent, it’s easy to read all sorts of things into him.  Some people might do that by accident, whether because they don’t read carefully or because they just can’t believe Nietzsche could be as crazy as he is.  But careless reading can also be highly motivated.  Nihilism thrills a lot of people, who may want Nietzsche to seem less crazy so that they can embrace some version of his lunacy. 

I’ve written from time to time that if we read Nietzsche at all, we should do so for the same reason we culture diphtheria or dissect hookworms:  To study cures.  The problem is that some Nietzscheans are engaged in gain-of-function research.