Believers claim that God can be proven to exist through logic. God’s existence can be established through our rational faculties and methods.
Before I go on, I must point out there’s no such thing as ‘the logic’. There are different forms of reasoning; Buddhists and Jains have their own, so why does a claimant choose this logic over the other states? Probably because many theists are so invested in Aristotle, they never once consider other religions have their methods.
Putting all that aside, here are a few questions about the idea that reason can prove an all-powerful God’s existence.
Paradox
Some say God is unique and vast; no rules can explain, but that also means logic can’t be used to prove a god exists. But the way God is argued for seems to indicate God is small enough to fit inside our tiny minds ad our reason.
Humans define God within the limits of their thinking. If God can’t be illogical, that means God must have at least one limitation, God can be illogical. One can also extend this to include evil, is god is not evil, then god does have a limitation.
Believers aren’t using logic to point at God merely but to define his characteristics. Here, logic seemingly becomes more potent than God since reason is the method used to define and establish boundaries of God.
It’s claiming God can’t be gift-wrapped with logic whilst trying to gift-wrap God into logic. It’s a way to say that defining god with logic means god is not all-encompassing, all-powerful, and therefore not god.
Is logic useful here
The claim logic can prove a god smuggles in another claim: that logic can be used to prove supernatural or metaphysical existence. Where is the evidence logic that can do this?
There is no way to test this idea other than using more logic, so you have circular reasoning, using logic to prove that the logic is logical.
No evidence exists to prove that logic can be used to demonstrate an ontology, beyond our empirical senses, an objective reality. This is to say nothing of the bigger problem: we can’t define reality or existence and what we mean by it.
We forget that logic doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it was developed in concert with our observations and evidence. Consider two hands washing: Reason vs evidence or Theory vs data. Each hand washes the other. When we have logic or a theory, it directs us to look for empirical evidence to support it. When we have empirical evidence, we can use logic and analytical thought to develop a theory that explains it.
When you remove the evidential aspect, reason is left alone, and one hand can’t wash itself as such logic can’t prove its axioms.
It’s also important to remind ourselves how poor we are at reason and logic. We created logic to help us describe and navigate this reality. Its use is tied to its practical effects.
A tool that works well in one domain may not work well in another. We don’t use jackhammers for dentistry.
Logic is developed and tested in this empirical realm. Apologists tell us logic can be used in the metaphysical domain just as well as this one. But where is the evidence this is true?
It’s an unsupported claim that abstract ideas have a reality and existence beyond our thoughts, called ‘Realism’, but Nominalists reject that such statements have such a reality; they are merely ideas.
The truth is reality doesn’t have to conform to our logic and reason; that is the fallacy of Reification. We are squeezing existence to fit our ideas and logic, making our ideas more important than the facts of reality.
The claim that logic can prove God rests upon several unsupported and untestable assumptions. The broader premise is a supernatural realm exists and works in the same way this natural realm works, so we can use the tools we have, sense and logic, to makes claim about the supernatural.
However, where is the roof of such claims? Where is the ability to test them? How can it be claimed that logic leads to the supernatural when we can’t check it? Such reasoning is devoid of proof and is left in the dustbin of speculative reasoning.