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!