Superglue – 2: The “Law” of Non-Contradiction

Within the long-running debate in Christian theology over soteriology (salvation), is the superglue issue. It is the answer to the logical dilemma created by positing deism on the one hand and fatalism on the other.

In order to escape “brute” or “random” facts it is necessary to ask how objects remain in place day in and day out to become “facts.” When you see day and night occurring in regular patterns, you say “this is a fact.” If it happened without any regularity, you could not call it a fact. When an object falls to the ground, after a few times of this regular occurrence you suggest that the “law” of gravity is a fact. But the only reason you can call it a “law” is because of its regularity.

It is necessary to explain the phenomenon of “regularity”. Is it the deistic concept of the clockmaker who makes his clock, winds it up, and let’s it run without further interference from him? Or is “regularity” itself the result of pure contingency? Neither of these explanations fit what the Bible says.

There is a third alternative, the one that Christians have fought over for centuries. It is this. Facts are what they are because they are held in their place by God’s eternal decree. This is often called predestination, but the idea of eternal decree has far wider significance than the usual idea of predestination. It is more properly called Providence. Day and night occur with regularity because of God’s eternal (and continuing) decree. Gravity occurs with regularity because it a product of the eternal decree. Not the eternal decree of an impersonal clockmaker who has left everything to run, but by the personal and triune God of scripture who upholds everything personally.

The idea of the eternal decree is that God has not only created this universe just as a clockmaker might make a clock but that he continues to uphold the continuation of the control of events in the world. Not as an impersonal “first cause” but as the triune Creator God who within himself carries all the attributes of personhood. Man, made in his, image, also carries the attributes of personhood, though in a created fashion. Contingency — impersonal chance — is thus ruled out. So, too, is random factuality.

But herein lies the challenge for some people: God cannot have an eternal decree when it comes to free will, for it is “logically impossible” for God to control whatever comes to pass and at the same time hold people accountable for their actions. Herein is one of the “laws of logic”. Apparently God cannot do anything that is self-contradictory.

Now while you’re playing around with the idea of that last sentence in your head, ask yourself this question: “God cannot do anything that is self-contradictory . . . to whom?”

It is usually a matter of course that the idea of self-contradiction is as it is defined by the mind of man. So it is the “law” of self-contradiction to the “natural” man that is used to argue against the idea of the eternal decree.

But wasn’t it just argued that without the eternal decree there are no laws, including the law of non-contradiction as defined by man? And if you use man’s definition of the “law” of contradiction, is it possible that you are now trying to fit God into the size of the mind of man?

Do you see the dilemma some people have created for themselves? On the one hand they want to uphold “free” will. At the same time, to do so they will give up the very glue — the superglue — that holds logic and factuality together — God’s eternal decrees.

This is some choice you are confronted with. On the one hand, a claim that the “law of contradiction” as determined by man unaided by divine revelation, is to be used in some fashion to “hold God accountable” to maintain libertarian free will, free choices that have no causality outside of man himself — but especially God.

In this fashion, man is held to be the “ultimate” determiner of what is logical and what constitutes the law of non-contradiction. And by refusing to take the Scriptural evidence at face value, this becomes another attempt to deny God the Creator and his rightful place in the universe.

When man fell in Eden it was to “be like God”, determining what is true or false, right or wrong. But in order to hold this position man must first destroy the idea that God’s word, the Scriptures, are trustworthy and truthful. Thus when the Scriptures teach any notion of eternal decree or predestination, the immediate argument is never “what does Scripture say” but “that does not make sense according to the laws of logic.”

Logic, it is suggested, is the superglue that cements things together, that determines what is or what is not possible. Some people become so confident in the “laws of Logic” that they forget these are not the standard: this prerogative belongs to scripture alone. Yet by exalting the “law” of non-contradiction in the way some people do it, they merely destroy the very environment that allows them to make their claims. They eliminate logic altogether.

Since the eternal decrees of God are the superglue that make knowledge possible, it is not surprising that when this idea is frowned upon, it is just a small step to put God even lower and exalt man as the the now the creator of the “eternal” decree. And in order to do so, man must take on the attributes of God. How this is done is the topic of part 3.