First of all, let me say that I now despise these stupid keyboards with the “sleep” key.  Especially since my computer, when it goes to sleep, never wakes up!  That’s right, I have to turn it off and turn it back on…so when I try to prop a book up on my keyboard to try to type in a quote…BAM.  There goes all my work.

GRRRRR!

With that out of the way, I have an article on this site called Logic Proves The Existence of God: Part II.  Using the Wayback Machine (internet archives), I found that the first time I had this put on-line that I can prove was back on January 30, 2003 on my old domain, DebateAtheism.org.  Back then it was called “Why Logic Proves the Existence of God” and was the main article on the January 30 page.

The date is important.  After all, when I wrote this essay, it was around the time I first heard about Greg Bahnsen and started to get into presuppositionalism in more detail.  And while that certainly influenced me, the conclusions I came to in my article were things I came up with independently.  That is, I didn’t read anywhere in any book where anyone tried to link the laws of logic to the attributes of God.  It just made sense to me, however, that it should be so.

As such, I was thrilled when I read this last night:

[W]ithin the very concept of [scientific] law lies the expectation that we included all times and all places.  That is to say, the law, if it really is a law and is correctly formulated and qualified, holds for all times and all places.  The classic terms are omnipresence (all places) and eternity (all times).  Law has these two attributes that are classically attributed to God.

Poythress, Vern S. (2006).  Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach, Wheaton: Good News Publishers (p. 17)

That’s right!  Someone else came to the same conclusions I did!  Granted, Poythress is speaking specifically of scientific law here, but it applies to logical laws too.

But there’s more!

The attributesof omnipresence and eternity are only the beginning.  On close examination, other divine attributes seem to belong to scientific laws.  Consider.  If a law holds for all times, we presuppose that it is the same law through all times.  The law does not change within time.  It is immutable.  A supposed “law” that did change with time would not really be “the law,” but one temporal phase in a higher or broader regularity that would account for the lower-level change.  The higher, universal regularity is the law.  The very concept of scientific law presupposes immutability.

Next, laws are at bottom ideational in character.  We do not literally see a law, but only the effects of the law on the material world.  The law is essentially immaterial and invisible, but is known through effects.  Likewise, God is essentially immaterial and invisible, but is known through his acts in the world.

Real laws, as opposed to scientists’ approximations of them, are also absolutely, infallibly true.  Truthfulness is also an attribute of God.

Next, consider the attribute of power.  Scientists formulate laws as descriptions of regularities they observe.  The regularities are there in the world first, before the scientists make their formulations.  The human scientific formulation follows the facts, and is dependent on them.  But the facts must conform to a regularity even before the scientist formulates a description.  A law or regularity must hold for a whole series of cases.  The scientist cannot force the issue by inventing a law and then forcing the universe to conform to the law.  The universe rather conforms to laws already there, laws that are discovered rather than invented.  The laws must already be there.  They must actually hold.  They must “have teeth.”  If they are truly universal, they are not violated.  No event escapes their “hold” or dominion.  The power of the real laws is absolute, in fact, infinite.  In classical language, the law is omnipotent (”all powerful”).

…

The law is both transcendent and immanent.  It transcends the creatures of the world by exercising power over them, conforming them to its dictates.  It is immanent in that it touches and holds in its dominion even the smallest bits in the world.  Law transcends the galactic clusters and is immanently present in the chromodynamic dance of quarks and gluons in the bosom of a single proton.  Transcendence and immance are characteristics of God.

…

Law implies a law-giver.  Someone must think the law and enforce it, if it is to be effective.  But if some people resist this direct move to personality, we may move more indirectly.

Scientists in practice believe passionately in the rationality of scientific law.  We are not dealing with an irrational, totally unaccountable and unanalyzable surd, but with lawfulness that in some sense is accessible to human understanding.  Rationality is a sine qua non for scientific law.  But, as we know, rationality belongs to persons, not to rocks, trees, and subpersonal creatures.  If the law is rational, which scientists assume it is, then it is also personal.

…

In addition, law is both knowable and incomprehensible in the theological sense.  That is, we know scientific truths, but in the midst of this knowledge there remain unfathomed depths and unanswered questions about the very areas where we know the most.

The knowability of laws is closely related to their rationality and their immanence, displayed in the accessibility of effects.  We experience incomprehensibility in the fact that the increase of scientific understanding only leads to ever deeper questions: “How can this be?” and “Why this law rather han many other ways that the human mind can imagine?”  The profundity and mystery in scientific discoveries can only produce awe–yes, worship–if we have not blunted our perception with hubris (Isa. 6:9-10).

(ibid, 17-21)

Yes!  Someone else has come to the same conclusions I did :-)  Naturally, I highly doubt that Poythress has ever read my website, and that makes the fact that we’ve both come to the same conclusions even more exciting for me.  It shows the consistency in presuppositional beliefs even when not explicitly stated.  I never read anyone before who had done this kind of work explictly like this; which isn’t to say that it isn’t out there either, of course as it may very well be.

In any case, it’s nice to see someone write in 2006 what I wrote in 2003 (albeit he wrote much better than I did). ;-)