Is the sentence, 'God exists', a logical statement?

Question

According to wikipedia a statement is either (a) a meaningful declarative sentence that is either true or false, or (b) that which a true or false declarative sentence asserts. Is the sentence God exists a statement? Me and some friend were discussing about the above sentence whether it is a statement or not. My answer to the question was No. Since its truth value depends on the personal opinions and so it can not be a logical statement( therefore different persons give different truth values based on their opinions. ) Please give a clear answer.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Since its truth value depends on the personal opinions and so it can not be a logical statement( therefore different persons give different truth values based on their opinions. ) Please give a clear answer.

There are some layers of confusion in this question, so (despite the request) the answer isn't exactly simple.

Given the context provided in the question, a "logical statement" is taken to mean an assertoric sentence that may be assigned a truth value. And I'm guessing that the asker also wants this to be done in classical logic, so only "true" and "false" are truth values.

The confusion that many people make is to assume that truth values (in a logic) inherently have something to do with a theory of truth. That's actually not the case.

Truth values evidently have something to do with a general concept of truth. Therefore it may seem rather tempting to try to incorporate considerations on truth values into the broader context of traditional truth-theories, such as correspondence, coherence, anti-realistic, or pragmatist conceptions of truth. Yet, it is unlikely that such attempts can give rise to any considerable success. Indeed, the immense fruitfulness of Frege’s introduction of truth values into logic to a large extent is just due to its philosophical neutrality with respect to theories of truth. It does not commit one to any specific metaphysical doctrine of truth.

(Although Frege may himself not have fully realized the impact of his innovation at the time, as he only considered two truth values.)

So whether you hold or not that "truth is subjective" (that is a theory of truth) surprisingly/actually has nothing to do with whether the sentence "God exist" fits the bill to be assigned some truth value in some logic, which may actually be even classical logic. But this is merely a formal observation.

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What you're probably referring to here (on the subjective angle) is the empirical or even knowability status of "God exists".

Even assuming the notion of "God" is universally defined with a fixed or at least sufficiently similar meaning between speakers, so all speakers mean [roughly] the same thing when they utter "God exists", obviously there are varying views on the matter, to the extent that some express theirs as a probability or at least more informally as a "leaning". (You could roughly consider this a non-binary truth value assignment.)

Furthermore, one has to be careful in reading such statements from a semantics perspective. There's implicature in that (bare) statement "God exists"; various speakers may mean slightly or even substantially different things by "God". E.g. one speaker holding an inerrancy view of the Christian bible would mean one thing by "God", but someone holding the view that the laws of the universe as we know them are God obviously means a different thing by the same two-word utterance. (And I'm vastly over-simplifying the spectrum of semantic positions here; philosophers have written a lot about the supposed nature of God.)

So, in summary, yes "God exists" is a "logical statement" from the point of view of formal logic... but that doesn't entail or explain anything substantial about the existence of God as an empirical question.

Answer 2

The statement God exists is logical. But it is not necessarily true. You are confusing logic with truth.

Logic is like mathematics: it is just a set of rules. It doesn't presuppose a truth value for x or y. x=3 could be true or false. It does not depend on logic.

Logic is just a method of reasoning regarding truthfulness and falsehood. But logic does not define per se what is true and what is false. The discipline that deals with such problem is philosophy, and from an empiric point of view, science.

For example, for science, relativity is a valid theory. But it is not valid from a philosophical or metaphysical point of view, because time and space would be subjective constructs. From the point of view of the tool, logic, both values (the theory is true or false) are useful.

Answer 3

God exists is a perfectly reasonable logical statement.

What you are doing is asserting a truth for the purposes of making logical deductions. For example, you could take this statement, add some others then apply logical rules to deduce further statements.

Now, whether the logical system you have produced is of any practical use or interest is a separate matter. Even if it's completely meaningless it can be, nonetheless, a perfectly valid logical system. All dogs are yellow, yellow things quack therefore dogs quack is a perfectly valid, perfectly useless logical scheme.

That's not to say making logical statements that are controversial is inherently pointless. For example, say you incorporated this statement with others. Now, you apply logical operators and ended up with the statement God does not exist. You now have a logical inconsistency which would imply, in your logical scheme, that God's existence is a logical contradiction. Whether this ends up as being known as Hamid's Paradox or whatever will, of course, depend on exactly how uncontroversial the other statements turned out to be.

It's also probably worth pointing out that, as God's existence is an input to your logical scheme, the only valuable thing regarding God's existence that you could reasonably deduce would be the contradiction above.

Answer 4

According to your theory of truth, the truth value of some propositions are determined by subjective conditions. In your opinion, the proposition "God exists" falls into that category, but in my opinion it doesn't. Therefore, which propositions fall into that category is itself a matter of opinion.

Now, if we apply your theory of truth to the things you claim, someone might be of the opinion that the truth value of everything you say depends on opinion, and, accordingly, it would follow that there is nothing logical in what you say. For that reason, I would suggest adopting another theory of truth.

Answer 5

Generally logic is about a system of inference that moves from true statements to true statements, it isn't able to assert the truth of propositions, this has to come from elsewhere. The proposition, 'there is a cup on this table' given the situation where there is a cup on a table has an unproblematic truth value, the proposition 'God exists' is much more difficult.

Deontic logic deals with this by treating such propositions as a matter of belief without asserting their ontological truth; and in a sense, this is unproblematic since the truth value of the proposition 'Ibn Arabi believes God exists' is a safe statement to make.

However, it will also assert the truth of the proposition 'Tom Cruise believes in theta beings' (he's a scientologist), and this whilst a safe statement to make is much more problematic.

Answer 6

If you think about the wide extent of things regarding God, for example churches, mosques, synagogues, temples and religions, an argument could be, God must exist, otherwise all those things would not have existed. Although cosmologists say they believe in God, they have no definition for God, according to Thomas Aquinas who was a cosmologist, therefore, for them it is difficult to logically explain the existence of God. Ontological people who believe God exist, have definitions for God. A definition could be--God are partly those who create--which implies God exist, because creativity exists. A discussion can then go on. What is meant by "creativity" and "create", i.e.? The point is, when existence of God is discussed with a cosmologist who 'believes' in God, the discussion will end in a metaphorical explanation, which does not have clear meaning. An ontological explanation could however lead to more meaning and comprehension.

Answer 7

Yes, the existence or non-existence of God does not depend on one's opinion. God either exists or doesn't regardless of what anybody thinks.

'God exists' is:

1. a meaningful statement
2. that is either true or false.

The sentence is a 'God exists' is definitely either true or false (can't be both), we just don't know which (or at least, I don't).

Answer 8

The truth value doesn't depend on the personal opinion. If you make a definition of what god is then there either is or isn't a god that fits that definition.

If your definition is rigid and unambiguous enough then there should be no state of being in between truth and falsehood. The crux of the matter though is twofold, a) there is no unambiguous definition of what "god" is so whenever you'd strike down one such assumption you could change it's meaning and propose it again, meaning that "god exists" is not unambiguous and can mean different things to different people and b) that even though it's possible and reasonable to assume that a truth value for that statement exists, we don't know what that truth value is and have no way of obtaining it.

So it is a logical statement that could have a truth value, whether it's known to us is irrelevant in that regard, but if we use it in larger logical structures we have the problem that we can't really evaluate them without actually obtaining that truth value.