Gratefulness For Reason

Many people seem to never think at all about the nature of logic or stupidly conflate it with something that is not true by necessity as logic is.  For instance, some people think that logic is just a pattern within language, when it is really a set of necessary truths that govern the concepts words are assigned to.  Others claim it is a part of God's nature and thus has always existed only because God has (while simultaneously pretending like they believe in necessary truths).  Others still might asininely conflate the laws of nature, arbitrary relationships or patterns within/concerning the physical world that could change at any moment, with the laws of logic.

One can access reason itself by not making assumptions or rousing from philosophical negligence to recognize that logical axioms cannot be false.  If nothing logically followed from anything or could follow without actually being true, then it would be true that it logically follows from the nature of reality that logic does not exist or is untrue.  Logical necessity is still true regardless!  It is impossible for nothing to be true, similarly, because then this would still be true.  Contradictions cannot be possible because then non-contradiction would be false, since this is a requirement for contradictions to be possible.  Thus, it is a logical necessity that contradictions cannot be true because one thing would still negate another otherwise, so this itself cannot be false.

This has ramifications for theology and science because all other truths besides axioms hinge on logical axioms.  This is why some ideas are self-contradictory: they contradict the laws of logic as well as themselves and so they cannot be true.  Oh, people can deny any one of these truths or ignore them for a lifetime to their own stupidity.  They are dependent on them either way.  If it was not logically possible, you could not exist, not even if you neglect reason or viciously believe it is an invention or an illusion.  Anyone who actively thinks about anything is still "using" logic even if they make assumptions--a distorted grasp of logic, indeed, but they are still relying on logic even in an epistemological sense.  Someone who believes they can prove that logic is false is relying on the very thing in question being true, or else they could not be correct, so their worldview can only be false.  Logic is true either way.  

It would not be true that logical truths have to be relied on to argue against logical truths if what follows and does not follow from something was a mere mental construct.  Logical axioms are true inherently and thus universally.  A person can nonetheless know that logical axioms are intrinsically true and thus are knowable by their self-evidence without realizing something very particular that follows from this, that logical axioms therefore would metaphysically exist in themselves if all other things were to cease to exist.  Logic cannot be any other way; not even God can have created something that never had a beginning, but logic is, as addressed, true by necessity independent of God and all besides itself.

Among the Christians (or pseudo-Christians) who think about things related to this issue, the vast majority I have encountered profess to believe that logic is part of God's mind or a separate creation of it.  It is neither.  It is impossible for it to be anything other than true in itself!  Consequently, it is incredibly asinine to praise God or thank him for the existence and nature of logic.  The real rational way to approach this sort of gratitude would be to thank God for creating oneself as a conscious being, which in turn allows anyone who does not make assumptions to grasp logical axioms and other necessary truths of reason.

Thanking God in the alternative manner would be like thanking your parents that a mountain exists.  Your mother or father might have done something with matter they derived from the mountain, such as bringing back individual stones to make a small pile by their home, but are they responsible for the mountain's presence?  If they are mere humans born into the natural world, there is no basis for thanking them, as opposed to expressing your admiration of or gratefulness for the topological features to them.  Communicating to them a sense of gratitude that is not directed towards them is not the same as thanking them as if they had anything to do with why the mountain is present.

At least with God, it is more fitting to express this reactive gratefulness for reason simply because God, though he absolutely cannot have created what is true in itself independent of him, is a higher being than any human.  Still, any praise given to God would only be valid if it is a reaction to his creation of the human mind with its capacity to grasp what is true either way (logical truths).  If a person thanks God for creating reason, as opposed to the human mind that can grasp reason, they have embraced a variation of the supreme error, that of holding to the idea that logical axioms and other stemming necessary truths are true because of something other than themselves, also meaning that they are not automatically true due to their own nature.

Was this the case, they would not be necessary truths, since they would not be inherently true.  As I have addressed numerous times across many posts, logic can only be true in a maximally foundational way unique solely to itself.  Nothing about the laws of logic changes or can be changed.  For logic to be false, it would still have to be true!  God only exists because this is logically possible and logically necessary.  It is not necessarily the case that God is the Yahweh of the Bible, but that is another issue.  This does not alter the fact that crediting God with the creation of logical axioms and the additional necessary (but not self-evident) truths grounded in them is theistic irrationalism, which like all other forms of metaphysical and epistemological irrationalism is false by default.