A correspondent asked me if I could address an objection he had encountered to the argument for God from logic. Here’s the objection as he quoted it, with my comments interspersed:
The authors equivocate when they make the leap to claim that the laws of logic are thoughts. The propositions themselves are certainly thoughts, but how can the truths that the propositions bear be thoughts?
I’m pleased that the objector concedes that “propositions … are certainly thoughts” because that’s a crucial step in the argument! However, the latter part of the question reflects a confusion. In our paper, we adopted the conventional definition of propositions as primary truth-bearers. But this doesn’t mean that propositions bear truths (as though truths were something other than propositions). Rather, it means that propositions are things that can bear the property of truth; they’re things that can be true. Given this definition, truths just are propositions; specifically, they are true propositions.
So there’s no equivocation in our argument once our definition of proposition is understood. The laws of logic are truths; truths are (true) propositions; propositions are thoughts; therefore, the laws of logic are thoughts. (Of course, this is only one part of the argument.)
The propositions have intentionality but what does it mean for the very truths to be intentional?
Truths are just true propositions. Truths have intentionality because propositions have intentionality. End of story.
The laws of logic could quite simply be descriptions of the way things behave.
I think this is quite the wrong way to think about the laws of logic; it makes them sound like the laws of physics. The laws of logic are very different from the laws of physics. They’re concerned with thoughts, not physical things. How exactly do the Law of Non-Contradiction or the Law of Excluded Middle describe “the way things behave”?
In any case, even if this characterization of the laws of logic were correct it wouldn’t affect our argument in the least, because the laws of logic would still be necessary truths — and that’s all we need to run the argument.
Earlier in the paper the authors establish that the laws of logic are propositions however I find this to be a equivocation as well:
…given that the laws of logic are truths, we can say that they are propositions, in the technical philosophical sense. (p. 3)
Truths exist independent of their recognition within a proposition. Propositions, though, require a truth to bear in order to even be a proposition. Therefore all propositions bear truths (or at least truth candidates, so to speak) whereas all truths do not have propositions attached to them.
As we’ve seen, the objector is confused about what it means for a proposition to be a “truth-bearer”. It doesn’t mean that there are truths, independent of propositions, and then there are also propositions that can bear (or “attach to”) those truths. It means that propositions are precisely those things that bear the property of truth. Propositions don’t bear truths; they bear truth. When we speak of “truths”, that’s simply shorthand for “true propositions”.
The irony here is that the objector is the one who’s equivocating. We defined our terms very carefully (and conventionally) in our paper, and we used them consistently throughout, but the objector is clearly using the terms “truths” and “propositions” with different senses than those used in the paper.