Gary answers a question about 1 Thessalonians 4 and encourages Christians to be educated beyond “buzz words” that tend to shut down discussion.
The three basic laws of logic are the Law of Identity, the Law of Contradiction (sometimes called the Law of Non-Contradiction), and the Law of Excluded Middle.
The Law of Identity states that “A is A.” This means that if any statement is true, it is true; it cannot be both true and not true simultaneously. That is, anything that exists in reality has a particular identity and is not something else. The thing is what it is. A thing may be a cow but not simultaneously a cat. A dog may be all black, but not simultaneously all white (that is, both black and white in the same way and the same place).
The Law of Contradiction states that “A is not not-A.” That is, no statement can be both true and false in the same sense at the same time. A person cannot be both alive and not alive simultaneously and in the same way. An astronaut cannot be on the moon and not on the moon at the same time and in the same manner.
The Law of Excluded Middle states that “A is either A or not-A.” That is, every statement must be either true or false exclusively, there is no middle ground. Or to put it differently: if a given statement is not true, then its denial must be true. For instance, we may say that something is either a chair or not a chair, it cannot be neither a chair nor not a chair. You are either here or you are not here, you cannot be neither here nor not here. [1]
Universals and the laws of logic are fundamentally important to rationality. Without them you could not relate one thing to another, nor reason about the world and life.
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Buy NowGary concludes his interview with Chris Arnzen on “Iron Sharpens Iron.” Gary answers a question about 1 Thessalonians 4 and encourages Christians to be educated beyond “buzz words” that tend to shut down discussion, words like “Calvinism,” “Arminianism,” “Postmillennialism,” “Hyper-Preterism,” etc.
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[1] The law of excluded middle does not say there is no middle ground between opposites (such as large and small). Rather it is dealing with the question of middle ground between a statement and its negative.