﷽

Our theology concerning God is based on rational judgements, not nomic judgements. Commenting on this, an opponent might ask: “can rational judgements be falsified with new scientific discoveries? If so, how can we be sure that the rational necessity of God’s existence, will hold against future advancements in science?”

We respond: scientific conclusions are strictly nomic judgements. This is because the scientist is one who describes correlations in nature using observation and repeated experimentation. And nomic judgements cannot falsify rational judgements^[1], which means that science cannot falsify the rational necessity of God’s existence.

The inability of science to falsify rational judgements, is given what it means for a proposition to be rationally necessary, and what it means for a proposition to be nomically necessary.

If a proposition is correctly judged to be rationally necessary, then the relation between the subject and the predicate is affirmed by virtue of their identities. As long as the subject is itself, then the relation in a rationally necessary proposition is affirmed. And since the subject is always itself by definition, this means the relation will always be affirmed.

On the other hand, if a proposition is correctly judged to be nomically necessary, this means that the relation between the subject and the predicate is affirmed by virtue of repeated observation.

Given the above, if a proposition is true by rational necessity, then observation cannot falsify it. This is because rational necessity holds as long as the subject is itself, and a subject cannot be observed being not-itself.

For example: “the whole of any body, is larger than its part” is a proposition that is true by rational necessity. We do not believe that this proposition is true for inductive reasons^[2]. Rather, this proposition is affirmed given the essence of “whole”,  and the essence of “part”. So long as a whole is a whole, and a part is a part, then the proposition holds. And since it is impossible for one to observe a whole not being a whole, or a part not being a part, no matter the advancements in science, one will never be able to falsify this proposition.

[1] In other words, if a proposition is true by rational necessity, then it is impossible to prove that this proposition is false by using the scientific method.

[2] We believe the proposition “the whole of any body, is larger than its part” is true. However, we do not believe it is true because all the bodies we’ve seen are larger than their parts, and we simply generalized this observation to all other bodies.