Theism and Dialetheism

The divine attributes of omniscience and omnipotence have faced objections to their very consistency. Such objections rely on reasoning parallel to the semantic paradoxes such as the Liar or the set-theoretic paradoxes like Russell’s paradox. With the advent of paraconsistent logics, dialetheism— the view that some contradictions are true — became a major player in the search for a solution to such paradoxes. This paper explores whether dialetheism, armed with the tools of paraconsistent logics, has the resources to respond to the objections levelled against the divine attributes. Traditional monotheists usually agree: God is essentially omnipotent and omniscient.1 Yet many of the logical objections to monotheism concern these divine attributes. The objections purport to show that, on pain of inconsistency, there is no God in the traditional theist’s sense. Some philosophers, notably Descartes [], Frankfurt [], and Conee [], have defended theism by accepting some forms of inconsistency. They endorse the claim that God is able to know true contradictions or is able to bring about inconsistent states of affairs. Unfortunately, the view has never been worked out in any logical detail. In the last half-century, the development of paraconsistent logics has given philosophers ways to reason about inconsistent theories. Dialetheism, the view that some contradictions can be true, has recently been defended as a way to handle all the semantic and set-theoretic paradoxes. But the paradoxes of omnipotence and omniscience are parallel to the semantic and set-theoretic paradoxes. So dialetheism and paraconsistent logic should prove helpful in developing an inconsistent theory of classical monotheism. 0This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form will be published in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy available online at: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/. 1See [] for medieval Islamic, Jewish, and Christian perspectives.