Many philosophical theists and soft deists claim that logic leads us to God. They affirm that logic is real, that it reflects something objective, and that this objectivity must ultimately be divine. They reason, “Logic must be grounded in God, because without logic, there would be no possibility of knowledge at all.” And because logic seems innately implanted in the human mind, they believe that something about God can be known apart from divine revelation.

But this line of reasoning does not prove God exists—it merely shows that our minds must function as if certain things are true. That is not ontology. That is cognition. It confuses the necessity of our thinking with the reality of God’s being. This isn’t theism. It’s epistemic solipsism dressed in theological language.

To reason from logic to God is to begin with a created structure—logic, like causality or time or beauty—and use it as the basis to define the Creator. But in doing so, God is subordinated to that structure. He becomes a conceptual plug to preserve intelligibility, not the Lord who defines intelligibility. He becomes the god of syllogisms, not the God who speaks. He is not the I AM. He is “what must be true if I want my worldview to work.”

This is not the God of Scripture. It is a metaphysical placeholder. A postulate of necessity. A projection from below, not a revelation from above.

These rationalist arguments—whether based on logic, causality, or order—are often miniature transcendental arguments. They show that some precondition must be in place for intelligibility to hold. But they are only fragments—what Van Til called solid rocks in the ocean. If they are all you have, you will still drown. They point to the need for a transcendent source of order, but they do not provide access to that source. They are necessary, but not sufficient. A full transcendental argument must account not only for inference or causality, but for the story of everything. Without that, no argument will sustain knowledge. No reasoning will lead to worship.

But this line of reasoning does not prove God exists—it merely shows that our minds must function as if certain things are true. That is not ontology. That is cognition. It confuses the necessity of our thinking with the reality of God’s being. This isn’t theism. It’s epistemic solipsism dressed in theological language.

To reason from logic to God is to begin with a created structure—logic, like causality or time or beauty—and use it as the basis to define the Creator. But in doing so, God is subordinated to that structure. He becomes a conceptual plug to preserve intelligibility, not the Lord who defines intelligibility. He becomes the god of syllogisms, not the God who speaks. He is not the I AM. He is “what must be true if I want my worldview to work.”

This is not the God of Scripture. It is a metaphysical placeholder. A postulate of necessity. A projection from below, not a revelation from above.

These rationalist arguments—whether based on logic, causality, or order—are often miniature transcendental arguments. They show that some precondition must be in place for intelligibility to hold. But they are only fragments—what Van Til called solid rocks in the ocean. If they are all you have, you will still drown. They point to the need for a transcendent source of order, but they do not provide access to that source. They are necessary, but not sufficient. A full transcendental argument must account not only for inference or causality, but for the story of everything. Without that, no argument will sustain knowledge. No reasoning will lead to worship.

Simply positing a god does not explain anything. Anyone can posit a god, but the question is: Does the god you posit actually account for the intelligibility of the universe?

A god who is posited without self-revelation is:

Epistemically inaccessible — you have no way of knowing anything about him, including whether he exists. A silent god is functionally indistinguishable from no god. If he doesn’t speak, disclose, or define himself, then whatever you claim to know about him is speculative and arbitrary. You’re left with a metaphysical shadow, not a living God.

Ontologically immanent — if you claim to know this god using human categories (e.g., logic, causality, being), then you are using external principles to define and interpret him. That means he is not ultimate or self-contained—he is simply another part of the universe, not the explanation of it. A god who can be boxed in by your categories is a god who lives under your ceiling.

This collapses the deist god into an immanent principle—a metaphysical placeholder within the system, not the Creator of the system. He may occupy a high rung in the ladder of being, but he’s still on the ladder.

This is precisely where the car factory analogy fits. If a car factory is defined by principles it does not itself create—such as mathematics, logic, or engineering—then it is just another product within the larger system. It is not the source of the system, nor is it self-interpreting. Likewise, a god defined by laws outside himself is not the origin of those laws. He is beholden to them. He is not the source of meaning, but a participant in a world of meanings not his own. That makes him a contingent being—not the self-existent, self-defining Lord.

So your “god” might function as a placeholder for metaphysical unease, or as an explanatory patch for brute facts—but he cannot ground the intelligibility of the world, nor can he make himself known. Without revelation, your god is mute; without aseity, your god is dependent. In both cases, he fails to be God.

Now, if you appeal to classical proofs for God in order to know, then other issues arise. Every classical theistic argument—cosmological, moral, teleological, ontological—hinges on a basic question:

Is God subject to the principle the argument employs?

If yes, then God is not ultimate. He is defined and confined by a principle that stands over Him. For instance, if God is known through causality, then He is subject to a causal framework that determines what He must be. That makes Him just another highly elevated being—perhaps the greatest of all—but still within the system, not the ground of it.

If no, and God transcends the principle, then the principle cannot lead you to Him. The argument collapses under its own assumptions. If God is not subject to causality, then you cannot reason causally to Him. You would need a principle capable of exceeding itself—a contradiction.

So you are left with a dilemma:

• If the principle applies to God, you’ve denied His transcendence and aseity.
• If the principle does not apply to God, then you cannot access Him through it.

Either way, natural theology—divorced from revelation—collapses. It either yields a finite god who isn’t worthy of worship, or a hidden god who cannot be known. Classical arguments may gesture toward a “first cause,” but they can never identify who that cause is, nor describe what He is like, without importing revelation.

This is not merely a theological problem; it is a philosophical one. Without divine self-disclosure, you are either left defining God by creaturely categories, or left in complete ignorance of Him.

If this god isn’t revealed, then he is unknown—but the entire point is that he must be known in order for anything else to be known. The transcendental argument is not that God is a convenient explanation—it is that He is a necessary condition for any explanation. If you try to infer His existence from a creaturely feature—say, motion, morality, or design—then the god you posit will never rise above that feature. He will be no greater than the things that led you to him, and he will be subject to the logic that connects them.

Furthermore, an underdetermination issue arises when you attempt to infer “God” from a general principle or observable feature of the universe—such as causality, contingency, order, or morality. You are not reasoning toward a specific, personal, covenantal being, but toward a conceptual abstraction. You are describing a role to be filled, not a person to be worshiped.

That immediately introduces fatal ambiguity: if multiple beings could satisfy the criteria in question, then the principle alone is insufficient to tell you which being is real. All you’ve done is generated a metaphysical job description—and even pagan gods might apply for the position.

This is a problem of classification. You’ve now introduced a set or category of possible beings that meet certain qualifications—say, “uncaused cause,” or “morally perfect being.” But in doing so, you’ve made your god dependent on the defining properties of that class. He is no longer the one who defines all categories; he is now categorized. That means the being you reach is not absolute or self-defined—he is subject to the framework you invented to find him.

This directly violates God’s aseity and uniqueness. The true God is not one candidate among many; He is the one by whom all others are judged. The god you infer through natural reason becomes just another object in a mental taxonomy—nothing more than an idealized creature with better credentials.

Even worse, such a method leaves open a wide range of interpretive possibilities. One could just as easily conclude that the cause of the universe is a pantheistic force, or a Gnostic demiurge, or a council of gods, or a computational intelligence. The principle you start with—“the universe must have a cause”—does not rule out any of these options. It is radically underdetermined by the data. That is, the facts do not constrain you to a particular conclusion. The inference is vague, ambiguous, and metaphysically inconclusive.

And here’s the final irony: the underdetermination doesn’t just create ambiguity between various false gods—it also fails to exclude the true God of Scripture. Once you admit that some ultimate being must exist, you have no rational grounds left to say that this being is not Yahweh, the triune God of the Bible. Your method has brought you to the edge of divinity—but the only real God is the one you’ve refused to acknowledge.

So now you face a different problem: not just ignorance, but rebellion. You’ve reasoned your way to an unknown deity, and then arbitrarily rejected the one God who has revealed Himself—through creation, covenant, prophecy, incarnation, and resurrection.

You haven’t just failed to find God. You’ve opposed Him on principle.

If your god is merely conceptually necessary—a being posited to satisfy the demands of a philosophical framework—then he is ultimately the product of that framework. His necessity is functional, not ontological. He is “needed” the way a variable is needed in an equation, not because He is, but because your system falls apart without Him.

But such a god is not self-existent. He is conceptually tethered to the structure of human reasoning, not ontologically prior to it. He is a god of inference, not revelation; a god of convenience, not of glory. You do not bow before him; you simply posit him to solve a problem.

In short, he is a god of human conception—not the living God who was before all things, who defines all things, and who speaks. If He is transcendent in any meaningful sense, then He must be revealed, because nothing in creation can comprehend Him unless He stoops to make Himself known. And unless you possess that revelation, you do not even have the tools to recognize His necessity. Without revelation, your so-called “necessary being” is just an idea you cannot justify—another piece of borrowed capital from a worldview you’ve rejected.

Such a god is nothing more than a philosophical crutch—a placeholder for mystery, a speculative bandage on metaphysical collapse. But he is not the I AM. He is not Yahweh. He is not the God who reveals, rules, judges, redeems—and speaks.

For further reading on the limitations of deism and philosophical theism, see:

• God’s Unique Identity: The Car Factory Analogy and Divine Self-Existence
• Epistemic Chaos: The Disarray of Unbelief
• Exploring the Unitary Knowledge Argument: A Dialogue on Omniscience and Epistemology
• Absolute Divine Simplicity

As Jimmy once summarized:

“On Christian Theism, God is self-existent, an idea freighted with a lot of metaphysical baggage. One metaphysical correlate is irrelativity. Who God is is not something defined by Platonic Forms or abstract properties or a force. God’s identity is something God has without depending on or emerging from or participating in anything other than Himself.

Because of this, an epistemological doctrine follows that God is incomprehensible. His identity is not limited to facts about the universe, human thought, and so forth, because all such matters are created. The only way to know God is to be Him or for Him to dip His toes into the stream of human experience and tell us Himself, metaphorically speaking.

This runs non-Christian Theists into a dilemma. How is it that we know God?

If we construct a natural theology from some non-revelatory category of human experience, then that entails that God’s identity is defined by that category, and He is not self-existent. Classical theists will readily note the problems following that concession.

For example, if reason unaided by divine revelation can hold God to “laws of thought” and so forth, then it is these laws of thought that exist paramount to all reality, over and above God, defining Him and so removing His aseity.

However, the observant philosophical theist will readily see the upcoming problem. For if revelation from God is not a public, historic matter verifiable by a community, then humans are universally unable to decipher mere claims of private oracle from objective acts of God. The Muslim, Mormon, and Reformed Christian all have means to resolve this problem by appealing to holy books attributed divine authorship.

What does a philosophical theist have?”

On Christian Theism, God is self-existent, an idea freighted with a lot of metaphysical baggage. One metaphysical correlate is irrelativity. Who God is is not something defined by Platonic Forms or abstract properties or a force. God’s identity is something God has without depending on or emerging from or participating in anything other than Himself.

Because of this, an epistemological doctrine follows that God is incomprehensible. His identity is not limited to facts about the universe, human thought, and so forth, because all such matters are created. The only way to know God is to *be* Him or for Him to dip His toes into the stream of human experience and tell us Himself, metaphorically speaking.

This runs non-Christian Theists into a dilemma. How is it that we know God?

If we construct a natural theology from some non-revelatory category of human experience, then that entails that God’s identity is defined by that category, and He is not self-existent. Classical theists will readily note the problems following that concession.

For example, if reason unaided by divine revelation can hold God to “laws of thought” and so forth, then it is these laws of thought that exist paramount to all reality, over and above God, defining Him and so removing His aseity.

However, the observant philosophical theist will readily see the upcoming problem. For if revelation from God is not a public, historic matter verifiable by a community, then humans are universally unable to decipher mere claims of private oracle from objective acts of God. The Muslim, Mormon, and Reformed Christian all have means to resolve this problem by appealing to holy books attributed divine authorship.

What does a philosophical theist have?

Further Reading:

Absolute Divine Simplicity