Bochenski : Attempts to Apply Logic to Problems of Religion

The paper deals with four areas of problems of religion where logic is applied. The kind of application used is mainly to take established laws and rules of formal logic but also to develop some new semantical relations. The first area is that of levels of extension and intention : in religious texts, like in the Bible, but also in literature there are sometimes cases where a word is a name (in the literal sense) for some object and this object is a name (in the metaphorical or spiritual sense) for some other object. These semantical levels are analyzed by offering exact definitions. A further area is analogy where it is shown how applied logic can help to offer definitions and analyze the important relations of analogy by proportionality and by attribution. A third area is that of the problem of evil. It is shown that two very widespread arguments which attribute every evil to God are either invalid or have false premises. The last area of problems are those of an analysis of religious belief. It is shown that there are not only differencies between scientific and religious belief (as is expected) but also a lot of interesting similarities.