Is God a Penguin?
(Did Paul Says Yes?)

An Indisputable Theological Fact

Perhaps the most important teaching of Paul is that there's a lot more flexibility in the Bible than your Sunday morning television shows make you think. You shouldn't trim your hair or mar you beard, but it's OK to have a nice clean shave. You shouldn't eat pork, but then it's OK to munch on a ham sandwich, and the same goes for shellfish. Men shouldn't dress as women, but then look at all the Scotsmen in the world. In fact, Paul goes so far as to say if it makes things easier to believe if you think of God as a penguin, by all means, think God is a penguin.

Now before anyone takes this last statement as one of gross impiety, it has to be stated most emphatically that not only is it directly from the Bible, but is arrived by a literal interpretation of Scripture. Don't think so? Well, just set down your remote, dust off your Bible, and flip to Titus 1:12.

One of themselves, a prophet of their own, said, 'Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.' This testimony is true."

There you are. God is a penguin.

The faithless may scoff that the famous "Liar's Paradox" will tell us anything, much less about whether we can eat ham or not. And then you also have a bunch of biblical "scholars" (that is, egghead college professors) that don't even think Paul really wrote the damn letter in the first place. But that's really good. Before long the scholars will probably say Moses didn't even write the Books of Moses, especially the part where it tells us how he died.

We have to admit a little digression is needed. For at least a thousand years theologians have been working out logical proofs that God exists. The trouble is most of the proofs are invalid like the one St. Thomas Anselm came up with around 1100 A. D. (for a CooperToons explanation and correction of this proof,

click here). Other proofs may be correct but useless like the 20th Century rendition by mathematician and logician Kurt Godel. But as we'll see below, if logic hasn't helped prove the existence of God, it certainly can show us that God is indeed a penguin - but only if you believe the Bible is true.

Now before you slam the book shut (or actually click to another website) we need a quick first course in logic. The first thing is to realize that a fundamental tenet of logical argument is that truth and falsehood are distinct and that a statement cannot be both true and false simultaneously. This isn't just common sense either. A basic logical theorem which can be proven with mathematical rigor is that if you have even one single statement that is both true and false, then any statement is also true and false. If a statement is true and false at the same time you can prove anything: you can eat ham or not eat ham, make whoopee or not make whoopee, and you can prove God is a penguin.

The passage in Titus quoted above is what's known as the Liar's or Epimenides Paradox. It's like the postman who delivers all the mail to people who don't pick it up at the post office themselves. And he does not deliver mail to the homes of people who do pick up their own mail.

But what does the postman do? If he picks up his own mail, he's not supposed to pick it up. But if he doesn't pick up his own mail he's supposed to pick it up.

So If a Cretan says all Cretan's are liars, then he, a Cretan, must be lying. But if he's lying that all Cretans lie, then that must mean all Cretans tell the truth. But if he's telling the truth when he says all Cretans lie, then he, a Cretan, must be lying. So if Cretans lie, they tell the truth; and if they tell the truth, they lie. So on and on in a vicious circle. You get the idea.

But one point of logic is that complex convoluted statements can be simplified so they can be more readily understood. So in logic you learn that the sentence "If all Cretans lie then all Cretan's don't lie and if all Cretans don't like then all Cretans lie" transform into a simple contradiction saying "All Cretans lie and all Cretans don't lie. This in turn is equivalent to asserting the statement "All Cretans lie" is both true and false. That is what's known as a logical paradox.

Well, at this point, your hot-shot philosophy major right out of Logic 101 will puff out his chest like a homing pigeon and say the Liars paradox, particularly as stated in the Bible is not a paradox. That's because the negation of "All Cretans are liars" is not "All Cretans tell the truth," but "At least one Cretan tells the truth at least once."

What this means is we can have two Cretans. One is Joe Blow, who happens to be a truth telling, kindly, and healthy-eating Cretan, and also we can have Epimenides who is a liar, an evil beast, and a lazy glutton. Then when Epimenides says "All Cretans lie", then he is lying. After all, we know there's Joe Blow the Truthful Cretan. So "All Cretans lie" is simply a lie and there is no paradox. Case closed, right?

Well, as the Duke said in Big Jake, "Not hardly."

Remember the statement following the the quote of Epimenides? The one that said "This testimony is true"? That is not what Epimenides said. So it is not a statement asserting it's own non-truthfulness. Instead it's a separate statement about the truthfulness of another statement. Big difference.

More to the point it's in the Bible. And Paul - the Colossal Apostle - is the one who said it, even if he really didn't write the letter.

So according to the Bible, then, all Cretans are liars including Epimenides and Joe Blow. So we're back to the paradox. When Epimenides says all Cretans lie, we know he's telling the truth (the Bible says so). So if he's telling the truth that all Cretan's lie, he, a Cretan, must be lying. And there's no Honest Truthful Cretan to let us weasel out of the paradox.

So according to the Bible, all Cretans lie and all Cretans don't lie.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, now is the time to prove God is a penguin.

Drumroll, maestro!

We will use the normal logical formalism in our proof. That is, the symbol, → is "implies" (that is, "if-then"), and the symbol "V" (short for Latin "vel") means "or". For this proof you don't need anything other than these symbols and the first order transformation rules (which you can see in another window by clicking here).

Proof! God is a Penguin.

Oh, ho! So here we are. From a literal intepretation of the Bible and by believing that all of the Bible is true we have come to the one indisputable theological fact.

So remember folks! Don't leave your penguins home October 4!

 

References

The logical demonstration that God is a penguin - at least "in spririt" - appears to first formulated at Duke University. See http://phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Philosophy/axioms/axioms/node30.html

However, CooperToons proudly takes claim of the discovery that a literal interpretation of the Revealed Word proves the axioms in the proof to be correct beyond the palest shadow of a doubt. With the logic correct and the axioms true, can the argument be anything less than sound?

Titus: 1: 12 - 14. This has the famous "Liar's Paradox". But to be fair to those who harbor doubt of the conclusions of the above analysis, a number of Biblical scholars question whether this is a bonafide letter from Paul. Certainly the tone has a distinct sneer at people who heed "Jewish legends", odd wording for a man who came from an old an venerable Jewish family himself.