"Religious Mystery and Paradox"
This paper explores the relationship between notions of religious mystery, apophaticism, negative theology and similar theological themes on one hand and glut-theory, paraconsistency, non-detaching logics and related logical themes on the other. The focus will be on apophatic traditions in Abrahamic religions primarily. The goal of the paper is exploratory, offering a number of different ways in which developments in logical might shed interesting light on ancient theological traditions. A clearer understanding of how contemporary logic might make sense of apophatic traditions in Abrahamic faiths specifically will in turn shed light on the relationship been mysticism and logic more broadly. Having explored several ways to illuminate this relationship, the paper will turn to a second topic, namely theologically-motivated opposition to truth-value gluts. To give one famous example, The First Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church building on the Biblical claim that God is Truth (eg John XIV, 6), decreed that (Ch 4, 6): “God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever be in opposition to truth. The appearance of this kind of specious contradiction is chiefly due to the fact that either the dogmas of faith are not understood and explained in accordance with the mind of the church, or unsound views are mistaken for the conclusions of reason.” This assertion throws up further interesting questions about the relationship between theology and logic.