God is love
Love is blind
Therefore, God is blind.

No cat has five tails
I am no cat
Therefore, I have five tails.

I hope our editors may allow me to discuss these "syllogisms", since they help in our discussion of what makes Shade's "syllogism" false. SKB's account seems unnecessarily complicated. Shade's "syllogism" is false simply because it has the form:

 

All x are M; A is not an x; therefore A is not M. (It does not matter that x is "other men" and A is "I" and M is "mortal".)

 

This is simply a false deduction. One can say only: All x are M; A is an x; therefore A is M. Or: All x are M; A is not M; therefore A is not an x.

 

Of the two "pseudo-syllogisms" above offered by SKB, only the second is false. The first is perfectly correct, provided that "love" is understood to mean the same throughout, and that "blind" is understood throughout as having the meaning it has in "Love is blind", namely "blind to faults".

 

If it were true that love is blind, then it would indeed be true that, if God is love, then God too would be blind, in this sense of not seeing faults in the beloved.

 

This conclusion, which has been correctly, syllogistically derived from the premisses, should make us suspect that one of the premisses is false. And indeed, the proposition that love is blind is surely false, as one cannot love without knowing or "seeing" the beloved. Otherwise it is a fantasy, an infatuation.

 

Anthony Stadlen