Mr. Nance,

I lead a group of young men in Intermediate Logic and they wanted to put their skills to use. They used an argument they pulled from chapter 1 of the book Defeating Darwinism. We tried several different ways of representing the propositions but always came up with an invalid argument. We really want it to be valid! What do we need to do? The original argument is: “If God created space and time, then He is outside of time. Therefore, He is not affected by time.” Any helpful hints will be very appreciated.

Kudos for applying the concepts to real life! This is the sort of thing I teach in Lesson 28. You need to keep in mind that ordinary arguments are not as neat and explicit as the artificial arguments the text uses to teach the concepts and methods. They often leave statements assumed (just like in Introductory Logic with enthymemes), which is what is happening in this argument. 

Here is what I think the complete argument would be, with the assumptions given in parentheses: “If God created space and time, then He is outside of time. (If one is outside of something, then one is not affected by that thing.) (God created space and time.) “Therefore, God is not affected by time.” I would then symbolize it this way: 

(S • T) ⊃ O     O ⊃ ~A     S • T     ∴  ~A

This can then be shown to be valid by shorter truth table or other methods.
Blessings!