cs.LOSep 14, 2026

Gödel's and Scott's Variants of the Ontological Argument in Lean 4 and TPTP THF

Authors: Christoph Benzmüller

Organizations: AI Systems Engineering, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Germany · Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

Abstract

The Isabelle/HOL dataset of Benzmüller and Scott's study of Gödel's ontological argument and Scott's variant (Monatshefte für Mathematik, 2025) is carried to Lean 4 and from there back to the automated provers, as a benchmark independent of either proof assistant. The port covers all thirty theories, structure and names preserved: 548 statements compare identical as parsed, every named result is proved again, and five results the original reports without replaying them are proved here. For every theorem, #print axioms gives the postulates its proof consumes: Scott's necessary existence and modal collapse need only a symmetric frame, confirming that KB suffices. The benchmark, in TPTP THF and SMT-LIB, turns the steps of an argument debated in philosophy into 294 theorems, alongside 45 statements the original refutes or leaves open, ten left open there. Five THF provers, and cvc5 on SMT-LIB, prove 227 theorems within ten seconds on one core and 232 within sixty, and none proves any of the 45. E and Leo-II solve the most, although Leo-II's calculus has been unchanged for about a decade and was only repaired and modernised here, as release 2.2. Vampire, whose later version won the higher-order division of CASC-30, solves the most in no configuration. Only E and Leo-II are measured in their own automatic mode: Zipperposition proves 101 in a single mode and 213 with its developers' portfolio, Vampire 174 without options and 209 with a higher-order schedule that its CASC mode does not select, and Leo-III 159 alone and 177 with E as partner.

Figures & tables

Explore similar work

Sep 28, 2026cs.LO

Proofs Without Nominals: Gödel's Ontological Argument, its Shallow Embedding, and the Open Questions of the Monatshefte Notes

The shallow embedding of higher-order modal logic in classical higher-order logic, used in Benzmüller and Scott's Notes on Gödel's and Scott's variants of the ontological argument (2025), reaches beyond the modal object language of the arguments: its property quantifiers range over terms that may also express nominals and satisfaction operators of hybrid logic, and a proof using one proves a theorem of the embedding that need not be one of the modal logic. That the framework affords this is not new, and whether a result is one of the modal logic can be settled in two ways: by replaying it in an explicit proof calculus, done by hand for chosen theorems, or by analysing the proofs the embedding itself produces, done here mechanically, for every result at once. Every statement the Notes prove has a proof inside the object language: 294 written out by hand and machine-checked, none using a nominal. The proofs the Notes themselves give instantiate no nominal either; what the detector flags there are terms a prover substituted. The three questions the Notes leave open are settled too, without nominals, but the conjunction axiom has to be emended: generalised in the Notes to Gödel's "any number of summands", it covers the conjunction of no properties, and of one; the empty one alone settles all three, and the two together yield what a separate axiom of Gödel's is for. This article restricts the conjunction axiom to at least two different conjuncts, the reading Gödel's footnote suggests, and the questions are settled again, by proofs that turn on the argument rather than a degenerate instance. The restriction holds of the object language only: with a nominal the axioms make the accessibility relation the identity and the readings coincide. Every theorem is verified in Isabelle/HOL and independently in Lean 4; the countermodels are Nitpick's, certified by the build.
Jun 4, 2026cs.AI

Goedel-Architect: Streamlining Formal Theorem Proving with Blueprint Generation and Refinement

We introduce Goedel-Architect, an agentic framework for formal theorem proving in Lean 4 centered on blueprint generation and refinement. A blueprint is a dependency graph of definitions and lemmas that builds up to the main theorem. First, Goedel-Architect generates a blueprint of formally stated definitions and lemmas, along with declared dependencies. This blueprint is optionally guided by a natural language proof. Then, a tool-equipped Lean prover component closes each open lemma node in parallel using relevant dependencies. Failed lemmas in turn drive refinement of the global blueprint. This strategy contrasts with other mainstream approaches which use recursive lemma decomposition, and can inefficiently loop on dead-end strategies. Using the open-weight DeepSeek-V4-Flash (284B-A13B) as the backbone, Goedel-Architect attains 99.2% pass@1 on MiniF2F-test and 75.6% pass@1 on PutnamBench. With an optional natural-language proof seeding the initial blueprint on the harder problems, we additionally close the remaining two MiniF2F-test problems (reaching 100%), lift PutnamBench to 88.8% (597/672), and solve 4/6 on IMO 2025, 11/12 on Putnam 2025, and 3/6 on USAMO 2026. This represents state-of-the-art performance for an open-source pipeline at a price point up to 500x less than comparable open-source pipelines.
May 26, 2026cs.LO

MerLean-Prover: A Recursive Looping Harness for Lean 4 Theorem Proving

MerLean-Prover is an end-to-end Lean4 theorem prover that replaces sorry declarations with kernel-checkable proofs. It is built from three agent types (Planning, Check, and Lean) composed by a recursive outer loop whose unit of revision is the proof plan itself, and uses no fine-tuning, no custom RL objective, and no theorem-specific scaffolding. On FormalQualBench, a benchmark of 23 PhD-qualifying-exam theorems, MerLean-Prover solves 10/23, surpassing the strongest published open-source baseline (OpenGauss, 8/23). On Putnam2025, the same harness closes 12/12 with substantially lower total wall-clock than the next-best system that closes the full set. The harness also transfers to smaller models: Sonnet closes all four tested FormalQualBench problems, and Haiku closes the two short ones. These results suggest that harness design is a central factor in end-to-end Lean4 theorem proving, alongside raw model capability, and that a relatively simple harness can already be effective.