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
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
Isabelle/HOL
Lean 4
Isabelle/HOL
Lean 4
Isabelle/HOL
Lean 4
Isabelle/HOL
Lean 4
⊥
⊥ m
⊤
⊤ m
∀
∀ m
∃
∃ m
¬
¬ m
∧
∧ m
∀E
∀ E
∃E
∃ E
∨
∨ m
⊃
→ m
↔
↔ m
r
r
□
□
◊
◊
=
= m
=
= m
≡
≡ m
⌊⋅⌋
⌊⋅⌋
⊃N
⊃ N
@
@ m
Table 1: Notation of the Isabelle/HOL sources and of the Lean 4 port.
Isabelle/HOL
Lean 4
typedecl i , typedecl e
axiom i : Type , axiom e : Type (with Nonempty )
type_synonym
abbrev
consts , axiomatization where
axiom (free variables become explicit binders)
abbreviation (unfolded at parse time)
@[simp, grind] def (unfolded by simp / grind )
definition f with f_def
def f , unfolded definitionally or by simp [f]
lemma … oops after nitpick
example … := by countermodel
Table 2: Correspondence of Isabelle/HOL and Lean 4 constructions.
total
prose
declarations
proof
Isabelle/HOL (30 theories)
1157
180
765
212
Lean 4 (30 modules)
1868
517
854
497
Table 3: Non-blank lines of source by kind. A one-line statement with an inline proof ( by blast , := term ) counts as one declaration line on either side; only lines of proof below the statement count as proof. Declarations include notation and module headers.
Module
Result
Frame conditions
Other postulates used
GoedelVariantHOML1
Inconsistency
—
Ax2a Ax3 Ax4 iNonempty
GoedelVariantHOML1inS4
Th3
Rrefl
Ax3
GoedelVariantHOML2
Th1
—
Ax2a Ax2b
GoedelVariantHOML2
Th4
—
Ax1Gen Ax2a
GoedelVariantHOML2
Th5 , MC
Rsymm
Ax1Gen Ax2a Ax2b Ax3
GoedelVariantHOML2
Monotheism
—
Ax2a
Table 4: Postulates consumed by the proofs of the principal theorems, as reported by #print axioms ; upper bounds for what the theorems require. Omitted are only the three standard Lean 4 axioms ( propext , Classical.choice , Quot.sound ) and the embedding’s signature constants ( i , e , R , existsAt , P ); everything else a proof depends on is listed, including the non-emptiness postulates iNonempty . The possibilist and mixed-quantifier variants agree with the entries of their actualist counterparts except where a row of their own is shown ( GoedelVariantHOML2AndersonQuant , Section 5 ).
prover
configuration
10 s
60 s
machine
alone
E 3.2.5-ho
--auto-schedule
218
220
227
8
--auto
209
212
–
Leo-II 2.2
with first-order E
218
221
226
1
Vampire 4.8 HO
snake_tptp_hol
209
219
218
0
no options
174
174
–
--mode casc
167
186
185
Table 5: The 294 THF problems at 10 and at 60 seconds on one core and on the whole machine, against the four higher-order provers Isabelle2025-2 bundles, E [ 33 ] , Vampire [ 22 ] , Zipperposition [ 4 ] and cvc5 [ 2 ] , and against Leo-II [ 17 , 7 ] and Leo-III [ 36 ] ; the versions are in the rows. Each prover’s first row is its recommended configuration (Section 6.2 ), the rows beneath it are further configurations, named by their options; a dash marks a column a configuration does not have. Provers are ordered by their first rows, summed over the three columns. “Alone” counts the problems a prover proves in its first row at 10 seconds that no other first row proves; the last row is the union of the first rows, with the one-core figures of Leo-III and cvc5 in the machine column. cvc5 runs on the SMT-LIB rendering of the same statements.
stratum
problems
E
Leo-II
Vampire
Leo-III
a variable applied to a lambda
872
510
214
265
203
no such application
2765
1907
1675
1539
1428
100 formulas or more
1033
614
282
318
174
fewer than 100
2604
1803
1607
1486
1457
the profile of these problems
438
267
262
207
193
these problems
294
218
218
174
159
Table 6: The 3637 monomorphic TH0 problems of TPTP v7.5.0 by stratum, at ten seconds on one core, in the versions of Table 5 but with Vampire without options and Leo-III without E, and the same figures for the problems of this paper, which are those of the corresponding rows of Table 5 . The profile is: a lambda somewhere, no variable applied to a lambda, no Boolean argument, highest type order three, between 50 and 100 formulas. Zipperposition and cvc5 were not run over the library.
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.
Christoph Benzmüller
AI Systems Engineering, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Germany · Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
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.
Jui-Hui Chung, Ziyang Cai, Zihao Li +14
1Princeton Language and Intelligence, Princeton University · 2Amazon.
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.
Jinzheng Li, Zeru Zhu, Yuanjie Ren
1Northeastern University · 2Stony Brook University · 3Massachusetts Institute of Technology