harmonicminer

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Perry Marshall has put up a brief introduction to the mathematical thought of Kurt Gödel.  After a brief explanation of it, he draws connections to the idea of the mathematical necessity for a Creator in Gödel’s Incompleteness: The #1 Mathematical Breakthrough of the 20th Century

If you visit the world’s largest atheist website, Infidels, on the home page you will find the following statement:

“Naturalism is the hypothesis that the natural world is a closed system, which means that nothing that is not part of the natural world affects it.”

If you know Gödel’s theorem, you know all systems rely on something outside the system. So according to Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem, the folks at Infidels cannot be correct.  Because the universe is a system, it has to have an outside cause.

Therefore Atheism violates the laws of mathematics.

The Incompleteness of the universe isn’t proof that God exists. But it IS proof that in order to construct a consistent model of the universe, belief in God is not just 100% logical, it’s necessary.

Euclid’s 5 postulates aren’t formally provable and God is not formally provable either. But just as you cannot build a coherent system of geometry without Euclid’s 5 postulates, neither can you build a coherent description of the universe without a First Cause and a Source of order.

Thus faith and science are not enemies, but allies. They are two sides of the same coin. It had been true for hundreds of years, but in 1931 this skinny young Austrian mathematician named Kurt Gödel proved it.

No time in the history of mankind has faith in God been more reasonable, more logical, or more thoroughly supported by rational thought, science and mathematics.

Everyone understands the Incompleteness Theorem in a personal way, and knows that it applies to the most important issues of life.

Only the most trivial, least important aspects of life involve things that can be proved in the way the objectivists wanted to do it. You can’t “prove” that you love your child, that there is any point to existence, that you are loved by the person whom you hope loves you, that you don’t plan to do some great evil tomorrow (or, for that matter, that you didn’t yesterday, the “negative” being notoriously difficult to prove), etc.

Yet we all live as if our lives matter, as if at least some other people’s lives matter, as if love is real, as if we are certain that their is some underlying rationality to the universe that is not containable within it, etc.    Scientists live and work in that latter assumption whenever they assume that the “laws” of physics are the same everywhere and everywhen, which is an unprovable notion, but foundational for the ability to DO science.  And the very idea that the universe may be understandable requires an assumption about its nature and, probably, its origin, that cannot be “proved.”

In other words, in the business of being a human being and living a normal life, very little of high and immediate importance can be proved.  Yet we all, with very little exception, live as if some of our foundational assumptions are true.  Love exists.  Rationality exists.  People matter.  It matters how we live.

These things are, while not “provable,” nevertheless as true as Euclid’s postulates, demonstrable by the simple observation that without them, nothing makes any sense at all.

The First Postulate, of course, is that God IS.  And it is surely true that, without God, nothing makes any sense, any sense at all.   Not love, not rationality, not human life, not the universe, not anything.

The Second Postulate:  everything that exists makes the most sense when understood in its relationship to our Creator.

Some will argue that only the First Postulate deserves the label “postulate,” but I think the Second Postulate protects us from Deism.

God is involved with us, and with everything that is, right now.

The Third Postulate is that God has revealed Himself to us, in Christ, in human lives and traditions, in words and history, and in nature.

I think these postulates are all one needs to seek God, who is surely seeking us, and does not require us to “prove” that He is there before being in relationship with Him.

What’s really interesting is that Gödel appears to have tried to “prove” the existence of God….  perhaps a sign of lack of faith in the implications of his own work, though his faith in God seems to have been strong.

The next post in this series is here.

The previous post in this series is here.

In a very interesting interview on the unlikelihood that Sci-Fi style artificial intelligence (AI) is coming soon, or even possible, computer scientist Noel Sharkey says why he thinks that AI is a dangerous dream –

I’m an empirical kind of guy, and there is just no evidence of an artificial toehold in sentience. It is often forgotten that the idea of mind or brain as computational is merely an assumption, not a truth. When I point this out to “believers” in the computational theory of mind, some of their arguments are almost religious. They say, “What else could there be? Do you think mind is supernatural?” But accepting mind as a physical entity does not tell us what kind of physical entity it is. It could be a physical system that cannot be recreated by a computer.

Of course, materialists have a very hard time accepting that anything of non-material nature exists, anything that is not some mere arrangement of matter and energy, space and time.  What the materialist approach fails to explain is that this theory is itself a non-material thing.  What is the materialist nature of an idea?  Calling it a mere brain state, even a brain state that is shared by others, forces us into the notion that a “brain state” is about something.  Yet the materialists have mostly asserted that what we call consciousness is mere “noise in the system.”  How to account for “brain states” that are about other “brain states” which are attempts to account for the existence of other “brain states”?  One is tempted to take seriously the idea that maybe the minds of materialists are just “noise in the system.”

(Editorial comment in 2023:  For our purposes here, don’t confuse large language models like ChatGPT with actual AI in sense discussed above.  ChatGPT is not sentient, and will “tell” you so. No current AI whose existence is public is “sentient”, which begs the question of what is meant by the word “intelligence” in “artificial intelligence.”  This is probably because no one has any real concept of just what consciousness or sentience is, how it works, what produces it, etc.  Large language models, as neural-net systems that have been trained with enormous amounts of linguistic usage as data, boil down to the management of lists of billions of possible verbal formulations, and the assignment of probabilities to them.  Sentience is something quite a bit more mysterious than a large list with assigned probabilities.)

In his book, The Spiritual Brain, neuroscientist Mario Beauregard adduces the evidence for a non-material mind that is related to but independent of the physical brain.

In the book, Beauregard makes short work of claims of a “God gene” or a “God spot” in the brain, something that would provide a false sense of transcendental experience that could be falsely attributed to God by the gullible.   He asks some very interesting questions about the placebo effect, and what that effect suggests about the relationships of mind, brain and body.  His discussion of the small but persistently measurable PSI effect is very interesting, and refreshing to read from a scientist.   Especially interesting is the discussion about the implications of psycho-therapeutic models that involve teaching people to think different ways, essentially using “mind” to affect “brain,” producing measurable physical effects by changing ideas held by a person.   Beauregard’s work in using functional MRI to study the brains of meditating Carmelite nuns is very interesting, and well worth reading.

You may have the impression that someday science will explain the mind in physical terms.  This is certainly the notion that materialist neuroscientists would like to create in the public mind, yet another form of promissory materialism.

The problem, of course, is that a promise of future theoretical success is a non-material idea flowing from a non-material motivation to defend a non-material perspective about the nature of things.  It seems an impossible task.

Think of it as analogous to trying to write an essay on the topic, “Why there is no such thing as an essay.”  (Coming up next:  “Why there is no such thing as a question….  or an answer.”)

The amazing thing about the human mind is not that it has a non-material aspect.   It is that it has a physical aspect.   After all, the human mind is an echo or image of the non-material Mind behind everything.   Of course it has a non-material aspect.  The amazing thing is that the Creator made a unique integration of mind, brain and body, one that seems to have been designed specifically to allow free moral choice in a physical universe that is of non-physical origin, one characterized as much by quantum uncertainty, which makes free will possible, as by obvious cause and effect relationships.

The next post in this series is here.