General Incompleteness Principle
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem and Divine Revelation
The Incompleteness Theorem
In September 1930, on the third day of a symposium on the foundations of mathematics, young Kurt Gödel detonated his bombshell: the Incompleteness Theorem. Loosely, by proving that formal mathematics cannot prove everything - even within its own formal system - it reduced the modernist aspirations of 19th century mathematics to rubble.
Douglas Hofstadter explains this to non academic audiences in his book, “Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid”. The original theorem addresses TNT - Typographical Number Theory. Each theorem of TNT, true of false, is a string of symbols. The idea of TNT was a set of rules for modifications to a known true theorem to create new true theorems. The thought was to thus, in principle, iterate through all true theorems of TNT.
Gödel assigned each symbol a number, and thus each theorem became a number - TNT theorems also apply to TNT theorems. Read Hofstadter’s book for the fascinating details illustrated with Bach music, Escher drawings, and Hofstadter dialogs between Achilles, Tortoise, and others.
For our purposes, formal systems of math cannot enumerate all true theorems. And yet, humans can produce true theorems unreachable within the formal system. As these are also numbers, these were dubbed “Supernatural Numbers” as they originate outside of the formal system.
The Incompletenees of Law
The Incompleteness of Revelation
Dreams are filled with what you consume in the evening.
Obedience
“Need to know” Ruth 2:2-3
