On 17 Jun 2012, at 17:09, John Clark wrote:
On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 Evgenii Rudnyi <[email protected]> wrote:
> Note that you will find Kurt Goedel among the authors of
ontological arguments on the page above.
Somebody mentioned the exact same thing a few months ago and this is
what I had to say about it:
That was in Godel's later years when he went off the rails and
thought he had a rock solid logical proof for the existence of God,
fortunately even at his worst he retained enough sanity to know he
should not publish the thing.
This is not correct. Gôdel makes this in his normal mind, and his
purpose as to convince (himself) that we can do theology
"analytically". He did not intent publication indeed.
We can criticize his definition of God (St Anselmus' one, formalized
in the modal logic S5), but his proof is valid.
Gödel, actually nobody, never claims this proved the existence of God.
That it is interesting or not for theology is debatable.
Gödel did defend the point I often make: theology can be done
scientifically/analytically/axiomatically.
In fact I don't believe that some field are more serious than other.
Some people can be more serious than other in any field. For
historical reason, some field are still culturally influenced by
authoritarian powers, and that is a reason to encourage rigor there so
as freeing us from authoritarianism.
Godel was I think an even greater logician than Aristotle;
nevertheless he was always a very odd man and he got odder as he got
older. He sealed his windows shut because he thought night air was
deadly, he wore heavy woolen coats on even the hottest days because
he thought the cold was deadly too, and for unknown reasons he
insisted on putting lots of cheap plastic flamingos on his front
lawn. He ended up starving himself to death, he refused to eat
because he thought unnamed sinister forces were trying to poison
him. The great logician weighed 65 pounds when he died in 1978 from,
according to the death certificate, lack of food brought on by
paranoia.
A lot of death are not easy.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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