Why Materialism Can't Possibly Add Up to Reality
Carl Sagan began his epic television series Cosmos with his atheist credo:"The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be."1 He was wrong, and Kurt Gödel tells us so.
What Gödel tells us is that mathematics is incomplete. The story of this astonishing discovery starts in the eighteenth century, when the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) challenged Galileo's idea that mathematics is the language in which God has written the laws of nature. Reacting to Hume, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) proposed that even if we cannot be sure that mathematics works in the external world, we can know that it does work inside our minds by...
is Professor of Christian Thought & History at Spring Arbor University in Michigan. He has recently run his 50,000th mile since January 1, 1992.
Get Salvo in your inbox! This article originally appeared in Salvo, Issue #40, Spring 2017 Copyright © 2024 Salvo | www.salvomag.com https://salvomag.com/article/salvo40/meta-math
