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To: RightWhale
==Goedel was working in logical systems. It would be an extrapolation to infer something from his theorems beyond that.

The implication of Godel’s theorems is that scientists are just as subject to faith as non-scientists. Indeed, the renowned atheist Bertrand Russel was so shaken up by this fact that he lamented “I wanted certainty in the kind of way in which people want religious faith. I thought that certainty is more likely to be found in mathematics than anywhere...But after some twenty years of arduous toil, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing more that I could do in the way of making mathematical knowledge indubitable.”

Again, in the ultimate sense, science requires FAITH. Therefore science and faith ARE NOT strictly incompatible.

569 posted on 07/02/2007 1:18:21 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
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To: GodGunsGuts
I still don't see how it follows that embracing "faith" is an "implication" of the knowledge that formal systems are necessarily incomplete.

In the end this increase in knowledge (and the knowledge that we can't prove all true theorems is an increase in knowledge) was achieved entirely by reason.

It may have disappointed Russell, but then he spent years of intense work trying to construct a complete formal system for basic math. So that makes some sense. It still doesn't imply anything about the universe as a whole.

570 posted on 07/02/2007 1:39:52 PM PDT by Stultis (I don't worry about the war turning into "Vietnam" in Iraq; I worry about it doing so in Congress.)
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To: GodGunsGuts
The implication of Godel’s theorems is that scientists are just as subject to faith as non-scientists.

Hope, maybe, dashed hope. They are disabused of all that going on 3/4 century.

582 posted on 07/02/2007 2:46:15 PM PDT by RightWhale (It's Brecht's donkey, not mine)
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