Incompleteness
Ed. Note: sometime soon, I will provide some textual impression of what I intend to focus on in this blog, why it is I appear to have little but venom and vitriol for religious faith, and specifically Judao-Christian faith, and where “Boxing the Jewels” came from, from two different angles. For those of you deprived of a suitable attention span to weather that longer piece, let it be known that I do not have anything but a civil respect for all systems of faith, including but not limited to Christianity, Buddhism, Satanic worship, pop culture, and science (choose your definition thereof). I do not, however, have such respect for dogma, orthodoxy, or institutional culture arising from a half-assed appreciation and misappropriation of logic and common sense, and will spare no amount of effort deriding and debunking such to whatever degree I feel necessary. So, if you believe in God and take offense, that’s your own business and not my intention; but if you believe in God and feel compelled to proselytize to me with a painfully-obviously flawed set of arguments, and take offense, then my work is done. Quite often, though, what I have to say will have nothing to do with any belief system or faith specifically. Mine is not an intention to place whatever I believe above all others, though, obviously, I have to feel that whatever I believe makes the most sense. I don’t expect anyone reading this to agree with anything I say, and hope to receive thoughtfully articulate counterpoints (note the “thoughtful” and “articulate” parts).
Also, note that I, for whimsy’s sake as much as anything, chose in this post to use the convention of capitalizing “god” and any adjectival reference thereof. This should not be taken to mean that these points relate only to the Judao-Christian deity, but rather a nod to the fact that this is the most common deity of worship in Western society. It really doesn’t matter.
There seems to be some common element to one of the ways in which the existence of a supreme power is supported, and that is an appeal to the fact that there is so much unknown in the universe. One common version of this, in the West, is some variation on “God works in mysterious ways”. Gödel seemed to apply incompleteness in his ontological proof of the existence of God. I find this a very curious line of reasoning, based on this observation: if some measure of God’s omniscience and domain is found in just how little we know about the universe, then, as our understanding of the universe increases, so does that measured omniscience and domain decrease.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say in so many words that God’s reach is measured by the gaps in our understanding of all things; but I think history can inform this observation. Once upon a time, God was quite strong in the minds of most people. Perhaps not coincidentally, once upon this time the average citizen did not count education as a fundamental human right, and, in fact, the Church dictated the course of education. By and large, for instance, clergy (e.g. monks) and the royal court were the only folks who knew how to read, let alone write. Sure, it’s a bit more complicated than that, and I don’t pretend to know all the facts; but the veracity of the general claim is easily verified.
In the modern (Western) world, though God still maintains a respectable audience, there’s no denying that His will carries noticeably lighter weight in the hearts of women and men than was once the case. To wit: I have no worries that I’ll be vivisected, hanged, burned, jailed, or in any other way punished by the U.S. government for writing this post. Say what else you might, but that simple, incredible fact is as much proof as I feel I need to say that God’s power has waned, at least His power over people in Western society. Perhaps not coincidentally, the modern (Western) world finds its citizens vastly more literate and well-educated than their medieval counterparts. It is now legislated, by the government no less, that each child be sat down in school and pressed to scrawl numbers, letters, and shapes onto paper, and, occasionally, glue to paper beans, pasta, or other foodstuffs, in the interest of understanding the world. If only the Scottish highlanders of millennia past had known that the secret of understanding could be found in adhering edible things to inedible things, the history of the West might have been written so much differently.
In short–and do let me know if it seems otherwise to you–the reign of God varies proportionately to the ignorance of His subjects. I think this touches on one of the fundamental divisions between those whose faith is in science, and those whose faith is in God: it appears to many science-faithful that maintaining a belief in God is clinging to a fear of, and derivative reverence for, all that is unknown, rather than attempting to make the unknown known. Again–and this should probably be assumed by anyone reading this for any purpose other than hunting for a fight–things are a bit more complicated than that, in the details; but I think it’s a fair assessment of the discontinuity.
Thoughts?
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