The whole thing was topped off with the brilliant argumentative tactic consisting in showing a photograph of Gödel standing next to Einstein and saying something like "Look what kind of friends he had! Kind of a smart guy that Einstein!" This feeble attempt got some responses of its own pointing out how this application of Gödel's theorem to a religious debate was. The response went something along the lines of this: "Gödel proved that there are unknown/unprovable truths, and therefore. Some atheist or number of atheists had argued against religion, presumably (because the response regarded this aspect of the religious question, but it wouldn't surprise me much to learn that the atheist/atheists in question had in fact asked about the ethical standards of the Bible or something else completely unrelated, the intellectual integrity and rational capacity of the staunch Bible defenders most of the time leave something to be desired) specifically regarding the question of the rationality behind belief in god. This was one of the former kind and in one of the lower subcategories of the bigger category of online venues for the exchange of ideas: YouTube. I think my first real encounter of a clear abuse of Gödel's incompleteness theorem came when I was engaged (as I so often am) in the debate on religion, online as well as elsewhere. My theory: we will learn about consciousness and the brain the hard way, by actually studying it empirically, not by divining its secrets with fascinating, but ultimately trivial, bits of logic.
The blunt truth is that the Liar's Paradox (and Godel's theorems, which closely resemble it) have no applications in the real world. It's as though people were to invest the Liar's Paradox ("this sentence is false") with some deep significance, and spend decades arguing about its applications to the real world. In both cases, a slick piece of a priori logic seems to have huge implications in the real world.
In my opinion, Godel's theorems bear a strong resemblance to Anselm's ontological proof of the existence of God. I have long felt that Godel's theorem is overhyped, and it was wonderful to read Franzen's takedowns of a number of half-baked arguments (Penrose and Chaitin in particular).
The level of detail was just about right for a reader with math experience enough to understand the principles of the proofs, without too much of the technical machinery.īest of all was the debunking. It covers Godel's two incompleteness theorems, and a number of important related topics (e.g., the completeness theorem, compactness theorem, non-standard analysis, large cardinals). That said, this is a concise and well-written overview. A person with little math experience will be in for a very tough slog. I myself have a math degree and found the book quite challenging. Note: THIS BOOK IS NOT WRITTEN FOR GENERAL READERS OR NON-MATHEMATICIANS.
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