an example of how terribly wrong you can go<\/a> by taking an intuitive explanation of something, believing that you understand the whole thing from that intuitive explanation, and running with it, headfirst, right into a brick wall.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
As any long-time reader of this blog knows, I’m absolutely fascinated by Kurt Gödel, and his incompleteness theorem. Incompleteness is, without a doubt, one of the most important, most profound, most surprising, and most world-changing discoveries in the history of mathematics. It’s also one of the most misunderstood.<\/p>\n
The problem is exactly what I described up above. It’s a really complicated idea. You can’t fully grasp it without having a really good understanding of logic and proof, and spending time going through the whole proof, in all of its gory details. But you can get across the gist of it with a simple explanation – and therein lies the problem. The gist that you can grasp with a simple explanation isn’t<\/em> the real meaning of the incompleteness theorem. It’s an approximation – something close enough to what the theorem says to help you understand it – but it’s not the real meaning of the theorem. And if you don’t realize that you don’t understand all of the details, you can wind up making some really serious errors.<\/p>\n One of the common ways that Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is explained is by a metaphor. Incompleteness shows how, when you’re working inside of a formal mathematical system, you can find statements that can’t be proven true or false from within the system. So as an approximation of that, people sometimes say something like “If you’ve got all of the true statements you can prove inside of a circle, then Gödel shows that there’s something outside<\/em> of that circle.” That’s a nice metaphor, which is certainly clearer, on an intuitive level than the earlier, but more correct, statement.<\/p>\n People often try to make it even a bit clearer, by extending that metaphor: If you’ve got a set of tools for drawing geometric systems, and you use them to draw a circle, part of the field that you use to draw on must be outside your circle. No matter how careful you are, you’ll can’t draw a line around an area of the field without leaving part of the field outside of it. Gödel’s theorem describes a mathematical form of the same sort of problem: if you have a good enough set of mathematical tools for showing what’s true and what’s false, there will be things that fall outside of the range of those mathematical tools.<\/p>\n
The problem is, that’s just an intuitive explanation. It misses the depth of incompleteness. It both makes incompleteness seem like something more<\/em> than it really is, and also like something less<\/em> than it really is.<\/p>\n You can try to make the statement of the theorem closer to accurate. That’s what I just did two paragraphs ago: I restated it in terms of a mathematical toolkit. That’s closer. But it still stinks.<\/p>\n
I can get even closer, by saying something like “In any valid, consistent, formal mathematical system that’s capable of expressing Peano arithmetic, there will be true statements that cannot be proved within the system.” That’s considerably closer, but it still<\/em> misses some of the essential points. After all, what does “true” mean in a formal system? And it misses one of the big facets of incompleteness, which is that no matter how careful you are to create a careful model that’s constrained to prevent self-referential statements, you can always create an alternative and equally valid model that does<\/em> include problematic statement. Grasping that fact, that there’s more than one model that can be fit to any consistent system, and what that really means, is absolutely crucial to fully understanding incompleteness.<\/p>\n The point, however, is that just because you’ve understood some intuitive explanation of something doesn’t mean that you really understand it. And using your incomplete understanding as the basis for building a proof of something else is, pretty much inevitably, going to be a total disaster.<\/p>\n
Our target in this post is the author of an argument that tries to use Gödel’s incompleteness theorem as a proof of the existence of God. It’s a perfect example of what I’ve just gone on at great length explaining. The author takes the “no circle without something outside of it” explanation of Gödel, and abuses it horribly. He really believes that he gets it, and that he’s doing valid reasoning on the basis of incompleteness. But because he doesn’t know that he doesn’t really understand it, he makes a mess.<\/p>\n
Here’s his explanation of Gödel:<\/p>\n
\nG\u00f6del’s Incompleteness Theorem says:<\/b><\/p>\n
“Anything you can draw a circle around cannot explain itself without referring to something outside the circle – something you have to assume but cannot prove.”<\/p>\n
You can draw a circle around all of the concepts in your high school geometry book. But they’re all built on Euclid’s 5 postulates which we know are true but cannot be proven. Those 5 postulates are outside the book, outside the circle.<\/p>\n
You can draw a circle around a bicycle. But the existence of that bicycle relies on a factory that is outside that circle. The bicycle cannot explain itself.<\/p>\n
You can draw the circle around a bicycle factory. But that factory likewise relies on other things outside the factory.<\/p>\n
G\u00f6del proved that there are ALWAYS more things that are true than you can prove. Any system of logic or numbers that mathematicians ever came up with will always rest on at least a few unprovable assumptions.<\/p>\n
G\u00f6del’s Incompleteness Theorem applies not just to math, but to everything that is subject to the laws of logic. Everything that you can count or calculate. Incompleteness is true in math; it’s equally true in science or language and philosophy. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Anyone who knows math can tell you that most of that has nothing to do with Gödel. It’s mostly confused babble. Gödel didn’t prove that you need to start any proof with a set of unproven axioms. That was part of math and logic long before Gödel ever came along. But our author believes that that’s what Gödel actually talked about.<\/p>\n
It isn’t. Gödel showed that given a formal mathematical system of sufficient power, you can produce a statement in the system which is true, but which is not provable within the system. Like I said before, that’s still a wretched oversimplification, but it’s a whole lot closer to the real meaning. What Gödel did was show how you can use simple arithmetic to encode logical statements into numbers; and then that you could use that encoding to create a number which encodes the statement “This statement cannot be proven true within this system”. It’s true: you can’t prove it within the system. You can use a different system to show that it’s true; but in that<\/em> system, you can do a similar construction, and show how that system includes statements that are true, but not provable within it.<\/p>\n But he’s convinced that he understands it, and that what it really means is that you need axioms that are outside of the system. He really believes that the “something is outside of the circle” explanation really does express the full meaning of Gödel, and that the things outside of the circle are the basic axioms.<\/p>\n
Of course, he’s only just begun. Nothing demonstrates your command of a subject better than your ability to take it and try to apply it to a domain where it makes absolutely no sense at all<\/em>. <\/p>\n\nA “theory of everything” – whether in math, or physics, or philosophy – will never be found. Because it is mathematically impossible.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Does Gödel really say that you can’t describe the physics of reality mathematically? No. We’re actually pretty close to nailing down something like a grand unification theory, which would be a physical theory of everything. And Gödel’s theorem has nothing<\/em> to do with whether or not it’s possible.<\/p>\n\nOK, so what does this really mean? Why is this super-important, and not just an interesting geek factoid?<\/p>\n
Here’s what it means:<\/p>\n
\n- Faith and Reason are not enemies.<\/b> In fact, the exact opposite is true! One is absolutely necessary for the other to exist. All reasoning ultimately traces back to faith in something that you cannot prove.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Once again, completely wrong. Gödel’s theorem says nothing of the sort. He’s still making the same basic mistake – that what Gödel did was show that logic requires axioms. That’s not what it says, and even if it was, this kind of vague, fuzzy, feel-good statement wouldn’t follow logically from it.<\/p>\n
\n\n- All closed systems depend on something outside the system.<\/li>\n
- You can always draw a bigger circle but there will still be something outside the circle.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n
You should be starting to see the pattern by now. He really doesn’t understand what incompleteness means. But he’s got one silly metaphor about circles, which he’s misinterpreted, and which he’s absolutely convinced is the whole truth<\/em>. Gödel’s theorem doesn’t say either of those things. It doesn’t come close to saying anything like those things, and no one who even comes close<\/em> to understanding what it says could possibly make that mistake.<\/p>\n The problem with all of the statements above is (apart from his confusion about axioms) the fact that Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is a statement about formal logical systems<\/em>, and statements within those systems<\/em>. Incompleteness doesn’t talk about religion, faith, god, circles, or open or closed systems. It talks about formal logical inference systems.<\/p>\n Anyway, we’re just finally coming to the point of his argument. But first he needs to take even more of logic and push it into his “circles” rubbish:<\/p>\n
\nReasoning inward from a larger circle to a smaller circle (from “all things” to “some things”) is deductive reasoning.<\/p>\n
Example of a deductive reasoning:<\/p>\n
\n- All men are mortal<\/li>\n
- Socrates is a man<\/li>\n
- Therefore Socrates is mortal<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
Reasoning outward from a smaller circle to a larger circle (from “some things” to “all things”) is inductive reasoning.<\/p>\n
Examples of inductive reasoning:<\/p>\n
\n- \n
\n- All the men I know are mortal<\/li>\n
- Therefore all men are mortal<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n
- \n
\n- When I let go of objects, they fall<\/li>\n
- Therefore there is a law of gravity that governs all falling objects<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Notice than when you move from the smaller circle to the larger circle, you have to make assumptions that you cannot 100% prove.<\/p>\n
For example you cannot PROVE gravity will always be consistent at all times. You can only observe that it’s consistently true every time.<\/p>\n
Nearly all scientific laws are based on inductive reasoning. All of science rests on an assumption that the universe is orderly, logical and mathematical based on fixed discoverable laws.<\/p>\n
You cannot PROVE this. (You can’t prove that the sun will come up tomorrow morning either.) You literally have to take it on faith. In fact most people don’t know that outside the science circle is a philosophy circle. Science is based on philosophical assumptions that you cannot scientifically prove. Actually, the scientific method cannot prove, it can only infer.<\/p>\n
(Science originally came from the idea that God made an orderly universe which obeys fixed, discoverable laws – and because of those laws, He would not have to constantly tinker with it in order for it to operate.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Those are just about the worst<\/em> definitions of “inductive” and “deductive” that I’ve seen. But worse is that they’re part of a purportedly mathematical argument: in math, “inductive” and “deductive” mean something specific, and it’s not this<\/em>. In math, inductive reasoning absolutely does produce proofs.<\/p>\n But the worst part of that is: “the scientific method cannot prove, it can only infer”. What does “infer” mean? In mathematical terms – in the terms that we’re using because we’re talking about the implications of a logical proof! – it means prove using mechanical inference rules within a formal mathematical system”<\/em>. So his statement, in mathematical terms, reduces to a contradiction: “the scientific method cannot prove, it can only prove”.<\/p>\n And now, finally, we get to the point:<\/p>\n
\n Now please consider what happens when we draw the biggest circle possibly can – around the whole universe.<\/b> (If there are multiple universes, we’re drawing a circle around all of them too):<\/p>\n