The God of the Mathematicians: David P. Goldman Explores the Religious Beliefs That Guided Kurt Godel's Revolutionary Ideas (Report‪)‬

Kurt Godel was a believer--or, at least, a knower--whose engagement with included a reworking of the ontological proof of God's existence. Born in 1906, Godel was arguably the great mathematician of his time. Certainly no twentieth-century thinker did more to show that the human mind cannot be reduced to a machine. At twenty-five he ruined the positivist hope of making mathematics into a self-contained formal system with his incompleteness theorems, implying, as he noted, that machines never will be able to think, and computer algorithms never will replace intuition. To Godel this implies that we cannot give a credible account of reality without God. But Godel's God is not the well-behaved deity of the old natural theology, or the happy harmonizer of the intelligent-design subculture. Godel's God hides his countenance and can be glimpsed only in paradox and intuition. God is not an abstraction but "can act as a person," as Godel once wrote, confronting those who seek him with paradox, uplifting man through glorious insights while guarding his infinitude from human grasp. Godel's investigations in number theory and general relativity suggest a similar theological result: that God cannot be reduced to a mere principle of the natural world. Godel may have seen himself as a successor to Leibniz, whose critique of Spinoza's atheism set a precedent for much of Godel's work. When we try to ascertain the theological intent underlying Godel's mathematical investigations, though, several difficulties arise. The first is Godel's reticence. "Although he did not go to church," his wife Adele told the logician Hao Wang shortly after Godel's death in 1978, he "was religious and read the Bible in bed every Sunday morning." But fear of ridicule and professional isolation made him reluctant to talk about his faith. "Ninety percent of contemporary philosophers see their principal task to be that of beating religion out of men's heads," he wrote to his mother in 1961.