Posted on 07/25/2016 10:51:24 AM PDT by SoFloFreeper
Many books have been written about the success of the West, analyzing why Europe was able to pull ahead of the rest of the world by the end of the Middle Ages. The most common explanations cite the West's superior geography, commerce, and technology. Completely overlooked is the fact that faith in reason, rooted in Christianity's commitment to rational theology, made all these developments possible. Simply put, the conventional wisdom that Western success depended upon overcoming religious barriers to progress is utter nonsense.
In The Victory of Reason, Rodney Stark advances a revolutionary, controversial, and long overdue idea: that Christianity and its related institutions are, in fact, directly responsible for the most significant intellectual, political, scientific, and economic breakthroughs of the past millennium.
In Stark's view, what has propelled the West is not the tension between secular and nonsecular society, nor the pitting of science and the humanities against religious belief. Christian theology, Stark asserts, is the very font of reason: While the world's other great belief systems emphasized mystery, obedience, or introspection, Christianity alone embraced logic and reason as the path toward enlightenment, freedom, and progress. That is what made all the difference.
In explaining the West's dominance, Stark convincingly debunks long-accepted "truths." For instance, by contending that capitalism thrived centuries before there was a Protestant work ethic---or even Protestants---he counters the notion that the Protestant work ethic was responsible for kicking capitalism into overdrive. In the fifth century, Stark notes, Saint Augustine celebrated theological and material progress and the institution of "exuberant invention."
By contrast, long before Augustine, Aristotle had condemned commercial trade as "inconsistent with human virtue"---which helps further underscore that Augustine's times were not the Dark Ages but the incubator for the West's future glories.
This is a sweeping, multifaceted survey that takes readers from the Old World to the New, from the past to the present, overturning along the way not only centuries of prejudiced scholarship but the anti-religious bias of our own time. The Victory of Reason proves that what we most admire about ourworld---scientific progress, democratic rule, free commerce---is largely due to Christianity, through which we are all inheritors of this grand tradition.
Goedel’s theorem shows that Hilbert’s program is impossible and that mathematics itself is built upon faith assumptions, the axioms that we find that we have to use. There are no closed, self-defining systems. “logical systems of arithmetic can never contain a valid proof of their own consistency.”
The real field is complete in the sense of Goedel.
“logical systems of arithmetic can never contain a valid proof of their own consistency.”
But you're not talking about peano arithmetic, are you? So why not simply leave Goedel out of this?
“So why not simply leave Goedel out of this?”
Because Goedel is ultimately about epistemology.
http://theor.jinr.ru/~kuzemsky/JakiGodel.pdf
Well, no. It's ultimately about arithmetic. You should leave Goedel (and Hilbert) out of this. It just sounds ridiculous to drop those names in the context of some argument about religion and faith.
“Well, no. It’s ultimately about arithmetic. You should leave Goedel (and Hilbert) out of this. It just sounds ridiculous to drop those names in the context of some argument about religion and faith.”
Stanley Jaki held doctorates in physics, philosophy and theology. He wrote twenty some books on the philosophy and history of science, often dealing with its relationship to Christianity. Goedel’s theorem was one of his special interests and I think I’ll continue to go with his opinion that Goedel is highly relevant to the discussion.
Go for it. Make yourself out to look stupid if you so desire.
” Go for it. Make yourself out to look stupid if you so desire. “
Boy, that’s a real convincing argument for your position. Does that work with whatever crowd you like to hang with and discuss, oh epistemology and the like? Somehow I get the impression that you don’t even know what that is.
What I do know is what Jaki’s education and field of expertise was- so let’s hear yours. Do you have a doctorate in philosophy? A PhD in physics? Do you have books published on the theory of knowledge and the history of science? There is someone on this thread making himself look stupid, it just doesn’t happen to be me.
Look, why don't you give it a little though on your own? Goedel's theorem is a a statement about arithmetic. Not even that, but a formalization of arithmetic. It hasn't even been convincingly demonstrated that this formal arithmetic is equivalent to the "arithmetic" that mathematicians study anyway.
If you want to say that lots of things can't be proved in math or are very hard to prove, or require some techniques for which formal methods are useless, just say so. Although even that has pretty much zero relevance to whatever point you are making regarding faith and reason.
But leave Goedel's theorem out of this, it continues to be run through the mud in every sort of debate for which it is utterly irrelevant about a thousand times a day on the internet. Do we need more?
“Look, why don’t you give it a little though on your own? Goedel’s theorem is a a statement about arithmetic. “
There is no point in pursuing the issue with you because you obviously have no knowledge of epistemology and the philosophical implications of Goedel’s theorem, which is why you think Goedel is only about arithmetic.
Jaki had a PhD in philosophy as well as physics which is why he could write extensively on aspects of Goedel that you don’t even know exist. Or apparently believe are threatening since you repeatedly insist that it not even be discussed. Nothing is as convincing as demanding that a subject be stifled because you don’t approve of it. Good luck with that campaign.
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