Saturday, November 22, 2008

Faith and Uncertainty

Faith is necessarily inconsistent. In fact, Godel proved that any system which could be used to determine the truth of any marginally complex statement must itself be inconsistent or incomplete. If it could prove itself true then it must necessarily be contradictory, able to prove any statement, and thus be completely worthless for establishing the truth of any claim. Since you can have faith that your faith is justified, one must properly understand that faith proves nothing. In fact, it is necessarily powerless to establish the truth of any proposition.

I know it seems a bit like hitting a flea with a bulldozer to show faith is pointless by way of Godel, but it's still a fun point to make.

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