a sermon delivered on January 29, 2012 at Sayville Congregational United Church of Christ
We begin at the end, because the story of Kurt Gödel does not end well, and hopefully this sermon will. Gödel was one of the three great minds of the early 20th century who closed the door on the great project of the Enlightenment. More on that later. Through the middle of the last century, he could be seen most days strolling home from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, with his dear friend, Albert Einstein, one of the other two great reality-changing thinkers of the time… Gödel was a difficult man verging on madness, and in the end it was madness that killed him, for he came to believe someone was trying to poison him, and when his elderly wife was hospitalized, he starved himself to death, not trusting anyone else with his food. It was a tragic end, to be sure, for a brilliant career. More than a decade earlier there was a more endearing reference to Gödel’s sanity when Einstein remarked to a friend that Gödel really had finally gone mad. When asked why, Einstein replied that the man had voted for Eisenhower.
If the story ends tragically, it starts rather well, and sets us on a path that will move from advanced mathematics and quantum physics to semiotics and post-modernism, and end where we are, poised on the threshold of becoming.
There have been moments in history where, through luck or design, massive creativity has occurred in a short-period in a single locale. We all know the hotbed of beauty that was Renaissance Florence, the amazing artistic and literary circle that gathered around Gertrude Stein, her partner Alice, and her brother Leo in Paris. But we have largely forgotten that Vienna was a center of intellectual activity before the Second World War. One group at the heart of that activity was the Vienna Circle, sometimes known also as the Logical Positivists. They were the ultimate expression of the great project of modernity and modern science. To them, the only things that were important were things that could be measured. They sought a world in which, as we smashed the world into smaller and smaller component pieces, everything became clear and logical, revealed in scientific mathematical precision. Now, as we discussed last week, the world turns out not to work that way at all, but this was still the goal at the time. This rabid pursuit of perfect logic would extend into other disciplines, including the so-called purest science, mathematics. So it was that the young mathematician Gödel stumbled into the Vienna Circle. Like his colleagues, Gödel appeared to be caught up in positivism, albeit mathematically. His generation was seeking a pure mathematics, one that was consistent and based on a tiny number of self-evident axioms from which all math would follow.
The goal was a simple and clear mathematics that contained no paradoxes or inconsistencies. Every great mathematician was on this quest, until 1930, when Gödel published his Incompleteness Theorems, proving that such a system was impossible. I will not even pretend to understand the math or logic involved, but in a nutshell, Gödel proved that you cannot prove the system of mathematics from within mathematics. In fact, there were two theorems. The first is: “Any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. In particular, for any consistent, effectively generated formal theory that proves certain basic arithmetic truths, there is an arithmetical statement that is true, but not provable in the theory.†The second is: “For any formal effectively generated theory T including basic arithmetical truths and also certain truths about formal provability, if T includes a statement of its own consistency then T is inconsistent.â€
I’m glad we cleared that up. But seriously, this was earth-shattering. It meant that the Enlightenment project, to turn everything into an understandable system through reason and logic, was highly suspect if not impossible. In the discipline of quantum mechanics or physics, two great minds had similarly pulled the rug out from under the project. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity had not only opened entirely new fields of study, they had also sabotaged any notion of a pure objective truth. Though none of the three men intended their discoveries to spill over into other human endeavors, their impact was profound. For example, one of the simple logical truths of relativity is that what is true is relative to your position, an oversimplification to be sure, but essentially accurate. Today it is commonly understood that we individual humans might experience different truths, and that in some cases they are equally true. This concept would have been completely foreign to a 19th century thinker.
Einstein, Heisenberg and Gödel were not alone in killing off the great project of the Enlightenment. In fact, the project’s corpse could be found in the fetid trenches of the First World War, for it was Enlightenment-style science that produced the weapons of mass killing, it was Enlightenment-style philosophy that fueled nationalism.
This is not to say that the brilliant trio destroyed science, we know that is not the case. But they dethroned humankind as the ultimate measure of all truths. Human reason had attained god-like status, was worshiped. With the introduction of relativity, uncertainty and incompleteness into what were supposed to be higher sciences, mystery came back into play.
Paralleling these game-changing developments in the sciences were a series of new philosophical systems, especially in the area of semiotics, what I’ll take the liberty to call the scientific philosophy of language. Now, I’d advise you to stop looking at me for a moment and look around the room, for I’m about to say a name that will make most humanities majors break out in a cold sweat. For one of the best examples of post-Enlightenment thinking in philosophy comes from the French thinker Jacques Derrida, with theories that include his playfully manipulated French term “différance.†You’ve had quite enough theories before lunch, but I can give you a simple example to demonstrate this new approach to language. If I say the word “dog,†an image comes to your mind. Maybe it’s one dog, maybe its a long line of dogs. Given a few extra seconds, this word will unravel, many kinds of dogs might pass through your mind, many experiences with dogs. Some of you might be terrified of dogs, others grieving a lost pet. Other words get swept up into your meaning of dog, happy, or maybe muddy, or beach. These words carry along their own associations. And if I didn’t call you back, you could drift off for quite awhile thinking about dogs and beaches and your trip to Aruba next month and when will you get to the store to buy that new suitcase you need, and… You see, there is play in the term “dog,†it is not a fixed empirical thing, and while our categories for “dog†may overlap, they are not all the same.
We have wrestled with two of human-kinds three great modes of thinking.
We’ve not touched on the first yet, for before modernity, that is, before the Enlightenment, humans dealt with mystery by making up stories, inventing explanations, engaging in mythopoesis, the creation of poetic myths. Enlightenment modernity required that everything be systematized and measured, even our theology! Both of these modes of thinking are still with us, and both are still valid. The science of Enlightenment modernity invented the medication that allows me to stand up here before you despite my disability. The stories of pre-modernity speak to me of the power of God and invite me to be part of the story. But we are also a post-modern faith, no longer convinced that there is ever going to be one single correct proof. After Hiroshima and Srebrenica, few are willing to view human reason and logic as the final arbiter of much of anything, and we have begun to understand that maybe humankind is not the final measure of all things, that maybe, just maybe, we aren’t even the sole reason for this creation, this amazing swirling mysterious dance of existence.
With the pre-modern, we are engaging our stories. With modernity, we continue to study, to bring reason and science to the table in our interpretation of our essential humanness. With the post-modern, we refuse to insist on a single understanding, refuse to insist that some magic combination of words is the key to salvation, refuse any creedal test for membership.
Those who claim that science is at odds with faith haven’t been paying attention, have not been paying attention as one respected scientist after another names that divine mystery at the heart of creation, have not been paying attention to science.
Like the finches in Darwin’s notebooks, we are evolving, collectively and individually. Like the complex adaptive systems studied at the Santa Fe Institute, we are robust, unpredictable, no telling what mysterious and amazing things might emerge. Like Gödel, Einstein and Heisenberg, we recognize the unknowable, though we name it as divine mystery… we name it God. Amen.