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Among the remarkable constellations of geniuses that populated the early and mid-twentieth-century landscape, G\u00f6del was a close friend to individuals like Einstein and Von Neumann. G\u00f6del developed theorems that put hard limits on the \u201ctruths\u201d we can access using formal logical systems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I recently read this fascinating Aeon article \u2014 \u201cWe\u2019ll meet again\u201d<\/a> by Alexander Englert \u2014 which details some of G\u00f6del\u2019s private thoughts about the afterlife, revealed in four letters he wrote to his mother in 1961.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Englert\u2019s article, I learned for the first time about Kurt G\u00f6del\u2019s fourteen-point outline of his deepest philosophical thoughts. As a scientist and as a person of faith, this really intrigued me, since it resonated strongly with many of the ideas that I\u2019ve found in my studies of the Baha\u2019i Faith. Here are G\u00f6del\u2019s fourteen points:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Englert\u2019s Aeon essay provides some background to a few of these points via G\u00f6del\u2019s letters. For example on the first point, \u201cThe world is rational<\/em>,\u201d G\u00f6del explained in a letter to his mother dated 23 July 1961:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Does one have a reason to assume that the world is rationally organized? I think so. For it is absolutely not chaotic and arbitrary, rather \u2014 as natural science demonstrates \u2014 there reigns in everything the greatest regularity and order. Order is, indeed, a form of rationality.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n In another passage, G\u00f6del went on to explain why the world\u2019s rationality motivates his belief in an afterlife:<\/p>\n\n\n\n If the world is rationally organized and has meaning, then it must be the case. For what sort of a meaning would it have to bring about a being (the human being) with such a wide field of possibilities for personal development and relationships to others, only then to let him achieve not even 1\/1,000th of it?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n This also relates to G\u00f6del\u2019s fifth point: \u201cThe world in which we live is not the only one in which we shall live or have lived.\u201d<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Remarkably, these ideas were first formulated<\/a> by Abdu\u2019l Baha<\/a>, who originally stated them more than half a century earlier in his 1906 book \u201cSome Answered Questions\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2026 nature is subject to a sound organization, to inviolable laws, to a perfect order, and to a consummate design, from which it never departs. To such an extent is this true that were you to gaze with the eye of insight and discernment, you would observe that all things\u2014from the smallest invisible atom to the largest globes in the world of existence, such as the sun or the other great stars and luminous bodies\u2014are most perfectly organized, be it with regard to their order, their composition, their outward form, or their motion, and that all are subject to one universal law from which they never depart.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Abdu\u2019l-Baha reinforced that point in another passage<\/a> from \u201cSome Answered Questions\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2026 if a human life, with its spiritual being, were limited to this earthly span, then what would be the harvest of creation? Indeed, what would be the effects and the outcomes of Divinity Itself? Were such a notion true, then all created things, all contingent realities, and this whole world of being\u2014all would be meaningless. God forbid that one should hold to such a fiction and gross error.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n RELATED: Can We Die Joyously?<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Compare, as well, G\u00f6del\u2019s fourth point \u201cThere are other worlds and rational beings of a different and higher kind,\u201d<\/em> with the views shared<\/a> in the even earlier 19th-century writings of Baha\u2019u\u2019llah<\/a>, the prophet and founder of the Baha\u2019i Faith<\/a>: \u201cKnow thou that every fixed star hath its own planets, and every planet its own creatures, whose number no man can compute<\/strong>\u201d and <\/em>\u201cKnow thou of a truth that the worlds of God are countless in their number, and infinite in their range. None can reckon or comprehend them except God, the All-Knowing, the All-Wise.<\/strong>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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