I recently read in the New York Time Sunday magazine about Antony Flew, a British atheist who allegedly recanted. The article was more about how Christian conservatives befriended an 81 year old Flew and ghost wrote a book where he says that Deism might be true, after all. By Deism, Flew means that the universe was created by some Intelligent Designer, along the lines of those set out by Aristotle many years ago. The article got me thinking about atheism and how hard the current round of atheists (Dennett, et. al.) try to prove that God does not exist. I believe they are misguided in their attacks on Deism (although I agree with them on the anti-organized religion stance and will deal with that in a later writing) but couldn’t put my finger on it until after reading the NY Times article.
I have concluded that the question, “Was the universe created by some Intelligent Being?” is an un-decidable question, in the framework of the work of Kurt Gödel. Here’s a quick refresher on un-decidability. In the early 20th century there was a push by mathematicians to put formal mathematics on a firm theoretical footing, logically deduced from a few “obvious” Assumptions. Specifically, they wanted to show that mathematics was both consistent (theories could be proven true or false, but not both) and complete (all theories were included in the formal proof process). It seemed pretty obvious to the mathematicians of the day that this was the case so imagine their surprise when Kurt Gödel showed that in any system of mathematics, questions could be posed that could not be proven. The statement or its negation could be assumed true (hence added to the basic assumptions of the system) and either was consistent with the current set of assumptions. So, in a sense, if mathematics was consistent, it was not complete.
In the case of atheism vs deism, I conclude that you can assume either one or the other and the subsequent system will be totally consistent with the way the universe operates. This helps me understand why there has been so long a fight, with neither side striking the deciding blow. They are both right! Neither atheists not deists can say the other side is wrong, because based on the “laws of the universe” you just can’t decide. Now I’m not yet ready to provide a fully documented proof of this, but my intuition is pretty strong that this is the case.
Just to be clear, this is not an argument that atheism and a God of the Judeo/Christian bent that intercedes regularly in the affairs of man are equivalent. The Deism we speak of hear is the idea that an Intelligent Being set up the laws of the universe and the universe unfolds (it actually evolves, but that term is loaded and ill be dealt with in a future post) on its own, without intervention.
