Nick Routledge@nick_routledge

@SophiaCycles 1/ And so it goes that the raging battle between science and religion is ultimately transcended in common acknowledgement of reality as not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine. Irony of ironies: wisdom harmonizes, as one, into increased bewilderment! x.com/covidyoga/status/1569399897060950016

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At the same time, critiques of science as a "secular humanist" conspiracy bent on usurping religion's power to make sense of the world around us, are concomitant with science's own demolition of traditional notions of universal truth and objective reality, a process hastened along by Godel's incompleteness theorem, a cornerstone of modern mathematics that the mathematician Godfrey Harold Hardy defines as the assertion that "there exist meaningful mathematical statements that are neither provable nor disprovable, now or ever...because the very nature of logic renders them incapable of resolution." The philosophical implications of Godel's theorem are "devastating," according to Hardy.

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The mathematician and cyberpunk novelist Rudy Rucker, who delights in such bombshells, asserts, "Godel has shown that the fundamental logical notion of 'truth' has no rational definition." What's [more], Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, a precept of quantum mechanics, leads to the inescapable conclusion that the very act of observation affects the state of the phenomenon observed, an axiom that plays havoc with the notion of objective truth. "The age of absolutes, if it ever really existed, is now most definitely and permanently passe," concludes the mathematician John L. Casti. "Einstein's work buried once and for all the concepts of absolute space and time, while Heisenberg shot down the belief in absolutely precise measurement. Godel, of course, stamped paid to the quaint and curious ideas of absolute proof and truth." Mark Dery