It's Time To Add The Human Element To 'The Great Unknown'

[rug]

John Farrell
MAY 14, 2017 @ 10:23 AM

Towards the end of his book The Great Unknown, mathematician Marcus du Sautoy finds himself reconsidering the question of God's existence.

"I wonder, though, whether, as I come to the end of my exploration, I have changed my mind about declaring myself an atheist," he writes. "With my definition of a God as that which we cannot know, to declare myself an atheist would mean that I believe there is nothing we cannot know."

Du Sautoy no longer believes that. "In some sense I think I have proved that this God does exist. The challenge now is to explore what quality this God has."

This is a startling admission from the man who replaced Richard Dawkins as the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnfarrell/2017/05/14/its-time-to-add-the-human-element-to-the-great-unknown/#3dc8c9906364

[DetlefK]

1. Didn't Goedel prove that it is impossible to know everything in mathematics?

It was something about structures that are unconnected to other structures and therefore cannot be gradualy discovered, or something like that.

EDIT: His anme is Goedel, not Gdel.

[rug]

2. I don't know.

Now I'll have to look it up.

[Jim__]

3. Is that Gdel (with an umlauted o that gets stripped out)? I've seen his name spelled as Goedel.

- as in Kurt Gödel -

His incompleteness theorems famously proved that formal axiomatic systems have limits to what they can prove.

[MineralMan]

6. It's only stripped out in post titles.

You can use such characters in the body text. It's all something to do with security risks for the site, somehow, according to the admins.

[AtheistCrusader]

4. Perhaps he is unaware of the Agnostic qualifier.

One can be an Atheist (without faith) and Agnostic (without knowledge, or without the ability to know).

At the end of the day that concept of god, that we are asked to believe in, was proffered by other humans in book or story form. Believe or not based on the evidence.

One can be an Atheist, dismissing all current claims, and Agnostic; not trusting the knowledge/truth claims of the other humans that assert 'god(s)'.

That leaves open the door to change later on, if actual evidence/knowledge becomes known.



I wonder if this is a mathematician thing. Pascal was similarly off the rails when dabbling in Philosophy.

[edhopper]

5. His redefinition of God

is peculiar. (can't read the article)

Not a being or entity, not anything with knowledge or intelligence, just the unknown, that we will never know.

Doesn't sound like any God worshiped here on Earth.

Yes that is one aspect, but hardly the full description.

[rug]

7. Ineffable might be a useful word here.

[edhopper]

8. still

that aspect alone seems to narrow to see as a God, as most define the term.