Saturday after Ash Wednesday - Lent is Not Rocket Science

From Bishop Knisely's new book published by Forward Movement. You can read the first week's meditations here, and download the ebook for Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, or iTunes at a discounted $1.99 price to follow along as we discuss this book the rest of Lent.

Saturday after Ash Wednesday

The Limits of Logic

You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free. — John 8:32

One of the great mistakes people make is to believe that things that are true can be shown to be true by the use of deductive reasoning and logic. I think the roots of this belief come from the way we are educated as children, when we learn facts in a systematic way and arrange truths in a logical order. You can see this most clearly in the way we learn mathematics, particularly as students move from elementary school classes in arithmetic into junior high and high school courses in algebra and geometry. Teachers start with the basic axioms, things that we accept as true without needing proofs. 

We use those axioms to prove more complicated ideas, and then use those proofs to support more and more sophisticated conjectures. The student is left with the idea that mathematics is a beautiful, organized ladder that starts with simple things and climbs up by use of logic and deduction to ever more complicated ideas. 

The same idea underlays much of the physical sciences, given that they are, to the greatest extent possible, driven by theories that are logically derived and experimentally verified. Certainly the great triumphs of Kepler, Galileo, and Newton in mechanics and celestial movements start with the very simplest laws possible and then extend them to explain and accurately predict the intricate movements of the world. 

A rather famous mathematician named Kurt Gödel threw a huge monkey wrench into the whole logical enterprise when he rigorously proved that there were things that were true that could not be proven true using logical deduction. (It’s a bit more sophisticated than that, but basically that’s his idea.) Gödel’s incompleteness theorem means that logic won’t get us to all truth. In fact it says that we can’t even hope that it will get us to most truth. Logic is a powerful, but limited tool. At least when we look at logic logically. 

Many people of faith worry about not being able to logically prove or experimentally verify their beliefs. And there are certainly voices in the world around us for whom this inability is seen as a fatal flaw in the religious enterprise. But if we hold Gödel’s idea before us, we can understand that this lack of logic isn’t a fatal flaw; it just indicates that religious truth has to be handled with a different set of tools. The big question for us is to discover what those tools might be. That’s something for you to ponder a bit. 

While you’re at that, you might reflect on the spiritual significance of limitations. Logic is limited in its utility. God limits God’s self in the act of Incarnation. You and I are taking on the spiritual discipline of limitations in the season of Lent. Sometimes the decision to limit our choices makes space for creativity to flourish and allows new ideas to emerge.

How do we know if a religious idea is true? 

Is it because it’s logically proven from the Bible? 

Is it because the church has found it useful over time? 

Is it because it makes you a better, more loving person?

How do we know our faith is true?
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"Lent is Not rocket Science" was published by Forward Movement, a ministry of the Episcopal Church which publishes accessible low cost resources on discipleship written by the laity, clergy, and bishops of the church largely on a pro bono basis.