The atheist’s dilemma

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 02:01:00 +0000

Humanity is an ape with its head full of stars, and the precarious intersection it occupies between the corporeal and the transcendent is one of literature's great subjects. Sometimes, an author approaches this incongruity as a tragedy; even the most exalted among us are creatures of the flesh and doomed to die. But satire works, too, as Rebecca Goldstein's new novel, "36 Arguments for the Existence of God," effervescently demonstrates.

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Wed, 23 Mar 2005 08:00:00 +0000

By now, most readers have learned that when a creative writer becomes enamored of quantum physics, the results are usually bad news for literature. This kind of intellectual infatuation often leads to gassy, shapeless explorations of the uncertainty and unknowability of pretty much everything. Mystery, in one form or another, is what art is about, but when an artist suddenly believes that mystery has been validated by science -- that hardheaded arbiter and high priest of the modern world -- he or she is likely to go nuts with the verbal fog machine. (And anyone who's read Jeanette Winterson's "Gut Symmetries" knows just how dire the consequences of that can be.)

It turns out that these intellectual romances can be disastrous for science, too, as Rebecca Goldstein shows in her masterful new book, "Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gvdel." The book is part of the Great Discoveries series, in which each volume is dedicated to a single important scientific breakthrough. The designated breakthrough in this volume is the revolutionary demonstration, by the Viennese logician Kurt Gvdel, that in any formal system complex enough to handle numbers, there inevitably exists at least one formula that is both true and unprovable, and that, by extension, no such formal system can prove itself to be consistent or complete.

Salon.com > Rebecca Goldstein

The atheist’s dilemma

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