Religion and Incompletenessq

[Surlethe]

It seems that religion, with no empirical basis, must be relegated to testing for internal consistency. Any theology must therefore be an axiomatic system. So, a couple of questions: is it possible to distill a consistent theology out of the mishmash that most Christians nowadays believe? And if so, is it sophisticated enough to encode the natural numbers -- i.e., is it subject to Goedel's incompleteness theorem?

[Superman]

It seems that religion, with no empirical basis, must be relegated to testing for internal consistency. Any theology must therefore be an axiomatic system. So, a couple of questions: is it possible to distill a consistent theology out of the mishmash that most Christians nowadays believe? And if so, is it sophisticated enough to encode the natural numbers -- i.e., is it subject to Goedel's incompleteness theorem?

How can you apply any type of consistency when it's all subjective bullshit?

[Kuroneko]

So, a couple of questions: is it possible to distill a consistent theology out of the mishmash that most Christians nowadays believe?

In nebulous cases like these, we should apply the giggle test. What it indicate?

And if so, is it sophisticated enough to encode the natural numbers -- i.e., is it subject to Goedel's incompleteness theorem?

I think it's fair to say that arithmetic would be included--the Old Testament does more counting than necessary. So in the the first-order sense of provability, of course. In the higher-order sense, it is still possible for all truths in that theory to be logical consequences of those axioms; e.g., all truths in second-order Peano arithmetic are logical consequences of the axioms (technical statement: all models are isomorphic to each other). Any theory that encodes the notion of finiteness or infiniteness is at least second-order.

Speaking of Gödel, he made a third-order modal formulation of Anselm's ontological argument for God's existence. It is implicitly a conditional, since he made no attempt at proving that his notion of "positive properties" (in some moral sense) is consistent.

[NetKnight]

Conventional Christian theology discribes a deity that is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, and capable of interacting with the physical universe. Even if one restricts evidence of 'bad things' in the universe to only mental anguish on the part of the observer (that is to say, in a psudo-sophlistic system consisting of the mind of the observer and this deity), the internal contridiction between the four atributes becomes clear. Indeed, omniscience is arguably implyed by the other three, as omnibenovelence provides the motive and omnipotence the means to observe any and all events in the universe.
Omnibenovelence implies interaction with the universe, as the deity must have extra-ego interaction to feel/behave benevolently toward. It should be noted, of course, that this deity must be quite mad, as it is must feel infinite guilt for bad things that it cannot prevent. Indeed, this deity must have ceased to exist as an independent ego, as it subliminates its entire identity to the perpetuation of good in the universe. This contridicts the axiomatic statement implicit in Christian theology of any relation to mainstream convention that this God must exist as an independent (that is, clearly defined, or individual) ego.
Interaction with the universe is, indeed, necessary for any "God System". Even neglecting the patent absurdity of constructing a system to discribe a thing that is, by definition, nonexistant, two other suporting reasons are aparent. First, Christian theology of any flavor that I've had the privlige of encountering contains that axiomatic statement that the deity discribed does, indeed, have the attribute of interaction with the universe. Second, and more generally, it seems an obivious absurdity to "discribe" (that is, implicitly compare to the surrounding universe) someting that is in no way in contact with the universe (discribable!).
Accepting this, along with the evidence of the independent ego of the observer (the reader, to the reader, me, to myself), it becomes clear that omnipotance is absurd as well. An omnipotent ego must, after all, subliminate all that it comes into contact with into itself. Unless one is to maintain that the observer is, in fact the 'deity' being discribed, wraped in a sophlistic haze, the existance of the independent ego of the observer contridicts this conclusion. Indeed, not only is this sophlistic cop-out in marked contridiction to Christian theology, but this argument is also of dubious valitity: how, after all, can an omnipotant ego experence any contridiction of its will, even in a sophlistic dream?
Omniscience may me dismised by noting that this deity must inevitably alter the universe in interacting with it to gain information. Only a finite amount of information can be gathered, then, contridicting the prefix omni-.
In short, conventional Christain theology, even when examined in the most cursory way at close to the most basic level, is repleate with postulates that blatently contradict both each other and even the most sophlisticly interprited reality. In this observer's respectful opinion, when one continplates that the construction of these postulates was the work of many of Western Europe's greatest minds for well nigh a milenium, one is compeled yet again to lower one's minimum expectations for human folly and stupidity.

[Kuroneko]

At least some Christians define good and evil in terms of God's judgment and actions (cf. Mr. Wong's signature). Such a position is immune from attack on their logical inconsistency via 'arguments from evil'. Mere self-consistency is not a particularly impressive trait, of course, but then the OP never specified that it had to make sense by any external metric.

[Surlethe]

It seems that religion, with no empirical basis, must be relegated to testing for internal consistency. Any theology must therefore be an axiomatic system. So, a couple of questions: is it possible to distill a consistent theology out of the mishmash that most Christians nowadays believe? And if so, is it sophisticated enough to encode the natural numbers -- i.e., is it subject to Goedel's incompleteness theorem?

How can you apply any type of consistency when it's all subjective bullshit?

The same way you test a mathematical system: try to find contradictions.

In nebulous cases like these, we should apply the giggle test. What it indicate?

Well, the giggle-meter describes a 4.5/5, so ... .

I think it's fair to say that arithmetic would be included--the Old Testament does more counting than necessary. So in the the first-order sense of provability, of course. In the higher-order sense, it is still possible for all truths in that theory to be logical consequences of those axioms; e.g., all truths in second-order Peano arithmetic are logical consequences of the axioms (technical statement: all models are isomorphic to each other). Any theory that encodes the notion of finiteness or infiniteness is at least second-order.

I'm not so sure that the Old Testament -- with its contradictions -- would be able to be a part of an axiomatic theology.

Speaking of Gödel, he made a third-order modal formulation of Anselm's ontological argument for God's existence. It is implicitly a conditional, since he made no attempt at proving that his notion of "positive properties" (in some moral sense) is consistent.

I'd thought his formulation was second-order. There is also some question of his assumption that Godlikeness is positive, and that infinite conjunction of positive properties are positive. Finally, of course, there's the possibility that if Godel's proof holds, he's magically established the necessary existence of modal logic.

[Kanastrous]

If all that business was convincingly demonstrable, I suspect that the faithful would dump it and go looking for a new set of boogah-boogah superstitions to which they could attach their faith.

[drachefly]

NetKnight, I'm not sure God would be subject to Newton's first law. If we're a simulation running on his infinite laptop he can look at our state at any moment without affecting the running of it.

Anyhoo, all the incompleteness theorem says is that certain statements of number theory cannot be derived from any given set of axioms.

If you, somehow, take the bible as your set of axioms, and somehow interpret it such that it is not contradictory (perhaps, by reassigning the characters to be numeric operators, this can be achieved), then there will be certain statements that it leaves up in the air. All right. How is this a problem?