Middle of Nowhere

Life in the Middle of Nowhere

Oneness of God series, Part VI

By John Taylor; 17 February, 2006

At the 7 February Feast Thomas nudged me after a prayer was read about
the omnipresence of God and whispered: "You said before that God is
everywhere but I know a place where He is not." Where might that be?
"Nowhere." My question is, where do kids get these ideas? I know,
nowhere.

The wife, concerned that the kids not lose their Czech language
heritage, has shut me out of the bedtime story biz of late. But the
other night something came up, I think her sister called, and I was
suddenly plunked in the bedside hot seat with nothing better to read
than the latest March 2006 edition of Scientific American. I turned to
an article called "The Limits of Reason" by Gregory Chaitin on page 75
and showed them an impressive illustration of a classical building
being demolished by a wrecking ball with the Greek letter Omega
printed on it. I told the frightening story of how this terrible Omega
number had utterly destroyed the entire edifice of mathematics in one
fell blow. Watch out for the Omega wrecking ball!

Thomas was suitably impressed with this picture but unfortunately he
confused this mathematical omega with the omega 3 eggs that I have
been eating two of each day -- it seems that if you stuff chickens
with flax seed feed, they produce eggs crammed with omega 3 fatty
acids, which reduce cholesterol rather than raising it as ordinary
eggs do. Anyway, I was taken aback and had to say that as far as I
know, omega fatty acids in food have nothing to do with the omega
number. The article's caption explains that omega is "a specific,
well-defined number that cannot be calculated by any computer program
(It) smashes hopes for a complete mathematics in which every true fact
is true for a reason." It seems that Kurt Godel used an early version
of the omega number to destroy David Hilbert's theory of everything.
To my surprise and delight I learned that Godel's incompleteness
refutation is based on two ways of expressing the liar's paradox that
have so preoccupied this Badi List over the past few months. Godel's
paradoxes are:

"This statement is false."
"This statement is unprovable."

I used most of the time taken up by Marie's telephone conversation
explaining laboriously what the liar's paradox is and how it makes the
true statement false and at the same time the false statement true. To
my astonishment Silvie called out confidently from the upper bunk that
she could easily solve that problem. How so? It has defeated every
thinker in history, thought I, what makes you an eleven year old
non-prodigy think that you can solve it?

Her brainstorm was this: you just apply Solomon's Choice to the
problem. You remember, in a child custody dispute Solomon threatened
to cut the baby in half. The prospect of cruel and summary execution
immediately exposed the real mother who was the only party willing to
give up her claim on the child in order to save it. Now I suppose in a
sense what Chaitin and other mathematicians do with the liar's paradox
is just that. Since Godel's incompleteness proof they have given up
their claim on quandaries like the Liar's Paradox and the omega number
as axioms, as unexamined givens. As Chaitin says, there are just
rather more axioms than anyone expected. Or perhaps this is not
Solomon's Choice but Abraham's choice, when He decided He was willing
to sacrifice His long awaited first born son as soon as Yahweh ordered
him to do so. God did not allow him to actually follow through, the
readiness was all. There was a second, though, when the lineage of the
divine covenant was about to be snuffed out and it was renegotiated
with a view to mercy. Consider this, from another document in the
history of science that we have been highlighting:

"Political revolutions aim to change political institutions in ways
that those institutions themselves prohibit. Their success therefore
necessitates the partial relinquishment of one set of institutions in
favour of another, and in the interim, society is not fully governed
by institutions at all." (Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, 1962, Ch. 9)

As Chaitin points out, the fact that basic foundations of logic,
mathematics and science are incomplete and are easily toppled is not
bad but good news. It means we have creative freedom, that autocratic
tyranny is banished; we will always have to tear things down and
rebuild them again. This has political consequences, and they
ultimately are reflections of the underlying spiritual reality.

Abraham's progeny were not snuffed out by that baby sacrifice, they
went on from victory to victory, eventually to Baha'u'llah Himself,
Who of course was descended from that holy genealogy. The great change
in governance in this age is a switchover from arbitrary power to
justice based upon universal recognition of fundamental limitations, a
more autonomous, provisional, tentative, creative, flexible style of
leadership and authority. Right now we are in the crossover time, the
period of chaos when every established convention and institution
contradicts all others. In other words, as Thomas pointed out to me at
the Feast, we are at the place where God cannot be, in the middle of
nowhere.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com