In Reply to: Re: baloney! posted by Xpentium on November 04, 2006 at 12:35:21:
I believe in God, but math cannot demonstrate that God exists.
Many people understand the principal of infinity, and although some see infinity as an expression of God, others just see it as a condition in mathematics.
Discovering is another word for finding something that was always there. You don't really make anything appear just because your awareness of it changes.
There is always the problem that the act of observing something changes what is being observed, so that whatever you observe is not what it would actually be if you hadn't come along to disturb it by observing it.
Everybody's probably asked if there is a God, then who made God, and who made the thing that made God ad infinitum. Accepting that there is no limit to the number of super systems engulfing a system is not so difficult to understand. Still that has nothing to do with proving the existence of God, unless you believe infinity is proof of God, in which case you bring the assumption that infinity is God, and not just a condition.
I am somewhat familiar with the incompleteness theorem, but not the second incompleteness theorem. But if the second one is used to prop up the first, then it does sound like another badly written Dan Brown plot, like in Digital Fortress:
The story is based on the idea there is a foolproof encryption algorithm, and its description is itself encrypted, and its encryption employs THAT algorithm, and you will never know the algorithm's sectrets unless you have the key.
Since we are talking Nerd to Nerd :-) you know that in effect means: when you enter the key, the encrypted file will open up, and THAT means that there is a program there that executes and takes the key and makes the decryption, and the program code can't be encrypted or it won't execute. In other words we can look at the program code and get the algorithm from there, and you don't have to decrypt the file to get the algorithm.