In Search of God’s Perfect Proofs | Hacker News Reader

In Search of God’s Perfect Proofs

quantamagazine.org

37 pointslelf14 comments

It's a shame that there is such a lack of knowledge on religion and concepts of god/creator in the modern, Western world, and the widespread assumption that a simple naive concept of the divine is the only one which can be true/false. I feel like many mathematicians (including Erdos) would find Platonism and Neoplatonism relevant and interesting, especially considering that Platonism is fairly popular with regards to mathematical objects (famously supported by Gödel.)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-mathematics/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoplatonism

https://iep.utm.edu/pla-thei/

A religious story for the modern, Western, world:

In the afterlife, the books one will have (and the only books one will have access to) are those which, during one's life, one has lent out but were never returned.

Or if they had been better read in Aquinas, they might recognize their criteria for what makes something beautiful mirrors Aquinas's criteria of clarity, proportion and integrity, and how these criteria in various ways point not only to God's existence, but what He must be like.

I don't think any theory that attempts to divide the world into fundamentally different realms is viable. Such realms can not be isolated, they must be able to interact in some way or otherwise one could never know about their existence. And once one concedes that they must be able to interact, the distinction between the realms becomes essentially not much more than a classification, just as we divide life into animals and plants and particles into bosons and fermions.

And it really does not matter about what kind of realm one thinks - souls, ghosts, gods, mathematical objects. If those objects can not influence our physical world directly or indirectly, then you can not know about their existence in any meaningful way. And the interaction must usually also go both ways to get a sensible thing, for example your soul must be able to affect your body but also what your body experiences must affect your soul.

I think the relationship of programmer to program is a good analogy.

I'm at the same time a very spiritual person and very rational. That's possible because I wasn't indoctrinated into any religion from an early age, but started looking by myself what's this life's all about. I think that if we understand God as the source of every natural mechanism from which everything comes from and functions, once we look deeply enough even in a grain of sand we will find it. I think the Creator/God can't be qualified. Once you qualify God as He, or She, or It, or Benevolent, or Malevolent, it's not God anymore. As understanding God is impossible for a human mind, people create their own versions. But this God essence is ingrained in everything that exists, including us. The mechanisms by which that all happens can't be understood fully by us in this stage, but we can experience this Force if we look in the right place and with the right emotion. That appears to be the key, emotion, not rationality.

Yeah, I basically consider the universe itself to be "God". I don't think of it as something that looks like a man, or something that even necessarily cares about humans any more than it cares about other life. It just is. It's the grand summation of all things, and the laws of nature. It is what it is, and science is the study of getting to know it better.

Of all systems of describing reality out there, I really like Advaita Vedanta. Everything is a manifestation of God or Brahman. As such, the dual aspect of reality and vision of separated things is an illusion. The only truth is that everything is One. As such everything is connected. Individuality is merely an illusion created by our minds so that we can live as individuals. Our mind naturally blocks this connection. Mediums, psychics, healers etc, are people that realized this connection to some extent.

You would probably like Spinoza, pantheism, and panentheism. Spinoza's concept of God is really intellectually beautiful.

"I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."

- Albert Einstein

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pantheism/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panentheism/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinozism

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/spinozas-...

I studied with Günter Ziegler at FU Berlin and he’s been by far the best lecturer I’ve ever had. Had a great taste in clarity and beauty in presenting rigorous proofs.

Just looking at his handwriting in the photos brings back good memories.

I went to a talk of him once (I think at Heidelberg University) and can confirm: He is an outstandingly good speaker.

The book:

https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783662495926#otherversion=...

It was available for free until July 31st. Bad timing for this post

I knew their hair will be white :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com