Kurt Gödel’s belief in the afterlife


Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) was a powerful logician whose contributions to logic, mathematics, and philosophy were immense. He was deeply interested in those aspects of philosophy that touched on religion and one of those was his ontological proof for God’s existence.

The argument is in a line of development that goes back to Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109). St. Anselm’s ontological argument, in its most succinct form, is as follows: “God, by definition, is that for which no greater can be conceived. God exists in the understanding. If God exists in the understanding, we could imagine Him to be greater by existing in reality. Therefore, God must exist.” A more elaborate version was given by Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716); this is the version that Gödel studied and attempted to clarify with his ontological argument.

Gödel is not known to have told anyone about his work on the proof until 1970, when he thought he was dying. In February, he allowed Dana Scott to copy out a version of the proof, which circulated privately. In August 1970, Gödel told Oskar Morgenstern that he was “satisfied” with the proof, but Morgenstern recorded in his diary entry for 29 August 1970, that Gödel would not publish because he was afraid that others might think “that he actually believes in God, whereas he is only engaged in a logical investigation (that is, in showing that such a proof with classical assumptions (completeness, etc.) correspondingly axiomatized, is possible).”[2] Gödel died January 14, 1978. Another version, slightly different from Scott’s, was found in his papers. It was finally published, together with Scott’s version, in 1987.

(For more see Oppy, Graham. 2017. “Ontological Arguments.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (Summer 2017 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta.)

I find such ontological proofs, which seem to me to consist purely of semantic sophistry, unpersuasive. Apart from anything else, I have summarized in my book The Great Paradox of Science the arguments that proving the existence of any (electron, neutrino, God) purely by logic is not possible. Apologists argue that God is not like any other physical entity and thus those arguments do not apply, which strikes me as special pleading, essentially saying that they have created a unique category for God to which normal arguments do not apply. Furthermore, the possible existence of God has been hotly debated for millennia and if an existence proof had been conclusively established, then surely that would be huge news, even more so than the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, and everyone would be believers. The fact that this is not the case would seem to imply that these proofs are not really ‘proofs’ (which imply certainty, at least if the axioms and logic used are valid) but like the word entity, are used to mean something else that is not clearly specified.

Gödel did not come right out and say that he believed in God’s existence but asserted that he was merely engaged in a logical investigation. He did not publish this work, fearing that others might think that he actually believed in God’s existence. But his notes on the topic circulated among a few people privately and were published only after his death in 1978.

But I digress. The main purpose of this post is to highlight that he did believe in the afterlife. He did not publish his thoughts on this either but revealed them in four long letters that he wrote to his mother Marianne in 1961. His mother was not a churchgoer and had raised Gödel and his brother as freethinkers. But two days after his death, his wife told an interlocutor that “although he did not go to church, was religious and read the Bible in bed every Sunday morning.” Unfortunately, Gödel’s mother’s replies to him have not survived but, from what Gödel says in his letters, suggest that she was not entirely convinced.

His rationale for belief in an afterlife is this:

If the world is rationally organised and has meaning, then it must be the case. For what sort of a meaning would it have to bring about a being (the human being) with such a wide field of possibilities for personal development and relationships to others, only then to let him achieve not even 1/1,000th of it?

He deepens the rhetorical question at the end with the metaphor of someone who lays the foundation for a house only to walk away from the project and let it waste away. Gödel thinks such waste is impossible since the world, he insists, gives us good reason to consider it to be shot through with order and meaning. Hence, a human being who can achieve only partial fulfilment in a lifetime must seek rational validation for this deficiency in a future world, one in which our potential manifests.

Before moving on, it is good to pause and capture Gödel’s argument in a nutshell. Assuming that the world is rationally organised, human life – as embedded in the world – ought to possess the same rational structure. We have grounds for assuming that the world is rationally organised. Yet human life is irrationally structured. It is constituted by a great potential but it never fully expresses this potential in a lifetime. Hence, each of us must realise our full potential in a future world. Reason demands it.

He believed that the afterlife did not occur in this world (i.e., we are not reincarnated) but in a distinct future world.

We do not know if he persuaded his skeptical mother since we do not have her replies to him but his letters suggest that she was, to say the least, puzzled by his views.

Gödel’s was not himself Jewish but he associated closely with the Jewish intellectuals of pre-war Vienna and this was sufficient for him to be thought of as either Jewish or a friend of Jews and thus prevented him from getting academic employment and he left Vienna for Princeton in 1939 where he worked at the Institute for Advanced Studies there. He had a close friendship with Albert Einstein who deeply respected him,and who reportedly said that after he (Einstein) stopped doing any real research, he would still go to the IAS so that he coulld have the pleasure of walking home with Gödel.

Gödel’s last years were tragic.

Later in his life, Gödel suffered periods of mental instability and illness. Following the assassination of his close friend Moritz Schlick, Gödel developed an obsessive fear of being poisoned, and would eat only food prepared by his wife Adele. Adele was hospitalized beginning in late 1977, and in her absence Gödel refused to eat; he weighed 29 kilograms (65 lb) when he died of “malnutrition and inanition caused by personality disturbance” in Princeton Hospital on January 14, 1978.

Gödel was a strange and fascinating man. It would have been delightful to listen in on the conversations between him and Einstein on their walks. Free from the tight constraints of academic publishing, their powerful minds could wander freely, examining the big questions that all of us struggle with.

Comments

  1. birgerjohansson says

    Even very clever people are vulnerable to wishful thinking. Being familiar with the fear of death, I can certainly understand his motivation.

  2. says

    Here’s another take on the Ontological Argument:

    God can’t exist because of Eric The God-Eating Magic Penguin.

    Since Eric is God-Eating by definition, he has no choice but to eat God. So, if God exists, He automatically ceases to exist as a result of being eaten. Unless you can prove that Eric doesn’t exist, God doesn’t exist. Even if you can prove that Eric doesn’t exist, that same proof will also be applicable to God. There are only two possibilities: either you can prove that Eric doesn’t exist or you can’t. In both cases it logically follows that God doesn’t exist.

    And from a follow-on comment:

    Imagine the greatest possible god-eating penguin. A penguin that existed and had eaten a god would be greater than a non-existent one that had eaten no gods, therefore a god-eating penguin that has eaten a god must exist.

    That said, a god-eating penguin who has eaten entire pantheons of gods would be even greater, therefore all gods have existed and Eric has eaten them all.

  3. billseymour says

    This computer programmer sees most arguments for the existance of a god as infinite recursions.  A recursion doesn’t halt because, gee, it’s just gotta (as, IIRC, Aquinas asserted).  You need to identify a way to tell when you’ve actually found the “first mover” (or whatever).

    Raging Bee @2:  LOL.  I hadn’t heard that one before.

  4. Bruce says

    Gödel essentially proved that if you assume a god is true, then these arguments can persuade you that he exists.

  5. Pierce R. Butler says

    God, by definition, is that for which no greater can be conceived.

    That depends entirely on the imagination of the conceiver.

    … purely … semantic sophistry… indeed.

    If the world is rationally organised and has meaning… Postulates unproven & apparently undefined.

    For what sort of a meaning would it have to bring about a being (the human being) with such a wide field of possibilities for personal development and relationships to others, only then to let him achieve not even 1/1,000th of it?

    An excellent illustration of why we call the “teleological fallacy” that.

  6. dangerousbeans says

    If the world is rationally organised and has meaning, then it must be the case. For what sort of a meaning would it have to bring about a being (the human being) with such a wide field of possibilities for personal development and relationships to others, only then to let him achieve not even 1/1,000th of it?

    I actually agree with this logic, but i would add that we see no evidence of an afterlife nor have a plausible mechanism for it. So therefore i think we need to reject the premise of the world being rationally organised and having meaning.

    On the ontological argument I personally prefer to imagine the greatest possible girlfriend, because that gives me a chance to be horny in serious theological arguments and that sort really hate horny trans women 😛

  7. Matt G says

    If there is an afterlife, who is there? Humans only, or other animals? And if no other animals, when, in the course of evolution, did members of the human lineage start populating the afterlife? This is the same problem faced by theistic evolutionists.

    Defining things into existence is pretty weak tea.

  8. file thirteen says

    Bill @#5:

    This computer programmer thinks our universe is a simulation. Part of the simulation of a great multi-dimensional alien slime mould that happens to bud universes off now and then.

  9. Holms says

    Apologists argue that God is not like any other physical entity and thus those arguments do not apply, which strikes me as special pleading, essentially saying that they have created a unique category for God to which normal arguments do not apply.

    Their actions demonstrate that they don’t believe this argument. If logic does not apply to god, why defend his existence with argument at all?

    If the world is rationally organised and has meaning, then it must be the case. For what sort of a meaning would it have to bring about a being (the human being) with such a wide field of possibilities for personal development and relationships to others, only then to let him achieve not even 1/1,000th of it?

    A simpler explanation: the world is not fair.

  10. says

    If you define God as “That than which no greater can be conceived”, then at best you can prove that God exists as an abstract concept. But it absolutely does not follow that a being that existed in reality would necessarily be greater than a being that did not exist in reality, because of a concept I’m going to have to call “existential incompatibility” for want of anything better.

    “A weapon that can pierce any armour” and “A suit of armour that can withstand any weapon” are existentially incompatible: any universe in which one exists precludes the other from existing. Similarly, “an irresistible force” and “an immovable object” cannot exist in the same universe: the existence of an irresistible force would necessarily imply that all objects are movable, while the existence of an immovable object would necessarily imply that all forces are resistible. The two are existentially incompatible. At most one of them can exist in reality, because each would define the other out of existence.

    And a being whose existence in reality would somehow have a negative impact on others (and it’s not hard to imagine ways in which this might happen, in a world full of flawed humans) would be less great if they existed in reality than if than if they existed only as an abstract concept.

  11. jenorafeuer says

    birgerjohansson@#1:
    In fact, very clever people can often be even more vulnerable to wishful thinking, because they’re better at being able to find ways to justify it.

    bluerizagirl@#12:
    One superhero story series I used to read actually codified some of the ‘existentially incompatible’ aspect, pointing out that there could never be more than one omnipotent being in the universe, and that the gods in his universe could ‘do whatever they wanted as long as other gods didn’t object too strongly, which they very often did’.

  12. Pierce R. Butler says

    bluerizlagirl @ # 12: … a being … would be less great if they existed in reality than if than if they existed only as an abstract concept.

    An analysis which extends beyond “beings”. F’rinstance, a conceptual circle remains circular at all scales; a physical one made of atoms gets very lumpy when considered closely.

  13. Prax says

    God, by definition, is that for which no greater can be conceived.

    That’s enough to kill the argument for me. Why should we believe that there is a conceivable entity that is “greater” than any other conceivable entity? That certainly isn’t the case for most quantitative concepts; there is no greatest conceivable natural number, or real number, or surreal number, or complex number, or cardinal number. For pretty much any ordering relation of “greatness,” you can define a new entity which is greater than whatever set of entities you were conceiving of previously. And then you can do it again, ad infinitum. Some mathematicians do this for a living.

    There is no largest conceivable island, no fattest conceivable rabbit, no most conceivably delicious pizza. So I don’t believe that a “greatest possible concept” is even logically possible itself.

  14. says

    [I wonder if it’s worth doing an argument clinic episode on that one. I’m not saying it’s always a good strategy but if someone starts trying to crush your patience and attention-span with some kind of “proof” simply assert the negation of their first premise and don’t let them go past it. Make them fight tooth and nail trying to defend it and if they make any progress flip over to linguistic nihilism “You haven’t convinced me that you understand what ‘meaning’ means in this context.”]*

    (* with a smidgeon on pyhhonism thrown in as a warning)

  15. Owlmirror says

    I’m not surprised that Gödel was embarrassed to publish these “proofs”. Surely he could see, in his more lucid moments, that they were just wishful thinking dressed up in formal language.

    I’ve had an idea about a possible afterlife, which I have not seen mentioned elsewhere. It, too, requires loads of wishful thinking — in the form of unproven physics and engineering, and ridiculous computing power, and ludicrous molecular-level manufacturing, and post-scarcity economics. But oddly enough, it doesn’t require the supernatural.

    1) The unproven physics is closed timelike curves (CTCs). CTCs exist as solutions to General Relativity — proven to be possible solutions by Gödel, actually. But — refusing to be drawn into ontological reasoning — existing as solutions to equations does not mean that they can actually exist in reality; there may well be better equations that rule them out.

    2) The unproven engineering, which is even more speculative, is the creation of closed timelike curve wormholes at arbitrary points in time. That is, the creation of wormholes that will allow photons (or perhaps neutrinos, or some other lightweight particle) to pass through from the past to the future, and be read by detectors. The wormhole generator would be put inside a person’s brain and/or body.

    3) The ridiculous computing power would involve the creation of a complete 3-D snapshot of a person -- the brain and body at the molecular-level scale.

    4) The ludicrous molecular-level manufacturing would involve taking this 3-D data snapshot, and turning it into an actual living person.

    5) The post-scarcity economics would be necessary to do this even once, let alone for all of the trillions of people who have ever lived.

    Would the hypothetical society that had all of this hypothetical technology even want to do this for everyone? Or would there be a filter — Kurt Gödel and similar level genius gets to be resurrected, but maybe not everyone.

    Maybe even just Kurt Gödel, alone out of all those trillions of people. Wouldn’t that shock his poor soul.

    I don’t think he would find an afterlife without his friends and family to be very appealing.

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