Heavenly Logic

3.1.1 A Summary of Gödel’s Argument
     Science shows that order pervades the world. This order provides some degree of evidence for the belief that the world has meaning. Granted that the world has meaning, there must be an afterlife. This follows because given that human beings in this world realize only a very small part of their potentialities, these potentialities would be a meaningless waste if there were no afterlife.
     Moreover, science supports the belief that this world of ours had a beginning and will have an end, thereby opening up the possibility of there being another world. On the other hand, we can, through learning attain better lives, and we learn principally through making mistakes. This is how we are. As we grow older, we get better at learning; yet before we can realize a significant portion of our possibilities, death comes. Therefore, since there ought not be such meaningless waste, we must envision the greater part of learning as occurring in the next world.
     Gödel rejects the idea put forth by his mother, that intellect is not the appropriate faculty for studying this issue. (By the way, this idea of his mother’s was widely shared and endorsed for instance, by Wittgenstein.) Gödel compares the status of his own view with that of atomic theory at the time of Democritus, when it was introduced “on purely philosophical grounds.” Gödel suggests that his belief in an afterlife may prevail in the future, just as the atomic theory prevails today. He admits that we are a long way from justifying this view scientifically, but it “is entirely consistent with all known facts.”
     To perceive this consistency, Gödel says, was what Liebnitz attempted to do 250 years ago, and what he also is trying to do in his letters. The underlying worldview is that the world and everything in it has meaning or reasons; this view is analogous to the “principle that everything has a cause, which is at the basis of the whole of science.”
— Hao Wang, A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy, p. 105.

“[By the Platonistic view I mean the view that] mathematics describes a nonsensual reality, which exists independently both of the acts and the dispositions of the human mind and is only perceived and probably perceived very incompletely, by the human mind.”
— Gödel, 1995, Coll. Wks. 3.

Mathematical objects and facts (or at least something in them) exist objectively and independently of our mental acts and decisions.
— Gödel, original ms.

— Kurt Gödel, in A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy, Hao Wang, p. 211.


     At some stage I asked Gödel to give me a systematic exposition of his philosophy, and he replied that he had not developed it far enough to be able to expound it systematically, although he was sufficiently clear about it to apply it in commenting on the philosophical views of others. As I said before, this was undoubtedly why he chose to discuss philosophy by commenting on what I had written — and on the ideas of other relevant philosophers such as Kant, Husserl, and the (logical) positivists.
     In November of 1972 Gödel used the occasion of discussing Husserl’s “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” (in Lauer 1965) to give what appears to be a summary of the pillars of his own philosophical outlook: that is, (A) to recognize that we have only probable knowledge; but to decline skepticism; (B) monadology; (C) to appreciate the universality of observations; (D) to strive for a sudden illumination; and (E) to achieve explicitness by applying the axiomatic method.
     The fundamental ideas seem to be these: By observation we can discover the primitive concepts of metaphysics and the axioms governing these concepts. By the axiomatic method, we can arrive at an exact theory of metaphysics, which for Gödel is best seen as a kind of monadology. In order to pursue this ideal effectively, we must realize that we are capable of only probable knowledge. We should learn to select and concemtrate on what is fundamental and essential. Therefore, in order to secure a governing focus to guide our continuous attention, we should strive for a sudden illumination.
— Hao Wang, A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy, p. 290.