> [continued from previous]
>
> Thinking over it some more, it begins to seem as though each religious system imposes a "ceiling" of sorts to the power and validity of logic. The Buddhist may dismiss as futile attempts to logically understand nirvana; this has also been the position of Christian theologians who reject efforts to mount "logical proofs" for God.

It depends on one's perspective. Looking at it from a standpoint where I believe humans are chained by our utter finiteness, I could also dismiss attempts to understand Reality and God through rigorous proofs created by man. But if I switch hats, and look at it through the eyes of an honest skeptic... One wonders whether theologians reject requests for "proof" because they sense the inherent weakness in the lack of overt, objective, experiential evidence for an immanent God. That is, a God that is an omniscient Being, who despite being a Spirit nonetheless created our material Universe, and who also possesses qualities of being all-Holy, and all-Good. When attempting to quantify a Being with such absolute attributes, the stakes become much, much higher than the simple question of whether any Godlike person exists or not. Because of this I ought to shy away, too, from attempting to mount a "logical proof" of God. But that doesn't prevent me from trying. :-)


> In daily life, logic applies; it cannot however reach high enough to penetrate transcendence. (This is something I've recognized before, even thought about a bit, but not in these exact terms.)

Well, this may seem a little odd, but why not. I tend to think of the apparent rift between our daily life (mortality) and Transcendance as being paralleled by the ongoing "Theory of Everything" debate in Physics. Here's the scenario: in Physics, we have two separate sets of frameworks to describe the Universe around us. There's classical Newtonian mechanics to explain the rules of the macroscopic world; and then there's quantum mechanics to explain the wonderful strangeness of the sub-atomic world. There is plenty of objective evidence to support both frameworks, and both work extremely well within their own individual demesnes. Unfortunately, we cannot extrapolate results from one scale to the other. The twain do not meet. The logic of the Newtonian scale is not applicable to the logic of the quantum scale. So then (I'm making a leap of faith here), perhaps we could apply this parallel to a similar separation between man and God. Perhaps the rules describing God may not be the same as the rules observable to humans. In other words, no wonder we can't "find" God through logic; we aren't using the correct framework to describe him with any rigour.

Then again, returning to the Theory of Everything problem, the last decade has seen new thinkers enlarging the Physics playing field. A synthesis has been proposed that bridges the classical/quantum gap -- it's called String Theory and Supersymmetry. From most reports, the Superstring framework does appear to offer a tidy explanation for the Universe. Unfortunately the theory, despite its elegance, suffers from a hauntingly familiar problem: a lack of experiential evidence to support some basic assumptions...

I really don't know at this point. Maybe Frank Tipler was thinking along these lines?


> Now, here's a question for whomever cares to join in: is this limitation on logic something that is:
> a) intrinsic to logic, an inherent limitation of its powers, or
> b) a case of humans projecting the limitations of our own capacity to think and understand onto logic, which itself is *not* limited, or
> c) something else entirely? Is the whole issue a chimera?

Oooooh boy. This is sticky. But from our human viewpoint, (A) and (B) are practically equivalent since, as you say, we have trouble conceiving of absolute perfect logic. That ceiling cannot been reached in everyday life, so it is difficult to imagine it using the logic of our limited, temporally-bound, and sequentially linear minds. (C) is a possibility, if the whole issue boils down to a question of semantics. It may be a failing of our language and communication in itself, one that forces us to express the need for absolutes and boundaries where none may exist with respect to "perfect logic". As an example, we find it possible to frame questions like, "Do colourless green ideas sleep furiously?" This statement is illogical and nonsensical. The fact remains, though, that the grammatical structure of English is flexible enough that such a bizarre question can actually be posed. Whereas in other languages, such as various Native American dialects, you could never say something like that. Such languages lose out on linguistic playfulness but may be less prone to the imprecision of subtle logic errors, or to miscommunication in everyday concepts.

On the other hand, there is also the language of mathematics and Quantum physics (again). Paradoxically, these fields allow us to describe things which we can't imagine. What is curious in this case is that often the math itself forces conclusions about the Universe that no one had an inkling of beforehand. That's where Supersymmetry Theory gets the idea about there being 11 space-time dimensions (7 spatial, 1 macro-temporal, 3 quantum-temporal?) because that's what the math suggests! Of course, whether this is correct or not depends on the validity of the logical premises behind pure math.

Wolfspirit

"Language puzzle: What if the entire concept of stuff existing 'Outside' the limits of the Universe is in itself a mathematical impossibility?"