One of the longest standing and still unresolved debates is about god and his existence, whether he really does exist. If so why is he allowing bad things to happen to good people ., you know the rest. Now I too was a sort of atheist due to similar arguments, ignoring those concepts that cannot be understood by the vigours of a mathematical proof. It was quite natural to believe so, we had a good system of logic, namely the scientific method, it helped us understand the world around and went one step further and helped us in manipulating it to our benefit. The ways of religion and faith seemed far fetched and quite frankly hilarious. But then two things have happened in the near past that have changed my view and now I have no idea what my religious beliefs are ( A limbo like condition).
The first one was a course that I had to take as part of my undergraduate curriculum named “Logic in Computer Science”, basically it was a course dealing with ( as the name suggests) logic systems, proof methods in these systems and their impact on computer science. It is quite abstract and as such many people would find it hard to follow, but I felt at home with the abstraction as I didn’t have to give preference to visualization and hence I could fully and completely pay attention to what was being discussed.
One of the discussions was on soundness and completeness of the various proof systems. What these two terms mean are quite simple concepts.
The Soundness property of a logic system states that
Anything you prove using the logic system is true in the real world
meaning, if your logic system is sound, then you should be able to prove only true things , for example, you cannot prove that 1 = 0 ( which is obviously false) if your logic system is sound.
The completeness property states that
Anything that is true in the real world can be proved
Again what this means is that if you know that something is true in the real world, then you should be able to prove that it is true if your logic system is complete. for example, We know that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west ( on Earth of course !! the statement would be false on venus). So if your system is complete, you must be able to prove this.
Now, why are these two properties of a logic system important??
Because of this man
In 1931, Kurt Godel proved that no reasonably complex logic system can be both sound and complete at the same time which are called Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, a consequence of this is that if you want to have a logic system using which you can prove all truths, then it must contain some statements which cannot be proved using the logic system itself, but you just have to assume they are true ( sound familiar??)
Now the second thing that made me reconsider my religious belief was not suprisingly another course ( humanities) Bhagawad Gita ( Now please don’t ask me why I took such a course contradicting my belief, that’s another story unto itself. Let’s just say that I was “given” that course). Apprehensive at first, I went to the lectures, the first few lectures was about Lord Krishna and how he is the supreme being and ruler of us all, I scoffed at these statements but still went to the lectures hoping to find some strand of “reason” in all the things being said, and find I did.
Few lectures later, the lecturer told us that to understand the Gita, you have to first believe that Krishna was the supreme controller of us all and you need to have faith in him, reflexively I laughed at this only then did I realize it was just another logic system which worked on the above mentioned assumption, so religion was just another logic system or in other words, religion is the most ancient logic system. This was a “Aha” moment for me, it all seemed to make sense now, we were just following an ancient logic system without even realizing it.
Of course, people will argue that it is not a sound logic system ( after all, it did say that the world is flat right?? ). Well, not exactly. It was people who interpreted and came to such a conclusion. As such we don’t have the original manuscripts of Bhagawad Gita or any other religious texts ( except the dead sea scrolls) and what we have are people’s interpretation of the original and this can very well be wrong.
I continue to go to these lectures keeping in mind the simple assumption and I have not encountered any fallacies yet.
O(lol n) 
Interesting co-relations. Keep writing.
Thanks 🙂
the last line you drew was interesting,(i.e. we can’t logically contradict the existence of god since even its a logical system that rests on logic and an assumption).
A difference that i think it has from other such systems is that our mathematical or scientific logic gains its power not from the initial assumption but the power of logic itself, while the logical system of god gathers its power from a very strong initial assumption.
I am not sure whether we agree upon giving such power to initial assumption.
Actually I do,
I recently read a quote which was to this effect
“I liked his logic, but his initial assumption was wrong”
We need to give equal emphasis to both the initial assumption as well as the conclusions one can draw from it, not to mention the method used to arrive at those conclusion, i.e., the logic system
I recently came across this, seems interesting but I haven’t gone through it completely
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4784