Coffee & Wisdom

David Breeden is speaking all week about writing from prison.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, and this is Coffee and Wisdom. This week we’ve been looking at something I’m calling allow me to post this epistle that is writings from prison that escape out into the world one way or another and have effects on the larger society. And today, I want to talk about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Nineteen sixty in nineteen forty five, one of the more famous prisoners in our own time and very much affects what we talk about in seminaries and about religion and theology very much today. Here we have a little Greek Orthodox icon of Bonhoeffer running away the demon of Nazism.There are quite a few of those kinds of things out there.Most people, I think, know a little bit about Bonhoeffer. I do want to make a very quick pass through his life here. Bonhoeffer traveled to the United States in 1930 on a teaching fellowship at Union Theological Seminary where he said there is no theology here. He was accustomed to German universities and German theology very much in the liberal theological Protestant tradition. He was into systematic theology, that is theology that all fits together very logically in huge volumes of and collections of books. So the American theological landscape just was not up to his standards. But he began to go to Harlem and the black church very much appealed to him. He fell in love with spirituals and he was transformed by the social gospel of the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell senior. Now, Bonhoeffer then goes back and he was a key figure in the early nineteen thirties, forming what was known as the confessing church, the church that was opposed to the Nazi takeover of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism right in the lead up to the Second World War. We can see some images here. The do you see this is the the Protestant churches that cooperate with Nazism and in the confessing church that was very much against Nazism. And we know how that’s going to go as the day is passed. This is from about nineteen thirty three and four and the crackdown is going to begin. What confuses Bonhoeffer is why the church isn’t better able to resist the ideas of the Nazis. As the war approaches, Bonhoeffer will have to go into service. He will be drafted. He’s a pacifist. But avoiding service was a capital offense, so he would have been shot.So he pulled strings. And Bonhoeffer was very connected to the ruling class within Germany of the day from his family background. And so he pulled strings and is able to join the military intelligence service. This leads to a lot of opportunities to do travel outside of Nazi Germany. He’s able to contact church leaders in other parts of the world. And but unfortunately, it also leads eventually to his death. Yes, he was indeed a spy. And so there are some interesting books out there talking about this, the faithful spy and the plot to kill Hitler Bonhoeffer. And this is really the scholarly standard if you’re interested in reading about his life. Bonhoeffer Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, spy, and is an open question very much debated today, whether or not Bonhoeffer should be considered to be a martyr, because here he was executed. Yes. By the Nazis. Yes, we’re trying to kill Hitler, but he was trying to commit murder and he was tried and convicted of doing that and therefore hanged, executed several books that are out there, the plot to kill Hitler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, passersby, unlikely hero and Bonhoeffer, the assassin, questionmark, challenging the myth, recovering his call to peacemaking, trying to reevaluate how these things work. How much did he know about the plot to kill Hitler and when did he kn...

David Breeden is speaking all week about writing from prison.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, senior minister for First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, and this is Coffee and Wisdom. This week we are looking at writings in and from prison. I’m calling it “Allow Me to Post this Epistle, because in the good old days of the Roman Empire, anyway, these letters were called epistles because they were meant for public consumption. They were not private letters. Since that time, we’ve backed away from that word a bit. Probably sounds like a word that’s a little bit too too. Nowadays we call them letters, but we’ve got quite a bit of writing from prisons.So today I want to look at particular Protestant, and I’ll ask you a question. What imprisoned writer is enshrined in the US House of Representatives; was condemned to life in prison; and ordered, read, and sent back so many books that he eventually escaped in the book box? Good question. Here, we’ve got a little picture of some folks carrying the box that seems a little bit heavy. We have here in a museum a box that purports to be the one that he escaped in. And then here they are schlepping it out of the prison itself. Well, the answer is Hugo Grotius. He was Dutch and so his actual name in Dutch was Groot. But most of the time when you look at his work, you’re going to see his name in its Latinized form.Hugo Grotius, who lived from 1583 to 1645. He was a Dutch humanist–with a little H humanist. That is, the people who began during this period to look at human nature as an important part of reality. He was also a diplomat, a lawyer, a theologian, jurist, poet and playwright. And he’s often called the “father of international law.” So somebody that we ought to know. But he is not all that well known these days.He was a proponent of a Protestant form of natural law. We have discussed natural law on Coffee and Wisdom before. Let’s just very quickly give a little handy dandy definition: All people have inherent rights conferred not by active legislation, but by God, nature, or reason. And the natural law, as it develops within Protestantism, is a little wonky or a little bit vague about who is actually conferring this. So here’s, I think, a good summary from Grotius on natural law, a quote, “The will of God is revealed not only through oracles and portents, but above all in the very design of the creator. For it is from this last source that the law of nature is derived.” So we can’t really find it from scripture so much as we can by reading the Book of Nature. And you can see how this is a very early form of what’s going to become an idea about Deism and will eventually become the idea for the American and French revolutions.Grotius wrote several books, One, On the Rights of War and Peace, a very famous book about international relations, and then The Freedom of the Seas. He’s the first European to claim that the seas ought to be open for trade, which would be a benefit and good for everyone. The Dutch were at this time period in a tooth and nail battle with both Spain and England for control of sea channels.Grotius says liberty is the power that we have over ourselves. And this is very important as a way of seeing how this is going to develop out of a Protestant viewpoint that people have a right to control their own conscience and their own bodies. This is a new idea. It’s coming out of the Enlightenment period. So here’s how Grotius drew it out: natural law, divine law, and human law. So we have the law, OK? And he says there are two kinds. There’s natural law which occurs again. And we can read it from looking at the Book of Nature itself,

David Breeden is speaking all week about writing from prison.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is Coffee and Wisdom.This week we’re looking at epistles, letters, and prison documents in general–things that people write when they have the time to kick back in prison. Not always happily, of course, but let’s look at some things.First off, I do want to do a little defining here. An epistle is a letter designed as a literary work rather than as a communication to an individual. But that term, epistle, is not much used nowadays. You know, it sounds like, well, something that Saint Paul would do. And so I suppose people think: I don’t want to try to live up to that. So I’ll just call it a letter today.I want to look at Antonio Gramsci. There is a book called Letters from Prison, but he’s mostly known for something else that I’ll get to He was a founding member and leader of the Italian Communist Party, and he was, as you might imagine, imprisoned by Mussolini. He wrote a lot of notebooks during the time that he was incarcerated, more than 30 notebooks. They are numbered according to dates. So he wrote 30 notebooks, three thousand pages of history and analysis during his imprisonment period. Gramschi wrote: “History teaches, but it has no pupils.” He was in prison from 1926-1937, when he died in prison.He never was a healthy person and prison life just was not what was good for him. But he was quite a prolific writer. Noam Chomsky wrote: “In the case of Antonio Gramsci, the fascist government agreed that he was a model intellectual in Edward Said sense, and for that reason determined in their words that we must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years.” So they had to put him away in prison. Gramsci said: “I hate the indifferent. I believe that living means taking sides. Those who really live cannot help being a citizen and a partizan. Indifference and apathy are parasitism, perversion, not life. That is why I hate the indifferent.”So get on our side, says Antonio Gramsci. His ideas are still around. You can see him in various posters on the streets even today. A saying that appeared in New York City recently: “Qualities should be attributed to human beings and not to things.” From prison. Notebook Number One. This is a central idea of Gramsci. It does go back to Marxist thought. Quality should be attributed to human beings, not to things. He had this to say about the way he wanted to go about theorizing: “The philosophy of praxis does not aim at the peaceful resolution of existing conditions in his history and society, but is the very theory of these contradictions. It is not the instrument of government of the dominant groups in order to gain the consent and exercise hegemony over this subculture and classes. It is the expression of subculture and classes who want to educate themselves and the art of government and who have an interest in knowing all true of this, even the unpleasant ones, and in avoiding the impossible deceptions of the upper class and even more, their own.”A couple of catch phrases within this: praxis, of course, the philosophy of praxis. You’re going to do something that will have some effect on society. And we’ll get to the word “hegemony.” Gramsci formulated the term “cultural hegemony,” and he had this to say: “Common sense is not a single unique conception, identical in time and space. It is the folklore of philosophy. And like folklore, it takes countless different forms. Its most fundamental character is that it is a conception which,

David Breeden is speaking all week about writing from prison.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is coffee and wisdom.We are beginning a new week, looking at epistles, letters, and incarceration–having plenty of time to do some writing. So I’m calling it “Allow Me to Post this Episode.”Of the twenty seven books of Christian Scripture, twenty one of them are epistles, are letters. Then, what is an epistle? An epistle is a letter designed as a literary work rather than as a communication to one individual. The term isn’t much used nowadays. I guess people have decided that it sounds maybe a little bit too, too. So nowadays we call epistles letters for the most part.The most famous in American history is probably “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King back in nineteen sixty three. There has been a lot of writing done in jails and prisons, however, over the many centuries.For example, Oscar Wilde–De Profundis, one of his last works, and also “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” after his incarceration. What can you say about a Western tradition that begins with a couple of its most famous people being people who are tried and executed? We’ve got Jesus before Pilate over here and Socrates declaiming why he is going to take that hemlock after being condemned by the Athenian Senate in his apology.There he is quaffing his his hemlock. Socrates said this: “I said to each one of you individually and in private what I hold to be the greatest possible service. I tried to persuade each one of you to concern himself less with what he has then with what he is so as to render himself as excellent and rational as possible.”OK, one of the most famous things about Socrates at his trial is that he says–you know, you ought to be giving me money instead of condemning me. And that kind of ticked the court off. But he wanted people to be excellent and rational, as he says.Famously, the Roman, Pilate, says, so you are a king. Jesus says, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born and for this came into the world to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” To which Pilate says, “What is truth?” It has long been debated whether or not Pilate was asking a deeper and more intricate question than Jesus had just answered. Perhaps Pilate himself had a very nuanced vision of truth, unlike the Jewish people he was dwelling among in the day.As the Christian scriptures unfold, Paul very famously wrote several of his epistles from prison. Yeah, you can find all kinds of illustrations online of Saint Paul, either writing or transcribing.That’s one of the debates–how much do some of these folks do the writing and how much do they talk about it and have a scribe write it? As Paul says, “I am in chains now, still preaching.” So there he is.Another very early Christian one is Constellation of Philosophy by Boethius. Here is Sophia, Philosophy, talking to Boethius, who was imprisoned by the Roman emperor. Boethius may or may not have been a Christian. It’s still debatable, but he definitely wrote from a standpoint of Greek and Roman Stoic philosophy about the trials and tribulations of fate and being alive.Another famous incarcerated person is Paul Bunyan. The Pilgrim’s Progress was entirely written in prison while he was there for twelve years in Bedford in the UK. Debatable about whether or not he had too much going on. Apparently he was able to see some people and had a fairly good visitor schedule there. Bunyon says: “I will stay in prison till the moss grows ...

David Breeden is speaking all week about Process Theology and Process Philosophy.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is Coffee and Wisdom. This past week, we have been looking at Process Philosophy and Theology. And we’ve been talking about the many aspects of this from all the way back until the present and what it’s doing nowadays. We’ve run into a lot of ‘p’s here, Process Philosophy, Process Theology, Panpsychism and Pantheism, or Pandeism according to who you’re asking, but they sort of mean the same thing and Panentheism. So Process Philosophy is the oldest coming from Whitehead. Then Process Theology coming out of that. And then some ideas that have been added in since the Process Theology started with Panpsychism and Pantheism and Panentheism. So let’s head off into those ‘p’s today, shall we? First off, it all begins with Alfred North Whitehead’s “Process in Reality”, published in 1929 from lecture notes that he gave at Harvard during those between twenty five and twenty nine. One of his students, as a matter of fact, a graduate assistant was Charles Hartshorne 1897 to 2000. Now Hartshorne is the one who brings the Process Philosophy into Process Theology for the first time, from nineteen twenty three to twenty five. He studied in Europe. He was a student at Edmond Research. We have we have discussed as a phenomenologists Martin Heidegger and then he was a research fellow at Harvard.Nineteen twenty five to twenty eight. This is the time that Alfred North Whitehead was giving the lectures that would become the book. And then he became a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. Nineteen twenty eight to nineteen fifty five and from there affected a lot of liberal religious future leaders teaching in the divinity school there. So we need to look just a minute, though, because that’s all a long time ago. Let’s think about where we are today. So this is a recent writing from John S. Fainberg, chair of and professor of Systemic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School just north of Chicago. So Systematic Theology is where we try to develop systems of theology that all sort of logically fit together and so that we can talk about reality, usually having something to do with the theistic bent. So he says stemming initially from Alfred North Whitehead’s “Process in reality”, nineteen twenty nine process theology has gained widespread interest and acceptance among nonevangelical scholars in the latter half of the twentieth century. Process Theology and he’s going to define it for us, sees all existing things, including God as dipoles are actual entities. I’ll get back to that. Each actual entity has a primordial poll which contains all the possible things that the entity can become and an actual poll, the physical thing in the world that the actual entity is. The process God is finite, mutable, less than omnipotent, and by his physical poll suffers alongside of his creatures.This is not thought to be a defect, but rather an asset as it allows God to identify with his creatures and experience. What explains what happens to them as it happens? OK, that’s a lot to say. But what is this dipole polar thing? Well, there really are depolarize substances out there. It’s especially true in chemistry and biology. It means that there are these dipolar are things that are set up that describe or don’t describe God. So over on the right hand side here, we have the what what the professor is calling the primordial elements, those things that are possible.

David Breeden is speaking all week about Process Theology and Process Philosophy.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden and the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is Coffee and Wisdom. This week we’ve been looking at process theology and process philosophy, looking at ways that this impacts liberal religion in general, Unitarian Universalism specifically, and the interface between that and humanism. We’ve been talking about the central book in this particular way of thinking, Alfred North Whitehead’s process and reality. I have mentioned before that it is a fairly unreadable book, so I don’t encourage people to read it unless you’re very into this. But there are lots and lots of scholars and theologians who have read the the book think they understand it in some way that’s always debatable and then drawn some conclusions from it. It was published in 1929 based on lectures that Whitehead gave in Harvard after he came here from the United Kingdom. And Charles Hartshorne was Whitehead’s graduate, a student student. And of course Whitehead becomes the his mentor. But then Hartshorne takes this idea and goes in a very different direction, introducing it into theology. And again, it’s quite debatable whether or not Whiteheads ideas and hard Seans ideas are really in the same ballpark. But that’s all part of the fun of process, philosophy and theology. Now, yesterday, we looked at a proof of God that Charles Hartshorne undertook based on Anselm’s proof of God called the ontological argument and some Saint Anselm of Canterbury live from 1033 to 1109.A very brief, this is skipping some points if you saw this yesterday. But just to give you the broad outlines of this argument, God is that being then which no greater can be conceived. Right. That’s a definition of God within this ontological this argument for being it is greater to exist in reality than merely as an idea. All right. Just an idea is just an idea. But it’s so it’s greater to exist. If God does not exist. We can conceive of an even greater being. That is one that does exist. So that would violate proposition one, that God is the being which has no greater. Therefore, God must indeed exist in reality. As we discussed yesterday, there are some rather difficult things about this proof. One of the interesting things is that a contemporary Gaunilo of Marmoutiers in the 1100s offered a counter argument. Now we think of the Middle Ages as being a time when nobody disagreed with anybody in the church. But this is really not the case as as exposed by this very famous argument. So he said this. The lost island is that island then, which no greater can be conceived. All right. It is greater to exist in reality than merely as an idea. OK, if the lost island does not exist, one can conceive of an even greater island that is is one that does exist and therefore the lost island exists in reality. Now, we mentioned Bertrand Russell’s teapot when we were talking about faux religions and those kinds of ideas.And so this is very much like Richard Russell’s teapot that you can’t see it. But I’d say it’s there. Therefore, the problem with these kind of arguments is that from the from Anselm’s point of view would be that, wait a minute, but God does exist and the lost island doesn’t exist. So you’re trying to prove something that doesn’t exist and we know it does it again, a very debatable place to be when you start talking about this. But the fact is, it all comes down to Schleiermacher, as I mentioned yesterday, who lived from 1768 to 1834. His great book on religion was published in 1799.

David Breeden is speaking all week about Process Theology and Process Philosophy.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, and this is Coffee and Wisdom.This week we’ve been looking at Process Philosophy and Process Theology and what all of that means now. And this is all based on one book, Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality, which was published in 1929. It was based on a series of lectures he gave in the late 1920s at Harvard. He was British but came to Harvard and then one of his grad students was Charles Hartshorne. We’ve also looked at in terms of what he did with going into something called Process Theology. Whitehead himself was a deist, probably. He was very vague about as theism if he had it one. But Charles Hartshorne was very much involved in the idea of finding a God in the process. Now, Hartshorne did not pretend to be Christian. He was a theologian and he was a theist and did go to Unitarian Universalist congregations. So what we need to look at today, first off, is the idea of process for philosophy itself. Yeah, there’s a lot of words here. This is from a Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy, one of the real central online things that you can look up and pretty well get just about anything in terms of philosophy.I’ll show you another source of the best process philosophies. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is based on the premise that being is dynamic and I’ve mentioned that before, being is becoming being as dynamic and that the dynamic nature of being should be the primary focus of any comprehensive philosophical account of reality and our place within it, even though we experience our world and ourselves, is continuously changing. Western metaphysics has long been obsessed with describing reality as an assembly of static individuals whose dynamic features are either taken to be mere appearances or ontologically secondary and derivative. We’re going to run into that term ontological several times today. That is the study of being itself. That’s a Greek term, ontose for being. But you get the idea. Here is what we’re looking at is a way to talk about a new way of talking about objects in the world. Are they solid objects? And should we deal with them as solid objects or should we deal with them as processes? And that’s a scientific explanation. And if it works, so let’s see what they say.For process philosophers, the adventure of philosophy begins with a set of problems that traditional metaphysics marginalizes or even sidesteps altogether what is dynamic or becoming. If it is the way we experience reality, how should we interpret this metaphysically?Now, I would quickly mention that in terms of of serious philosophy, the term metaphysics means that which does not change. It’s not about supernaturalism or anything of that, but which we kind of in popular use of the term we kind of used. But in serious philosophy, metaphysics simply means that which does not change. So what is DII and dynamicists? You’re going to see very weird uses of words in Process Philosophy because they’re trying to express something that has not been expressed before. Now, given its current role as a rival to the dominant substance geared paradigm of Western metaphysics Process Philosophy has the overarching task of establishing the following three claims. So if we’re going to talk about it seriously, these things must be established. Number one, the basic assumption of the substance paradigm, i.e. metaphysics based on static entities such as substance’s objects, states of affairs or instantaneous stages are dispensable theoretical presuppositions rather than laws of thought. Now, if you know some philosophy,

David Breeden is speaking all week about Process Theology and Process Philosophy.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breedeen and the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. This is Coffee and Wisdom. And this week we’re talking about Process Philosophy, and then it’s ancillary, the process theology, to think a little bit about liberal religions and some concepts that have been going into the construction of liberal religion. Yesterday, I asked the question, what is the common philosophical underpinning of much of feminist Unitarian Universalist, Christian, Jewish, black, church, indigenous and Earth based theology? And the answer is process thought. Well, just as a idea here, I did a little searching online and found this pretty immediately. This is a description from a Unitarian Universalist minister on their church’s website about her theology theology. I describe myself theologically. I describe myself as a metaphorical theist with humanist tendencies. Process theology comes closest to expressing my understanding of interrelatedness and mutual transformation. For me, metaphorical theism means that there is one ultimate reality and we use different metaphors to interpret that reality. I sometimes use the word God to describe the creating, sustaining and transforming power in and of the universe. And I would say that this really stands in for a very large number of Unitarian Universalist ministers these days. So where does that come from? Well, it comes from a book by Alfred North Whitehead called Process and Reality, published in nineteen twenty one. I described yesterday a little bit about how he worked with Bertrand Russell, two mathematicians and logicians trying to figure out and prove that mathematics is logically all interconnected and true.They fail to do that. Alfred North Whitehead for his next project, decided to do this. How might we systematically describe not only scientific knowledge, but also ethical esthetic and religious knowledge? Well, so having failed to do math, he goes and decides he’s going to define just about everything out there. A kind of a large bit to bite off, probably, but there you go. He said, we think in generalities, but we live in details. We think in generalities, but we live in details. That’s one of the contradictions in the human condition. Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge, said Alfred North Whitehead. The only simplicity who to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity you get. The idea here is we’ve got to go through those ideas of generalities to particulars, find those particulars which then are simple, and find the larger complexity that is outside of those. Before we go back to the particulars, it’s a particular way of thinking that he’s doing. He said this The misconception, which has haunted philosophical literature throughout the centuries, is the notion of independent existence. There is no such mode of existence. Every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe. So let’s get over it. It’s astonishing how relentlessly Western philosophy has strayed to prove we are not squirrels by the philosopher Crispin Sartwell. You get the idea that often in Western philosophy we work over and over and over again trying to prove something that cannot be proven.Then we have to go back and dig around a little bit to come up with new ideas, usually based on older ideas. So here’s an old idea that Whitehead was going to begin using, and that is from Gottfried Leibniz, a philosopher and mathematician who said The monad of which we shall speak here is nothing but a simple substance which enters into co...

David Breeden is speaking all week about Process Theology and Process Philosophy.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. This is Coffee and Wisdom. When we try to do some looking at some ideas that are floating around out there in religion and philosophy that coming from the past and then their impact on the present and perhaps the future. This week we’re going to be looking at “It’s a Process”. And so, first off, I have to ask you a question. What is the common philosophical underpinning of much feminist Unitarian Universalist, Christian, Jewish, black church, indigenous and Earth based theologies? Well, it’s the answers in the title. They’re a movement, engaging process, thought a movement engaging process. Thought you’re going to see that everywhere when you’re looking at theological materials these days, it is “Process Philosophy”, which is then used within “Process Theology”. And that’s what I want to take a look at this week, is how this came to be and where it kind of is what it is and then it may be heading next.So there’s just all kinds of books out there on this subject. “Process, Philosophy and Christian thought”, “Emptiness and Becoming”, “Integrating my Heart”, my Yanique Buddhism and “Process Theology”. Who knew that was a thing, right? Everything flows toward a process of philosophy where, you know, you in this goes on and on. Just look up process and begin looking at all the books and covering. So we got everything here from Christian thought to Buddhism to biology. And how are all of these tied together and all of those things I already mentioned in terms of theologies all the way from Earth based to Judaism? Well, it’s all tied together with a very basic idea that also is a bit of a head scratcher or there wouldn’t be so many books about it being is becoming. So where does this come from? Well, first off, we have to go back to the late 19th, early 20th century and consider a book that was one of the most massive failures ever. And it was by a couple of the geniuses of the 20th century. The book was “Principia Mathematica”, and the geniuses were Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. We’ve heard quite a bit about Bertrand Russell. He’s one of the greats in terms of humanist thought. A couple of weeks ago we were looking at his his teapot problem and he was a great logician in his time, as was Whitehead, and they were dealing with mathematics and set theory. And their idea was, how do we get to a basis of to prove that mathematics is true. And so this is a three volume set that came out over several years. And as they were working on it, they just saw more and more that they were never going to get there.I have a little sample problem here from this proposition. It will follow when arithmetical edition has been defined that one plus one equals two. Well, you can see where this might become a problem when we have to think this much to figure that out. The fact is they never reached a place where they could show that mathematics had a an indisputable basis. And because while they were working outcomes, girls incompleteness theorems. Now don’t ask me to define them. Really, I don’t understand, except the fact that it also is dealing with a set theory. And the fact is that girl discovered that you can have a set of solutions that also have within it a set of provable solutions. So some things can be true within the set, true facts within the set that can’t be proven. There’s always going to be something that is undecidable.

Rev. Dr. David Breeden

February 26, 2021

Weekday wisdom and philosophy with a humanist twist.