A mathematician’s proof of life after death

Can life continuing beyond death have a basis in logic?

Kurt Godel – hailed by many, including Einstein, as one of the greatest logicians and mathematicians of all time – was convinced that the soul outlived mortality and continued to exist, not in a changed reincarnation, but in its earthly identity.

Like a blazing comet, Austria-born Godel soared to the heights of mathematical science when in 1931, at the age of 25, he published his two incompleteness theorems that shattered the bedrock of certitude on which numeric logic was founded.

By translating logical axioms into numbers, he devised a mathematical system that defies logic by, in effect, stating: This statement cannot be proven.

If the statement could be proven then the system on which it is based would be self-contradictory and false. If it is true, then it demonstrates that truth itself is beyond logical proof.

Godel’s paradox of mathematically unprovable truth upended the apple cart of logic, much in the way that quantum mechanics overturned the laws of classical physics, and paved the way for the development of algorithms and other areas of computer science.

Godel’s quest to test the limits of science went beyond the realms of mathematics and logic into the chartless domain of spirituality.

Although he privately circulated his interpretation of the ontological proof of God formulated by the 11th-century Benedictine monk, St Anselm – if God exists only in the mind as an entity than which nothing greater can exist, a greater being existing in reality can be imagined, therefore to be the greatest possible being God must of necessity exist in reality – Godel’s religious beliefs were never made public.

It is through the letters he wrote to his mother Marianne, with whom he had a deep emotional bond, that we know of his spiritual convictions. Marianne remained in Austria when Godel emigrated to America in 1940 but they maintained a lifelong correspondence. While the letters she wrote to him have not been preserved, his letters to her reveal a profound spiritual sensibility which, superficially, might seem at odds with the rigorous discipline of logic.

In one of his letters, Godel used the term Auf Wiedersehen, till we meet again, in response to his mother’s question as to whether he believed in an afterlife.

He affirmed that it would be meaningless for our existence to end in death with us having achieved ‘not even 1/1000th’ of our potential to evolve beyond the conflicts and sufferings we inflict upon ourselves.

Like his theorems, humans remain incomplete within their earthly span of existence and find completion in a future state of being to which this life is but ‘a means to an end for another’.

In his Bible, Godel annotated a verse which says that our lives are like seeds awaiting germination: “It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body.”

Observing that materialist philosophy would ‘regard the world as an unordered and therefore meaningless heap of atoms’, Godel averred that materialism perforce ends in self-contradiction as being essentially incomplete by itself.

To materialism ‘death appears to be the final and complete annihilation’, when it is merely the beginning of a true awakening.

By bidding his mother Auf Wiedersehen, the mathematical genius appended the final QED to what he conceived was otherwise the insoluble theorem of human life.