A Consistent But Incomplete Post

Now, this business of revelation: is it necessary, redundant, irrelevant, neutral, or harmful?

I suppose it depends on the revelation, but who are we to pretend to judge something that purportedly comes straight from God? Nevertheless, some kind of judgment must be made, but on what basis? 

Perhaps in the same way we judge a scientific theory, which will explain a great deal -- i.e., unify the phenomena -- in such a way that it doesn't unexplain what had previously been understood. 

Looked at this way, the revelation in question needs to make more sense of our lives than anything else on offer. It must transcend science while not in any way negating it, because science (obviously) explains a great deal, even if it has necessary limits. 

Let's think this through. First of all, we either need revelation or we don't. In other words, either we can form an accurate and complete map of the cosmos via wholly natural resources, or we can't. If we can't, then there is either no remedy to our ignorance, or we are in need of a vertical murmurandom to complete the epistemological circle.

It seems that we can never arrive at a complete and consistent model of reality. Stanley Jaki, in his Brain, Mind and Computers, correctly notes that Gödel's theorems prove

that even in the elementary parts of arithmetic there are propositions which cannot be proved or disproved in that system (emphasis mine).

And if that isn't enough to put a crimp your day, his analysis implies that "no formal system" of any kind "is immune to the bearing of Gödel's conclusion."

So, the mind is not, and cannot be, a logic machine. If it were, it could never know it, because it would be confined to the closed circle of logical entailment. Which I suspect also goes to our freedom, since it too escapes necessity. 

A machine

can have only a finite number of components and it can operate only on a finite number of initial assumptions....  

Gödel's theorem, therefore, cuts the ground under the efforts that view machines... as adequate models of the mind.

A machine "can never produce at least one truth, which the mind can without relying on other minds.... No matter how perfect the machine, it can never do everything that the human mind can." 

So, it seems that our most perfect manmade system of thought will necessarily have to put its faith in at least one thought or principle or axiom or assumption or intuition or speculation or delusion or hallucination that the system cannot justify, and which comes from outside (transcends) the system.

Therefore, if I am following my argument correctly, there is no escaping faith. 

Back to our opening statement: either we need revelation or we don't. Looks like we do, but just because we need it, that doesn't mean it exists. What we call revelation could be -- and for materialist must be -- just self-deception. It is as if we are unconsciously trying to get around the theorems by pretending to a completeness that is forever inaccessible to us.

However, I recently found out that Gödel not only believed in a personal God, but thought he could prove the existence of an afterlife:

I am convinced of this, independently of any theology. It is possible today to perceive, by pure reasoning that it is entirely consistent with the known facts. If the world is rationally constructed and has a meaning, then there must be such a thing [as an afterlife] (quoted in Wang).

It is indeed ironic "that the greatest logician since Aristotle" thought "God's existence could be proved a priori" (Goldstein).  

Nevertheless, which God? What is he like?  

Andrew Klavan asks, "if the human condition is the puzzle, which of the oldest solutions endure and what has Christianity added to them?"  

Good questions.