As I kid I struggled with algebra in high school, so I wouldn’t even try to understand the concepts Christoph Benzmüller of Berlin’s Free University and his colleague, Bruno Woltzenlogel Paleo are using but their conclusion, that they have successfully proven Kurt Gödel’s ontological proof for the existence of God, is still fascinating to me.
The two scientists were not on a quest to convert atheists or comfort theists, but were looking for new mathematical expressions which could be used in a variety of high tech ways.
Here is a small selection of an article in Spiegel Online International which discussed the project:
As headlines go, it’s certainly an eye-catching one. “Scientists Prove Existence of God,” German daily Die Welt wrote last week.
But unsurprisingly, there is a rather significant caveat to that claim. In fact, what the researchers in question say they have actually proven is a theorem put forward by renowned Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel — and the real news isn’t about a Supreme Being, but rather what can now be achieved in scientific fields using superior technology.
Using an ordinary MacBook computer, they have shown that Gödel’s proof was correct — at least on a mathematical level — by way of higher modal logic. Their initial submission on the arXiv.org research article server is called “Formalization, Mechanization and Automation of Gödel’s Proof of God’s Existence.”
Click the link to read the whole article: Holy Logic: Computer Scientists ‘Prove’ God Exists