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It’s interesting how so many landmark thinkers in the history of science, whose ideas have served as an inspiration for the modern atheist-materialist scientific worldview, were nonetheless avowed religious believers and spiritually inclined philosophers at heart. Isaac Newton, founder of modern physics, was a devout Christian who wrote more on theological themes than he ever wrote about science. George LeMeitre (who discovered the “Big Bang” initial singularity in modern cosmology) was a Priest, and Gregor Mendel (founder of contemporary genetics) was a monk—and the list goes on and on.

This intriguing article about Kurt Gödel— colleague of Albert Einstein at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, preeminent modern logician/mathematician, and innovator of the renowned “incompleteness theorem”—highlights how this paragon of science and rationalism also employed his knowledge of logic and science to defend the legitimacy of religious faith. An enthusiastic spiritualist in a largely secular culture, Gödel devised a formal ontological proof for the existence of God, offered informal arguments for the soul’s immortality, and via the implications his own incompleteness theorem, advanced an explanation for why an immaterial soul must exist to begin with. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is also the inspiration for Penrose and Hameroff’s contemporary concept of quantum-information-based consciousness in their “orchestrated reduction” theory of the mind—a secular version of Gödel’s concept of the immaterial soul. Based on Gödel’s incompleteness theorem (which implies that no formal system or algorithm can ever be self-referentially consistent or non-contradictory, and therefore requires additional justification outside of the system itself to establish its own legitimacy) Penrose, following Gödel, concluded that the physical universe and human brain (which according to physics is also basically a formal system or algorithm) cannot be self-explanatory and must therefore require a force or cause outside the physical universe to justify itself— hence the origin of the universe and human mind must be an intelligence outside of the physical universe itself—a supernatural Mind (or at least a subatomic one involving forces located outside the currently known limits of spacetime).

If there is a moral to this story, it would seem to be that, no matter how apparently successful the deliverances of scientific empiricism and secular rationalism have been in attempts to repress the revelations of religion and spirituality, these revelations inexorably reemerge via “the return of the repressed” in newer and more intellectually innovative forms—like a spiritually-based “equal opposite reaction” to the force of rationalism’s anti-spiritual impetus. Scientific explanations, no matter how complete and compelling they may be, cannot refute, negate, or render irrelevant, the power of spiritual insight. I suppose that this seemingly irrepressible spiritual impulse, as the secular humanists and atheist materialists claim, may simply be the evolutionary product of instinctive irrational fear in the primitive human psyche—fabricating magical forces and mythical entities to conceal the cold, hard scientific facts about the universe that religious believers are afraid to face. OR as believers contend , such irrepressible spirituality may be an acknowledgment of the world’s radically mysterious and divine nature, that can’t be denied regardless of how much the scientific-rationalists vainly attempt to explain it away. …. I certainly don’t possess the Gods-eye-view of all reality necessary to decide which view is right or wrong (and my own spiritual intuitions on this topic probably don’t count for much). However (the adamant and compelling protestations of secular humanists, New Atheists, and logical positivists notwithstanding) what the history of modern science paradoxically appears to demonstrate is that, no matter how sophisticated and ‘advanced’ scientific knowledge becomes, the spiritual-religious impulse in human thought certainly doesn’t seem as though it will ever go away….

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