Kurt Gödel (1906-1978), considered (perhaps?) the greatest logician since Aristotle (c. 384-322 B.C.), used logic to reveal limits, inconsistencies, and contradictions in mathematics. On another note, when his aging mother asked about whether they would meet in the hereafter, Gödel, not religious in the traditional sense, applied logic here as well.
“If the world is constructed rationally and has a meaning,” he wrote in response to her question about an afterlife, “then that must be so. For what kind of a sense would there be in bringing forth a creature (man), who has such a broad field of possibilities of his own development and of relationships, and then not allow him to achieve 1/1000 of it. That would be approximately as if someone laid the foundation for a house with much effort and expenditure of money, then let everything go to ruin again. Does one have a reason to assume that the world is set up rationally? I believe so. For it is certainly not chaotic and arbitrary, but rather, as science shows, the greatest regularity and order reign in everything. . . . So it follows directly that our earthly existence, since it in and of itself has at most a very dubious meaning, can only be a means to an end for another existence.”*
Though nothing demands that the cosmos end rationally, all the logic and rationality here and now on earth do seem to point to something more than the ‘very dubious meaning’ of our existence.
Our eyes have a purpose, a rational one too. So do our ears, as do the ears of mice and cattle. The sky has a purpose, as do the dirt and grapefruits and grapes that reach of the dirt and absorb air, which does too. The 100 or so neurotransmitters (acetylcholine, serotonin, dopamine, glutamate) in our brains have a rational purpose, as do our brains. All these rational purposes, and endless others (white blood cells, water, mitochondria, photosynthesis), suffuse life in earth, but then—what? They all culminate into meaninglessness and purposelessness in the cosmic heat death of the universe? That’s not rational. And though nothing demands that the cosmos end rationally, all the logic and rationality here and now on earth do seem to point to something more than the “very dubious meaning” (if even that) of our existence if all these rational purposes fizzle into eternal purposelessness.
No wonder, then, that the Word of God talks about eternal life, resurrection, and a new heavens and a new earth. “So also is the resurrection of the dead. The body is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption” (1 Cor. 15:42). “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). “Now I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away” (Rev. 21:1).
And people deride Christianity as irrational or illogical? What’s illogical or irrational is for all the in-your-face rationality and purpose that saturates life now to end in eternal oblivion.
None of this makes Christianity true but, simply, logical.
* Stephen Budiansky, Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel, Kindle edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company), pp. 267, 268.
