Thursday, August 4, 2011

Footnote (toe-note) to Theologia Mathematica : GKC

[footnote to the thread begun here]

Our beloved Chesterton is far from any of this.  He does not stand in opposition; he merely moves in a different forest – one vast and magical, in which I have wandered over many happy hours.  And yet I miss him in these discussions, as one misses a loved-one. So let us at least quote one stray phrase of our old friend, describing the (best of the) pre-Chaucerian world: “patterns showing a profound knowledge of mathematics and their relation to metaphysics…” Even to quote this sentence to the end would add nothing by way of development; let it merely be noted, he acknowledged that such a relation exists.



 Further apt  quotations from GKC:

Logic (or what reasonable people call reason) was almost the very soul of the Middle Ages.”

“All that the parsons say  is unproved.  All that the doctors say  is disproved.  That’s the only difference between science and religion  there’s ever been.”

"You can only find truth with logic  if you have already found truth without it."

(As your Local Logic Guy, I should scarcely cite this one, save that it is quoted with apparent approval by a practicing mathematician, John Barrow)

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