The End of Inquiry

The Axiomatic God

I don’t have kids yet, but I’ve been told that one of the most frustrating periods raising a child is when they learn the word no. Perhaps it’s so frustrating because they overuse it, and particularly they use it in situations where it betrays what they actually want, and often what they definitely need. Like food. Or sleep.

As they get older, they learn a new, very powerful word - a word that frustrates parents in a distinctly different way. While no repeated 19 times can cause mom and dad to start questioning whether they really are cut out for this whole parenting thing, this new word can make them question just how much of their 3rd grade education they remember.

I’m talking, of course, about the word why.

Here is an astonishingly good conversation that ChatGPT created¹ to demonstrate just how quickly a conversation can go from something mundane to borderline cosmic in a flash.

Parent "Okay, time to clean up your toys, please."

Child "Why?"

Parent "Because it's messy, and we like a clean house."

Child "Why do we like a clean house?"

Parent "Because it's nice to live in a tidy place. It makes us feel good."

Child "Why does it make us feel good?"

Parent "Because... well, our brains appreciate order and organization. It's just nicer!"

Child "Why do our brains like order?"

Parent "Because, little professor, when things are orderly, our brains don't have to work as hard to understand them."

Child "Why don't brains like to work hard?"

Parent "Well, they do, but there's a limit. Too much chaos is stressful, and our brains prefer a balance."

Child "Why do they prefer balance?"

Parent "Because balance is key to functioning properly! It's like... not eating too much candy."

Child "Why can't I eat too much candy?"

Parent "Because you'll get a tummy ache and it's bad for your teeth!"

Child "Why is it bad for my teeth?"

Parent "Sugar feeds the bacteria that cause cavities. You don't want cavities, do you?"

Child "Why do bacteria cause cavities?"

Parent "Because they produce acids that eat away at your teeth!"

Child "Why do they produce acids?"

Parent "Because that's how they digest the sugar! It's just their nature."

Child "Why is it their nature?"

Parent "Oh, for the love of... because that's how they evolved! It's biology, kiddo!"

Child "Why did they evolve that way?"

Parent "Because... evolution is like a long, slow game of survival, and bacteria that could eat sugar survived better."

Child "Why is survival a game?"

Parent "It's not literally a game! It's just an expression. It means life is full of challenges."

Child "Why is life full of challenges?"

Parent Starting to lose patience "Because nothing's easy! That's just how the world works!"

Child "Why is nothing easy?"

Parent "Because if everything were easy, we'd all be lazy blobs and nothing interesting would ever happen!"

Child "Why would we be lazy blobs?"

Parent Clearly agitated "Because! Effort builds character! Struggle leads to growth! No pain, no gain!"

Child "Why does struggle lead to growth?"

Parent Throws hands in the air "Because the universe is a big, crazy place that doesn't owe us any answers, and sometimes you just gotta roll with it! Now, please, for the love of all that is good and orderly, pick up your toys!"

Child "Okay! Why didn't you just say so?"

Parent Stares in disbelief, then breaks into laughter "You win, kiddo. You win. Let's clean up together, and then we'll have a snack. How's that?"

Child "Why do we have snacks?"

Parent Laughing "Because they're delicious, and I need one after this conversation!"

I’m tempted to speak at length about how incredibly well ChatGPT followed my prompt, but I’m going to gloss over that and simply point out the all-too-familiar direction that the conversation went with the parent and child. It started with cleaning up toys, and ended with an uncaring and bewildering universe, all because a child asked why.

But there’s something else going on here. In this conversation, the question “why?” is a tool to get to some satisfactory level of understanding, that much is clear, but the child wields this tool with curiosity. If why is the hammer, then curiosity is the hand.

At any point in time, the child could have decided that the parent’s answer was satisfactory. Instead, what we see, or what is alluded, is that bottomless curiosity and the ability to ask why is all you need to reach the end of inquiry.

Exactly what is at the end is what philosophers, scientists, theologians and various other epistemologists have been dying to know. Each of them put forth their theories, their assertions, their claims and their arguments, but none of them have so far convinced the world of their discovery. We are still left grasping at air.

It fascinates me that a sufficiently curious child can bring Socrates to his knees; can make Einstein look relatively plain; can break Newton’s laws; can force a priest to wave his hands and say, “mysterious ways, mysterious ways.”

The philosopher might say we need bigger brains to figure it out. The scientist might say more data and experimentation. The theist often relents and plainly admits that “god only knows.” Oddly, what all of these have in common is some form of faith.

Before you get your panties in a wad, let me explain what I mean by faith, though I suspect wadded still will be your panties when I’m finished.

The white bread definition of faith is “belief without evidence,” which, while not incorrect, is insufficient. A better definition is “courage in the face of uncertainty.”²

This definition of faith captures the sense of an incomplete set of information, but it also embraces the attitude towards a commitment to an idea in spite of that lack of information. This notion of faith still applies to the theist in his pursuits of inquiry, but more interestingly it applies to the philosopher and the scientist as well, though less obviously so.

To figure out how it applies, let’s first talk about how scientists and philosophers pursue truth. Suffice it to say, scientists use empiricism and the scientific method to generate results by way of experimentation, and over time those results lead to theories, which in scientific parlance, are facts about the world. Philosophers use logic and rationality to construct arguments composed of premises and conclusions, that in turn produce statements or facts about the world.

So where does faith come in to play? Let’s start with the scientist’s approach.

One of the required properties of a scientific theory is that it must be “falsifiable.” In other words, there must be some way to prove it wrong. Now, to be fair, it also must have a high degree of explanatory power, it must be replicable and so on, but the fact that it must be falsifiable means that there is a tiny gap, a very thin space between the theory, and the bedrock of reality, where something can prove it wrong. And this happens time and time again throughout history. The earth was thought to be flat, and that was proven wrong. Gravity was thought to be a force by Newton, and that was proven wrong by Einstein, and so on. This is a good thing! It’s one of the reasons why there has been such a tremendous amount of discovery and new knowledge in the past 400-500 years. This requirement of falsifiability, though, is part of the reason why a scientific theory drops from 100% certainty, to … 99.9999999999% certainty at best.

It doesn’t end there, though. There is an even deeper reason why faith is linked to both scientific and philosophical endeavors toward truth that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. In my opinion, it should sit alongside Einstein’s E=MC^2 in terms of public knowledge, even though most people have no clue what that equation actually means.

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem

It is said that the reason Einstein agreed to come to Princeton is so that he could have daily conversations with Kurt Godel, an Austro-Hungarian born logician and mathematician whose name should be as familiar as Aristotle³ That’s how much Einstein valued Göde’s brilliance.

I encourage you to do a deep dive into Kurt Gödel and his Incompleteness Theorem because it is far too complicated for me to understand or explain in full, and it’s worth the discovery of just how much he shook the worlds of logic and mathematics. I will spend just a few sentences here summarizing the key concept, which will relate back to faith.

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem states that any formal system of mathematics and logic will inevitably produce true statements that cannot be proven to be true by the system that created them. This is a terribly difficult concept to wrap your head around, so really, I encourage you to look deeper into it.

It is important to remember that any formal system of mathematics or logic must start with at least one axiom, and often more than one. An axiom is a statement or proposition that is accepted as universally true without being proven. Axioms are like little seeds from which sprout enormously complex and highly sophisticated rules, laws, postulates and theorems, but the axioms themselves are left unproven. There isn’t even an attempt to prove them. They’re like tiny little miracles that are self-evidently true, and thus escape explanation.

What does that sound like to you? It sounds like faith to me.

Don’t get me wrong, the faith that the theist uses is of a different texture, size and character than the faith that the scientist and the philosopher use, but curiously both faiths serve the same function: it fills the gap between the end of inquiry and the beginning of everything.

This is how god entered my life. This tiny crack in the door is what let the light in. This sliver of air is what I breathe now. As someone who vehemently asserted that science and philosophy are the only valid methods of pursuing knowledge for many years, I ultimately conceded that for now, and possibly in perpetuity, all of our pursuits are asymptotic to truth. Whether that gap spans a thick or thin distance, it must be traversed courageously, uncertain of what is on the other side.

1. For those of you who are curious, this ChatGPT conversation was the result of 2 prompts. Here is the first prompt:

generate a conversation between a parent and a child demonstrating what it's like for the parent to talk to the child immediately after the child learns the word "why." the conversation should follow an arc of the parent getting more and more frustrated that they cannot answer the child's simple question, as the answers get more and more complicated to the point that the answer s beyond all current human knowledge.

ChatGPT produced a serviceable conversation, but it was dry and boring, so I followed it up with this prompt:

that's good, but recreate the conversation where the parent gets demonstrably and humorously more agitated until giving up in a funny, exasperated way

2. Jordan Peterson said this somewhere and I can’t find it.

3. My grandfather taught at Princeton, and my Grandmother reported seeing Einstein and Godel on their famous walks around campus. A neat reminder that the history is never that far behind us.