(by TZ)

“To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.” – Isaac Newton

We discover what the civil law should be via reason. Look for what makes for a peaceful society. Things like “don’t steal”. This is not different from what scientists do. Physicists have discovered the laws F=ma and e=mc2. These are also God’s laws written into the fabric of the universe. Many have found God by looking at Nature. How the planets dance to the music of the spheres. How light is split into a rainbow or glory.

It starts with logic and mathematics.  Some things are merely abstract symbols, but they grow and resolve and form patterns like a Bach fugue or an Escher drawing.  They ask “is there any conceivable universe where 2+2 can equal 5?”.  Or is the shortest distance always a line, or do all triangles internally add up to 180 degrees?  Sometimes it depends on an assumption we cannot prove, only define or assume. Some worlds are complex and wondrous, others are simple and elegant, all are from reason.  But all are imperfect. Kurt Gödel showed that any such system we can construct will be incomplete or have contradictions – and he did it using the very mathematical proof technique as everything else in mathematics is discovered.  So we may never know if there are an infinite number of prime pairs (11,13; 17,19) or an odd perfect number.  But we can keep looking to find them or find a way to prove their nonexistence.  They are searching the mind of God in the purest sense for the foundational laws – laws which even precede the real world.  And rules for reason itself and where reason can take them.  You can hear it in Bach more directly, but there is something astonishingly beautiful in an (more…)