> It may be crap (I didn't read it), but I don't see how it can be off > topic, as the existence of God has consequences for the foundations of > mathematics. ...[*] > For instance, if God exists--I assume we're not talking about > Mercury or Thor here, but the omnipotent omniscient God of Christian > theology--then the axiom of choice must be true, as the God would be > capable of choosing an element from every nonempty set, well-ordering the > universe, etc.; and questions such as the true size of the continuum would > have a definite answer known to the Almighty. Historically, great > mathematicians from Euler to Goedel have offered proofs of the existence > of God (all right, maybe Euler was just kidding), and theological > considerations are said to have played a role in Cantor's thinking about > infinite sets.
Indeed, in fact George Boole in his "Laws of Thought" (1854), [ where he introduces his (set-) algebra as an idempotent branch of [ arithmetic (for properties x, y of an object: x^2=x, so x(x-1)=0 --> [ with roots x=1, x=0; and commutative xy = xy : no order dependence) mentions that a main motivation for him to develop this binary logic was to formalize & simplify the age-old logic of Aristoteles, as employed by Spinoza (17-th century phylosopher) and more recent Clarke (spelling?) for their God_existence 'proofs' -- And to check these proofs (IIRC: Boole himself was son of a clergyman/minister in Ireland).
His conclusion: those arguments were 'circular' (the result was in the premises;-) No surprise... Nowadays we use Boolean algebra for more practical purposes, like the optimal design of combinational logic circuits, after Claude Shannon in 1938, as a student in MIT, noticed the isomorphism between Boolean(+,.) and switch_connection(parallel,series). That took some 85 years ! (BTW: how long after 1928 Shuchkewitch' paper on the detailed structure of finite simple_semigroups will it take to develop associative function composition algebra (=finite semigroups) for optimal sequential logic synthesis in computer_engineering / digital network theory ?-) ..[2]
