Russell's Loss Poem by Paul Hartal

One of my favorite philosophers,
Bertrand Russell, was eighteen years old
when he read in the autobiography
of John Stuart Mill that the question:
Who made God? , cannot be answered.
This prompted him to reject
the notion of the First Cause
and he became an atheist.

Twenty years had flowed down
under the bridges of the River Thames.
And then propelled by a throbbing drive
to find a secure anchor,
together with Alfred North Whitehead,
Russell published in 1910-13
a landmark, three-volume work,
The Principia Mathematica.

The authors believed that they laid down
in symbolic logic the foundations
for analytical certitudes,
a set of axioms and inference rules
from which, all mathematical truths,
in principle at least, could be proven.

Yet two decades later,
Kurt Goedel came along and showed
the Incompleteness and Undecidability
of mathematical knowledge.
Goedel said that every system of axioms
engaged in arithmetic produces sets
of self-referential statements
whose truth or falsity
remain to be unresolved forever.
Thus propositions rise among
well-shaved formulae,
which can neither be proved,
nor disproved.

Moreover, adding new axioms
does not solve the problem
because they churn out
other undecidable propositions.
Since uncertainty strikes the axioms,
mathematics defies
its reduction to a class of rules
that could spawn valid proofs
and viable theorems.

Thus, truth turns to be
stronger and larger
than our ability to prove it.
The limits of logic barricade the mind.
Like the foot that cannot step on itself,
the mind cannot encompass
its own essence.

Russel was devastated
by Goedel's theorems.
Bewildered by the loss of certainty,
he gazed at the inscrutable night sky
in desparate yearning
for a solitary secure signal from above.
However, the flickering stars
remained silent.

So, in vain the finite mind ponders
unpenetrable mysteries
clad in the timelessness of time,
or reckons eternity
gleaming with the beams of hope.

But, nevertheless,
the soul hears distant melodies
of unbounded love
and recalls Pascal,
who knew already centuries ago
that the heart understands the reason
that reason does not understand.