Will Adkisson : Cardinals Without Choice

Posted by William Adkisson , part of the Louise Hay Logic Seminar.

At

March 21, 2019, 4 p.m.

In

427 SEO

Abstract

In the 16th century, the rise of Calvanism and its doctrine of predestination presented an idealogical challenge to the Catholic Church. To prevent further schisms, the Vatican was forced to seriously examine the theological consequences of a lack of free will. If all is predestined, that would imply that a good, just, and merciful God actively wills evil, rather than merely permits it, and actively predestines individuals to hell. A somewhat smaller complication that the Vatican was forced to grapple with, however, was how to describe the size of infinite sets without being able to guarantee explicit bijections to the ordinals.