If Youth Knew, If Age Could 15 — All Things Bright and Wonderful, and Unknown: What Do We Know, Really?
Dr. Herb Silverman is the Founder of the Secular Coalition for America, the Founder of the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, and the Founder of the Atheist/Humanist Alliance student group at the College of Charleston. He authored Complex variables (1975), Candidate Without a Prayer: An Autobiography of a Jewish Atheist in the Bible Belt (2012) and An Atheist Stranger in a Strange Religious Land: Selected Writings from the Bible Belt (2017). He co-authored The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America (2003) with Kimberley Blaker and Edward S. Buckner, Complex Variables with Applications (2007) with Saminathan Ponnusamy, and Short Reflections on Secularism (2019), and Short Reflections on American Secularism’s History and Philosophy (2020).
Here we talk about what you know, what you can’t know, and what you can’t ever know.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Of all possible mathematical knowledge, what do we really know? You were a distinguished professor in the past. We have written a text on this.
Herb Silverman: Here is what we know about mathematics. Mathematicians start with axioms (assumptions) and see what conclusion may logically be deduced (proved) from…
