On the Big Ideas Blog there is a post about the different types of reasoning, Analytic vs. Synthetic, and their relevance to the existence or non-existence of God. But, my favorite passage was one concerning we mathematicians:
The requirement of reasonableness might be illustrated as follows. Imagine Tom, John and Jane live in a country run entirely by mathematicians. Their whole culture is built on analytic thinking — only water-tight logical proofs are considered to have any real force. Well, then it would hardly matter how careless Tom had been in disguising the murder, since any number of outlandish explanations for his innocence might be put forward. If you require that Tom is innocent until analytically proven guilty then he’ll get off scot-free, as will every other criminal. This is why mathematicians are rarely given anything important to do.
(Emphasis mine). Yep, we'll just stick to proofs and blogging!
