ИСТИНА

A deep conviction of the majority of mathematicians on the brink of the 20th century was that mathematics is or at least must be infallible, consistent, rigorous, certain, necessary and universal, as well as free and applicable to the world without restriction. This common belief needs to be explained. This very conviction or belief was responsible for a heated argument provoked by set-theoretic paradoxes which were interpreted as an indication of the foundational crisis of mathematics (Grundlagenkrise der Mathematik). The crisis caused the emergence of diverse programs for the foundations of mathematics. Those programs gave birth, on the one hand, to the contemporary philosophy of mathematics and, on the other, to the formation of a new research field within mathematics: mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics. This paper proposes the hypothesis that mathematics, seen from the foundationalist perspective, served at the time as a substitute for theology. According to this approach, philosophy of mathematics mediates an impact between theology and mathematics. To confirm this hypothesis I consider the prehistory of such an absolutist account of mathematics and pay a special attention to theological and quasi-theological ideas of the key figures of the three main foundationalist programs (logicism, intuitionism and formalism).