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No.

Godel's completeness theorem can not be understood without bringing in first order logic, because it is a statement of the expressitivity of the language(relative to its semantics). Other more expressive languages, like second order logic (with its usual semantics) is not complete. Trying to explain Godel's completeness theorem without bringing in the language is a path to confusion.

And your explanation of the first incompleteness theorem is also at best confusing. I must preface this with the comment that your definition of a 'theorem' matches what is usually called a sentence or a statement, and a theorem is usually reserved for a sentence which is proven by a axiomatic system. If the axiomatic system is sound, all theorems will be true in all models. The question of completeness is whether or not all truths(aka sentences true in all models) can be proven(aka they are theorems). With this more common usage of the words, Gödel's incompleteness theorems show that every consistent theory containing the natural numbers has true statements on natural numbers that are not theorems of the theory (that is they cannot be proved inside the theory).

Your description of the first incompleteness theorem is also true for complete logics, even for propositional logic (with your definition of 'theorem' as actually meaning statement). It has statements which is true in some models and false in others. This does not make it incomplete.

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My understanding is that for any system of axioms strong enough to encode arithmetic, you can have at most two of these three properties:

1. Complete (for any well formed statement, the axioms can be used to prove either it or its negation)

2. Consistent (can't arrive at contradictory statements ~ arriving at a both a statement and its negation )

3. The set of axioms is enumerable ~ you can write a program that lists them in a defined order (since the workaround for completeness can be just adding an axiom for the cases that are unproven in your original set)

If my understanding is correct, I believe your explanation is missing the third required property.

It's also important to point out that if we cant prove a statement or its negation (one of which must be true) then we know there are true statements that are unprovable. This is a much stronger of a finding than "Godel's first incompleteness theorem says that in any axiomatic system (sufficiently complex) there are theorems that are neither always true nor always false. "

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That is interesting, I always thought that the incompleteness theorems says, there are theorems that are true or false in all models but cannot be proved to be so. But if it that is not the case and there always exist models where the theorem is true and false, that makes it sound to me, like the incompleteness theorem is not really about proving things. With that it sounds more like the inability of a sufficiently complex set of axioms to only admit isomorphic models, i.e. have all possible models agree on all expressible theorems. Makes the entire thing sound almost trivial, of course you can not prove what does not follow from the axioms.
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> I always thought that the incompleteness theorems says, there are theorems that are true or false in all models but cannot be proved to be so.

As the GP points out, that's not what Godel's incompleteness theorem actually shows. Although it's a common misconception (one which unfortunately is propagated by many sources that should know better).

The key point of the incompleteness theorem is that it shows that (at least in first order logic, which is the logic in which the theorem holds) no set of axioms can ever pin down a single model. For example, no set of first-order axioms can ever pin down "the standard natural numbers" as the only model satisfying the axioms. There will always be other models that also satisfy them. So if you want to pin down a single model, you always have to go beyond just a set of first-order axioms.

Using the natural numbers as an example, consider a model that consists of two "chains" of numbers:

(0, 1, 2, 3, ....)

(..., -3a, -2a, -1a, 0a, 1a, 2a, 3a, ...)

The first chain is, of course, the standard natural numbers, but the second chain also satisfies the standard first-order axioms that we normally take to define natural numbers. So this model, as a whole, satisfies those axioms. And there is no way, within first-order logic, to say "I only want my model to include the first chain". That's what Godel's incompleteness theorem (or more precisely, his first incompleteness theorem combined with his completeness theorem) tells us.

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> The key point of the incompleteness theorem is that it shows that (at least in first order logic, which is the logic in which the theorem holds) no set of axioms can ever pin down a single model.

No, this was known before the incompleteness theorem, ref Löwenheim–Skolem theorem.

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The Lowenheim Skolem theorem only applies to first-order axiom systems that have an infinite model. So it would apply to the axioms for the natural numbers, yes.

The Godel theorems apply to any first-order axiom system, regardless of whether it has an infinite model or not.

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