Church's Thesis is a metamathematical hypothesis that says the concepts of effective calculability and computability are coextensive. It is reasonable to consider everything that happens in the material world to be ‘effective’. If Church's Thesis were true in the natural world, then it would mean that all material processes could be expressed in purely syntactic terms. A corollary in relational biology is that a living system must have noncomputable models. Thus the existence of living systems implies that Church's Thesis is false as a physical proposition. The paper begins with a review of the tenets of relational biology, which is the standpoint from which this exposition on the Foundations of Mathematics and Theoretical Biology is composed.

Church's Thesis 是一个元数学假设，它说有效可计算性和可计算性的概念是同延的。认为物质世界中发生的一切都是“有效的”是合理的。如果丘奇的论题在自然界中是正确的，那么这将意味着所有物质过程都可以用纯粹的句法术语来表达。关系生物学的一个推论是生命系统必须具有不可计算的模型。因此，生命系统的存在意味着丘奇的命题作为一个物理命题是错误的。该论文首先回顾了关系生物学的原则，这是构成本次关于数学和理论生物学基础的论述的观点。