Timeline for Do Christians believe that God used mathematics to design the universe?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 7 at 1:01 | vote | accept | CommunityBot | ||
| Apr 1 at 17:38 | comment | added | Ian | @Matthew - Yes, I suppose immaterial created things can be immutable. Angels are like ideas in this way. But the fact that the idea never maps onto the physical world perfectly (IE - there is no perfect triangle and if you put one near a black hole the math is no good), is perhaps a good argument for man being made in the image of God, or else where do our ideals come from? We bridge the material and immaterial; we are priests. I'm sure Plato's forms have something to do with this, but I'm not that well read. | |
| Apr 1 at 17:23 | comment | added | Matthew | @Ian, to be clear I don't claim that the equations which map math to physics are uncreated. Math itself however might be. For example, it can be proven using only pure math that 1+1 does equal 2, at least to the extent one permits those symbols to have the usual meanings. Much else in math can be similarly proven. The Pythagorean Theorem, for example, is a likely candidate for something which is immutable. | |
| Apr 1 at 17:17 | comment | added | Ian | I'm not sure Math is immutable. Mathematical models are useful within certain constraints. For instance Newtonian calculations are useless for electrons. Even the concept 1 + 1 = 2 can be slippery. If I have 2 apples and I try to analyze this mathematically I have to ask what is an apple exactly? Does the stem count? No matter how I construct it I will always have 2.1 or 1.9 apples. There is always a jump between the physical and theoretical that is something like faith, and multiple models maths can be rightly used to analyze the same phenomena with varying degrees of accuracy. | |
| Mar 31 at 12:25 | comment | added | curiousdannii♦ | @Mark Please stop requesting people go look at your questions on other sites. That's not one of the acceptable uses of comments. | |
| Mar 30 at 10:28 | comment | added | gidds | Early scientists seem to have agreed with this view. If it's permitted to quote such a secular source, Isaac Newton's masterwork of mathematics and science, the Principia, starts with an ode by Edmund Halley with the lines: “Here ponder too the Laws which God, Framing the universe, set not aside But made the fixed foundations of his work.” | |
| Mar 30 at 2:21 | comment | added | David Cary | +1. Perhaps Proverbs 8 also supports this, implying that wisdom is another of what you call "immutables", things that were not created, but instead things that were with God before any "thing" was created. | |
| Mar 29 at 17:44 | comment | added | Matthew | Let us continue this discussion in chat. | |
| Mar 29 at 17:37 | comment | added | user61679 | What do you think about a naturalist postulating the fine-tuning of the universe as a brute fact and the origin of life as a brute fact as well (in the sense that the improbable coincide of abiogenesis was bound to happen as a brute fact)? | |
| Mar 29 at 17:07 | history | answered | Matthew | CC BY-SA 4.0 |