[snarks_when_bored]

Nice quote from Barrow, A-G. Here's what I would say to a couple of parts of it:

All our surest statements about the nature of the world are mathematical statements, yet we do not know what mathematics "is" ...

I agree.

... and so we find that we have adapted a religion strikingly similar to many traditional faiths. Change "mathematics" to "God" and little else might seem to change.

I disagree. Attributing to mathematics the characteristics commonly attributed to a deity makes little sense to me.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your reply, snarks!

Barrow: ... and so we find that we have adapted a religion strikingly similar to many traditional faiths. Change "mathematics" to "God" and little else might seem to change.

Snarks: I disagree. Attributing to mathematics the characteristics commonly attributed to a deity makes little sense to me.

Perhaps it would be helpful to consider Barrow’s remarks in light of Eugene Wigner’s ”The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.

The original article is online here. A more current view of the phenomenon by Cumrum Vafa is here.

My personal favorite example is Riemannian geometry which Einstein was able to pull “off the shelf” to describe general relativity.

Barrow’s observation is that mathematics exists, the mathematician or geometer comes along and discovers it. Pi is true everywhere in space/time. And because it transcends the human creative process, it has a mystical quality – or as Wigner and Vafa observe, it is unreasonably effective.

In my view, the unreasonable effectiveness of math - like the fact of a beginning and that the universe is intelligible at all - declares that God exists. Order cannot rise out of chaos in an unguided physical system.