You left out three.
Sorry
Posted on 01/28/2008 9:20:07 AM PST by forkinsocket
Which math-phobic among us has not beseeched God for help with another colon-clenching algebra or calculus exam? Had we heeded the words of the German mathematician Leopold Kronecker, perhaps we would have realized we've been talking to the wrong person: "God made the integers; all else is the work of man."
Pythagoras, who gave us his eponymous theorem on right-angled triangles, headed a cult of number worshippers who believed God was a mathematician. "All is number," they would intone.
The 17th-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza echoed the Platonic idea that mathematical law and the harmony of nature are aspects of the divine. Spinoza, too, posited that God's activities in the universe were simply a description of mathematical and physical laws. For that and other heretical views, he was excommunicated by Amsterdam's Jewish community.
German mathematician Georg Cantor's work on infinity and numbers beyond infinity (the mystical "transfinite") was denounced by theologians who saw it as a challenge to God's infiniteness. Cantor's obsession with mathematical infinity and God's transcendence eventually landed him in an insane asylum.
For the Hindu math genius Ramanujan, an uneducated clerk from Madras who wowed early 20th-century Cambridge, an equation "had no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God." Though an agnostic, the prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos imagined a heavenly book in which God has inscribed the most elegant and yet unknown mathematical proofs.
And famously, Albert Einstein said God "does not play dice" with the universe.
What is it with God and mathematics? Even as science and religion have quarrelled for centuries and are only recently exploring ways to kiss and make up, mathematicians have been saying for millennia that no truer expression of the divine can be found than in an ethereally beautiful equation, formula or proof.
Witness, for example, such transcendent numbers as phi (not to be confused with pi), often called the Divine Proportion or the Golden Ratio. At 1.618, it describes the spirals of seashells, pine cones and symmetries found throughout nature. Other mysterious constants like alpha (one-137th) and gamma (0.5772...) pop up in enough odd places to suggest to some that they are an expression of the underlying beauty of mathematics, and to others that someone or something planned it that way.
But does that translate into actual belief?
The New York Times reported recently that mathematicians believe in God at a rate 2 1/2 times that of biologists, quoting a survey of the National Academy of Sciences. Admittedly, that's not saying much: Only 14.6 per cent of mathematicians embraced the God hypothesis, versus 5.5 per cent of biologists (versus some 80 per cent of Canadians who believe in a supreme being).
Count John Allen Paulos among the non-believers. A mathematician who teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia and who has popularized his subject in bestselling books such as Innumeracy and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, Paulos's latest offering is a slim but explosive volume whose title is self-explanatory: Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up (Hill & Wang).
This newest addition to the neo-atheist field crowded by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and others emboldened by the recent transformation of non-belief from a 97-pound weakling into a he-man, Paulos thankfully employs little math, preferring to see things, as he tells us, in the stark light of "logic and probability."
Deploying "a lightly heretical touch," he dissects a playlist of "golden oldies" that includes the first-cause argument (sometimes tweaked as the cosmological argument, which hinges on the Big Bang), the argument for intelligent design, the ontological argument (crudely, that if we can conceive of God, then God exists), the argument from the anthropic principle (that the universe is "fine-tuned" to allow us to exist), the moral universality argument, and others.
The famous Pascal's wager – that it's in our self-interest to believe in God because we lose nothing in case He does exist – is upended as logically flawed, based on what statisticians call Type I and Type II errors.
Lord knows Paulos isn't the first mathematician to proclaim his lack of religious faith. Cambridge's famous wunderkind G.H. Hardy loudly and proudly adjudged God to be his enemy. To Erdos, God, if He existed, was "the supreme fascist."
Even as Paulos works to refute the classical arguments for God's existence, he does something too few of his mindset do: Chide non-believers for unsportsmanlike conduct.
"It's repellent for atheists or agnostics," he admonishes, "to personally and aggressively question others' faith or pejoratively label it as benighted flapdoodle or something worse. Those who do are rightfully seen as arrogant and overbearing."
That doesn't prevent him from doffing the gloves. The ontological argument is "logical abracadabra.'' The design, or teleological argument, is a "creationist Ponzi scheme'' that "quickly leads to metaphysical bankruptcy.''
Much of theology is "a kind of verbal magic show.'' A claim that a holy book is inerrant because the book itself says so is another logical black hole.
However, math, specifically something called Ramsey theory, which studies the conditions under which order must appear, can account for the illusion of divine order arising from chaos.
Paulos provides a nice counterpoint to theoretical physicist Stephen Unwin's 2003 book The Probability of God, which calculated the likelihood of God's existence at 67 per cent, and to Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne's use of a probability formula known as Bayes' theorem to put the odds of Christ's resurrection at 97 per cent.
Those and other efforts remind one of the story, perhaps apocryphal, of Catherine the Great's request of the German mathematical giant Leonhard Euler to confront atheist French philosopher Denis Diderot with evidence of God. The visiting Euler agreed, and at the meeting, strode forward to proclaim to the innumerate Frenchman: "Sir, (a+bn)/n = x, hence God exists. Reply!"
Diderot was said to be so dumbfounded, he immediately returned to Paris.
To Paulos, the tale is a great example of "how easily nonsense proffered in an earnest and profound manner can browbeat someone into acquiescence."
His arguments notwithstanding, Paulos concedes that there's "no way to conclusively disprove the existence of God."
The reason, he notes, is a consequence of basic logic, but not one "from which theists can take much heart."
As for the problem of good and evil, he defers to fellow atheist, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg: "With or without religion, good people will do good, and evil people will do evil. But for good people to do evil, that takes religion."
Or as Paulos might say, no mathematician has ever deliberately flown planes into buildings.
Ron Csillag is a freelance writer from Thornhill.
Bovine Excrement.
One, two, five.
—b—
You left out three.
Next is seven.
It is a nice sounding theory that when you separate the Christian Church from the state, you get stability, but it does not pass the common sense test.
For instance, I know it is the first words out of any atheist mouth when you try to talk with them about Jesus, “Explain the Inquisition," and “Look how evil the church was!" and "Look what they did in the name of Jesus!"
It is true that about 500 years ago, Christian fanatics killed about 10,000 people over a 100 year time period (about 100/year) in the name of the Roman Catholic church. It is a shame on the record of an organization that claims to be promoting the ministry of Christ. Now compare this record to the example of the countries that have officially done away with religion. To the countries that have outright banned religion and imprisoned those who try to practice it (the ultimate test of the theory of separation of church and state).
Yes, I am talking about Communist countries. In the Communist Manifesto, Engel and Marx declared, "Communism abolishes all religion." In my father's lifetime, the numbers of people that officially atheist countries have murdered in the name of no-religion is staggering; the USSR slaughtered 20 million, China slaughtered 10 million, Communist Cambodia slaughtered 2 million, Communist North Korea has/continues to murder untold numbers, Communist Cuba has/continues to murder untold numbers, the list goes on.
The grand total is over 50 million dead in the last 80-year time span (over 600,000/year). Even comparing the worst time of "Christian Persecution" to an average time of a just one country that has officially and forcefully separated church and state, the conclusion is obvious: Christianity has a huge calming influence on government.
Atheists love to hark back to the dark days of Christian sectarian violence, but it is Christian Europe with its underpinnings of Judaic law that brought forth western civilization. The bad is infinitesimal compared to the good in western civilization. We had better resolve to defend it.
2banana
ping for future.
God is an APPLIED mathematician.
Yeah.
The greatest murderers in history... Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot... all were highly religious. /sarc. LOL!
They were atheists. Like 86% of mathematicians. Like the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg. Like Margaret Sanger.
Just anti-religious bigotry.
I’m sure in the heart of the person that spake thus, he’s only referring to Christianity.
One tidbit for everyone - ever wonder why the Muslims didn’t advance ANY science of their own except for what they stole from conquered civilizations?
In Christianity, we believe that God is good and consistent. For example, we assume that He wouldn’t make the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter different in different cases.
Any such “chaining” of “Allah” would be viewed as a beheadable offense in Islam.
You left out three.
Sorry
That it is alot of fish?
It's the birthday of anyone born on May 3, year 1?
Nice Reply.
Do you have a source for your statistics?
I went the other way 'cause my BD is on May 3!...felt a kind of kindred relationship, ya see...
They are all over the net. This is a good source (and yes, I was very conservative with the numbers)
http://www.jpfo.org/filegen-a-m/deathgc.htm
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