Math and God [Part 1]

Did we discover math, or did we invent it? Was it there without us, before us, or is it our own creation, only possible with the growth of the human brain?

It’s a huge question – I realize – but the significance, once we realize the ramifications of either claim, are startling. This will be a 2 part series. Today, I will discuss the first possibility.

Let’s say we discovered math. That is to say that quantities, functions, and co-ordinates exist independently of humanity and have consequences, therefore, beyond humanity.

The universe, therefore, is not random, but a menagerie of co-mingled mathematical expressions and dangling formulas we just might not yet have access to. Math – and I don’t mean word, I mean the concept – has always been and will continue to be in the world.

It may have taken us millions of years of evolution to recognize it as such, but since we did, it has helped us to reasonably expect that events happen probabilistically, that quantities may be combined, divided, and multiplied.

We have learned that theoretical speculations can have logical, expectable, feasible premises behind them. This is good. We like to be right. And we like when it’s not just us making ourselves be right. (We like that too, just a little bit less).

This line of rhetoric makes a lot of sense, at least to me. Much of the math we have just seems to work with the world. (Of course there is also a ton of math that doesn’t work at all with the world, but seems to work just fine with itself). When we add marbles in front of our eyes, or on paper, we get the same answer. Yet, unfortunately for our logical expectations of consistency, empirically demonstrating that Math works in front of our eyes does not serve as good proof that Math was indeed discovered – that is, there before our eyes/minds could see it. In short, just because this A is a B, it does not mean that all As are Bs and certainly not that A → B. Remember Hume’s fork?

In fact, it is this shortcoming that leads me away from attempting any proof that Math can be existent independent of humanity. Sure we coined the word ‘math’, but we also coined the words ‘sky’, ‘earth’, and ‘dinosaur’ – surely this doesn’t mean that these things didn’t exist before we categorized them as such.

So if math is independent of our conception of it, and if we have finally become smart enough to hit the tip of the ice berg in discovering one of the mysterious ways in which the universe operates, should we be asking what this means?

If Math was discovered by us, not intentionally invented by us, does it not mean that it was intentionally imposed upon us? If Math, as a discovery, includes the potential explanation to all of the inner-workings of the universe’s celestial bodies – from big to small – and our current intelligence is enough to help us see the possibilities of how far we could take this concept but falls short of completely comprehending it in the first place, what then, I would ask anyone, besides a bunch of archaic and unsubstantial mythologies is the substantive different between our word for ‘math’ and our word for ‘God.’

Surely a religious person would not claim that God was invented, but rather God was discovered. God was always there, waiting to be found, until ‘I’ (whomever claims to have done so) found God. Similarly, Math, if discovered, has always been there, ruling, shaping, changing the nature of things, and keeping constant rules of order and existence until we discovered it, and then realized that we could use it to create our own theoretical, hypothetical words based on rules and constraints of our own construction.

So then, I conclude, with no mathematical certainty, but only a philosophical intuition as my guide that “Math = God” is a true statement, and the only way to disprove it would be to show me how the creative power and potential that Math yields does not function in a similar capacity to the expectation we have of the all powerful creator.

I bet if you told a mathematician that he was doing God’s work, he’d look at you cross-eyed. On the other hand, maybe not.