One could argue that it does in the following way.
What do you think?
Paul Dirac said, "God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world." However, I think as follows: This is a literary expression of "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences" [this is the title of Eugene P. Wigner's paper published in Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, Vol. 13, pp. 1-14 (1960) https://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html] up to the present human knowledge. The usefulness of mathematics might be a happy coincidence. Therefore, the applicability of mathematics does not necessarily point to the existence of God.
I have to confess, that made me chuckle out loud. (In a good way, to be clear.) Thing is, Kirk, that given the physical world exists, math was created by us as a convenient tool to measure and describe, rigorously, the physical world. Conceivably, in a different reality, mankind would have created a different mathematics. Said another way, the physical world comes first. Mankind, and its creation of math, follows.
So, how is this any different from claiming that, without God, the physcial world would not exist, and therefore math would not exist? I'm saying, you don't need to mention math specifically. It does not really help make the point.
The other aspect of this is, regardless, the God(s) we humans have postulated is/are certainly not the essential truth. The physical world, and math as we know it, could exist just as well, with a totally different model of the supernatural. There will always be things we don't understand, but that doesn't mean that our construct of a supernatural framework, with all of its very specific rules and unsubstantiated minutiae, is even remotely accurate.
The applicability of mathematics points only to the existence of mathematicians.
Paul Dirac said, "God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world." However, I think as follows: This is a literary expression of "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences" [this is the title of Eugene P. Wigner's paper published in Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, Vol. 13, pp. 1-14 (1960) https://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html] up to the present human knowledge. The usefulness of mathematics might be a happy coincidence. Therefore, the applicability of mathematics does not necessarily point to the existence of God.
Dear Tatsuo
I am reading Wigner as I write. I shall get back to you after I've finished
best regards Tony
Modern mathematical interpretations of Kurt Gödel are essential for your question; the PDF contains the latest update. I do personally think that maths is a very helpful tool to measure patterns of reality, and to formulate eventually the laws of harmony of matter and living matter. However, it cannot deliver any proof for or against a creator. It is exactly this 'neutrality' which makes maths so effective and efficient.
Mathematics is not an independent science, but only a language. From this point of view, mathematics is simply trying to translate into language of formulas the reality surrounding us, in particular physics. There is even a science called "Mathematical Physics". From my point of view, brilliant music, for example Mozart's 40th symphony, is the creation of a god in which Mozart deeply believed. That is, music is inside God as its component part. However, there is no way to formally describe Mozart's genius music with the language of mathematics, it's simply impossible. If this were possible, then the world would lose all meaning, since then in this case everything would have been possible to predict with any accuracy. However, the strength and beauty of the world is primarily in its unpredictability, and this fact gives rise to a great sense in life. As is known, mathematical models are created in order to predict future events.Thus, let's leave the god alone, who is already beautiful and wonderful in itself without any outside interference. Once the bard of Vladimir Vysotsky was asked: "For what qualities do you love your friend?" he replied: "If I could have known for what, then it would not be love, it would be a good relationship." In short: there are things that can not be explained even by ordinary words, not to mention mathematics.
God or a Supreme power does exist; can you name the one who created science
ok Prof you seem fight tooth and nail to prove point -3 !!!!!!!!!!!
MATH as much as I love it , is created by us , a language so universal that can explain phenomenon(s) in a scientific way !!!
Now , god for some reason is a form of faith, free from a need for explanation or rationality . So strongly embedded in us that we do not want any equations explaining the existence of faith within us !!!!
Conclusion : Math defines rather looks for ORDER
Faith looks for strength may be in a time of CHAOS
No one has proved the existence of God through mathematics
Many physicists and mathematicians have tried and come close; modeling something similar to true nature. Theory of Relativity, Quantum Physics, etc.
The consensus reached by a number of cosmologists (Vilenkin ...) , and by a roundabout way information theorists (Vlatko Vedral, whose view of emerging physics requires the pre-existence of math, et al....) and philosophers (Philip Goff ...) is that a form of disembodied mathematics must have existed before anything could become real (be that ‘anything’ our own universe, or alternatively something else that forewent it.)
Your question can hence be reworded as follows: was there some form of consciousness present within ‘disembodied mathematics’.
I know of a hard science project looking into exactly that question (which as you can imagine is not exactly straightforward), and they will be publishing their work at the back end of 2018 - stay tuned.
Dear H. Chris:
I wonder why scientists interpret the foundations of mathematics as God or consciousness. Plato's conjecture is far better; there is an Ideal reality (or part of reality). I can easily accept Plato´s view as a partial truth, in my Aristotelian framework (see link below), without postulating God or a primitive/universal consciousness. In my view, the existence of conscious experiences and the concept of God formulated by conscious persons are both products of the evolutionary process. I see no reason to postulate their existence at the origins of reality.
Chapter Triple-Aspect Monism: a framework for the science of human c...
Dear Alfredo,
I think it's likely all ultimately a question of semantics: if some "Ur-mind" turns out to be the ultimate reality - some mind-stuff behind the math which turns out to be behind material reality - then this Ur-mind could be labelled 'God' - of course, a fundamentally different God from the personal, anthropomorphic, often ridiculously petty god that many religions from a dark pre-scientific past would have us believe in ....
In the work I am referring to, there is no postulating - prior, disembodied math seems to be truly required for a false vacuum to be able to tunnel out of a true vacuum (i.e., the genesis of any existence out of pure non-existence), and the question becomes, does a form of mindstuff forego - precede - disembodied math? There seems to be solid grounds to suspect so .... but, as i said, straightforward it isn't.
Dear Kirk,
... as if there is the only alternative between "happy coincidence" and God's work: Your assumption no. 1 is simply wrong!
There could be other explanations for the applicability of mathematics to the "physical world". What about this one?: Humans learned to categorize their environment - the world - as "things", i. e.: we are accustomed to see the world through certain spectacles, I mean: with certain ontologies in mind. If it seems to be "natural" for us to categorize the world as "things", it will be in the same way natural to count them. And counting is the beginning of all mathematics.
If you are a medieval scholastic theologian, you may even ask whether the applicability of mathematics to theology points to the existence of God, since with mathematics you can work on such brilliant questions like "How many angels can be placed on a needle tip?". If one is used to count heavenly creatures (which requires a certain type of ontology), one may even apply mathematics to theology. Thanks to God, theology gave up counting angels and demons!
Thus, my result is near to the citation that Christian brought up: "it is only its [the physical world's] mathematical properties that we can discover." (Russel)
Physics simply observes the world through the lens of mathematics. Therefore mathematics fits so perfectly to the physical (!) world. (Well, this is one possible explanation. There may be others. However, it shows that your first precondition is anything but evident.)
Regards
Lorns
It is said " When it comes to optimization - nature does it better" . If you believe nature as god, then god knows mathematics!!!.
The logical thinking of human beings which lead to the school of thought ascribed as " Mathematics" as a convenience tool to do things meticulously. If mathematics is god, why animals do not understand simple arithmetic tasks? If mathematics is god, why god is biased ? For some of the actions in mundane life mathematics is not needed , most of the things we do in our day-to-day life is by experiential learning.
I don't think so. As existence of God is just merely based on belief; It can not be proved by the mathematics or by pure sciences.
Thank you for sharing this question. After a brief analysis of the fundamental physical theories from the past few hundred years we see many unanswered questions. They indicate that our mathematical models of the Universe are not the finalized intellectual constructs. This fact combined with the Gödel incompleteness theorems shows that our understanding of Nature can be advanced further, but it is unlikely to be completed. This iterative process is converging rather slowly and I think that we still do not have mathematics suited for the task at hand. The progress in creation of the fundamental mathematical theories is still much slower than the corresponding advancements in technology. It took around 100 years to obtain a proof of the Poincaré conjecture, in the same time the computing abilities of mankind advanced from the level of abacus to supercomputers. This discrepancy dominates the current use of mathematics, we are slowly drifting away from the analytical models to the numerical approximations, even in such a fundamental areas as cosmology. In conclusion I can say that in the recent time, mathematics is used mainly as an element in the iterative process of building the successive approximations of the physical reality.
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