Math shows that God exists
Why is there a correlation between our abstract descriptions of the workings and laws of nature and its actual behavior? After all, if the "laws of nature" are merely the result of random natural processes, we have no reason to think they are at all predictable. And yet, they are predictable and reliable to a stupefying degree.
The physicist Eugene Wigner seems to have originated the phrase, "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics." It is unreasonable because we have no reason to think that mathematics, a product of human minds, would bear any resemblance at all to the real world. A striking example of this “unreasonable effectiveness” is Leonhard Euler’s (1707–1783) work with imaginary numbers in the eighteenth century and their actual application in electricity and quantum mechanics hundreds of years later. How is that possible, unless there is an amazing order to the laws of nature? Our best attempts to understand mathematics reflect the actual order of real things.
Twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophers and scientists believe that the laws of nature are a kind of incarnation of the mind of God.1 Antony Flew's answer to the question, “Did the universe know we were coming?” is that God structured it that way. The universe appears to have known we were coming because God knew. Belief in the God of the Bible answers the philosophical problem, “Who wrote the laws of nature?” That Jesus is real and the Bible is true have great explanatory power when it comes to this philosophical question. All things, even the laws of nature, hold together in Jesus.
1Flew, Antony, There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, New York: Harper Collins, 2007, p. 97 .
This blog article is an excerpt from my book: Five Languages of Evidence: How to Speak about Reasons for Christianity in a Post-truth World. Not yet published; available upon request.
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