Topics Mathematics

Question Even if there was no intelligent life at all in the whole universe, if there were no humans, or other thinking creatures, mathematics would still exist, wouldn't it? Of course no one would ever find out about mathematics' existence, but its truths would just be THERE... Isn't that magnificiant? We didn't make up mathematics. It just exists and doesn't require any atoms or whatever... Do you think it is something divine?

Accepted:
April 15, 2010

Comments

Thank you for this wonderful question.

I don't myself know whether to say that mathematics is something divine, but the idea that it is has a long history, going back at least to the early modern Rationalists. Many of them suggest, directly or indirectly, that, in uncovering the (as they saw it) fundamentally mathematical principles that describe the operation of the universe—this is the very birth of mathematical physics—one is thereby limning the very thoughts of the Creator, which gave birth to, and continually sustain, the universe. Even today, one often reads remarks by physicists (and other scientists) that have a similar bent: that there is an astonishing beauty to the fundamental laws that, in some way, seems to provide a glimpse of the divine. Note that this essentially aesthetic response needs to be sharply distinguished from any form of the argument from design. It is not that people think, "Well, this is all so incredible, someone had to design it". It's more, "Wow", followed by an indescribable feeling that somehow everything ultimately makes some kind of sense, quite independent of us. I have in mind here a feeling of how small and insignificant one is and yet that this is OK, because one is so privileged not just to have a place in this great cosmic show, but to have had a glimpse of what the show as a whole is about.

Can the contemplation of mathematics produce that kind of Wow-feeling? I do not see why it should not. Mathematics can be tremendously beautiful, and the sense that such beauty "just is" might well inspire the "everything makes sense" feeling.