(June 9, 2020 at 4:27 pm)LostLocke Wrote: Some years ago, somewhere on the great wide web, (I don't remember where), people were discussing math as the "proof" for God, or at least a higher intelligence. Someone said, if this discussion was a sentence, math would be an adjective and/or adverb, *not* a noun or verb. Math *describes* a thing, it is not the thing in itself. The observable universe doesn't follow the laws of math, rather we created the "language" of math to describe what the observable universe is doing.
As I understand it, the pro-God side has wanted to use math in two ways:
1) The world operates on regular knowable principles which can be described by math. This can be seen as Logos, a concept pulled into religion long ago.
2) Many people (not just religious ones) have said that numbers are ideal objects, with an existence that is without change, extension, or location. The existence of non-material, transcendent objects of this type has been important to theology pretty much since it began.
I'm not advocating the religious view here, just describing how it relates to math.