(June 9, 2020 at 4:27 pm)Belacqua Wrote:(June 9, 2020 at 3:31 pm)Grandizer Wrote: Was watching a debate between Graham Oppy and WLC recently on YouTube, and the topic of the debate had to do with whether or not the applicability of mathematics to the universe serves as evidence for God. WLC (and a lot of Christian thinkers) seem to think that mathematics (at least at the advanced levels) is completely a priori and will find it surprising that it nevertheless can be reliably applied to the universe in the form of physical laws and such. But I'm really not sure what the shocker here is. My understanding is that even the most advanced mathematics that is applied to reality is generally still based on aspects of reality that have been discovered/experienced, so of course when you then apply mathematical conclusions and theorems back to reality, it shouldn't be a surprise that often times there will be a successful mapping between mathematics and reality. If there is structural order in the universe, this is to be expected. But order does not necessitate the existence of God and is perfectly compatible with naturalistic views. Order, for example, might simply be the necessary manifestation that the universe exhibits, and pure chaos might perhaps be some form of an illusion. You could argue that this order still needs some grounding in something, but that is still fine with naturalism in general.
Thoughts, disagreements, go ahead.
I haven't read any WLC. It wouldn't come as a surprise, though, to hear that someone had pointed to genuine philosophical puzzles and tried to puff them up as proofs for God.
The relation of math to the material world does apparently turn out to be trickier than one might first expect. Math isn't only and always a descriptor for what goes on in the material world. Roland Penrose is good on this, among others.
At most, one could use math as an example of non-material things having an existence that isn't known through empirical means. Getting from there to God, though, needs a whole lot more steps.
Bolded mine. Yeah, mathematics has its many uses, and not all of them are applied to the real world in any way. I do think though that, when it is successfully applied, it's because of some initial inbuilt assumptions based on (or derived from) observations made in the real world. In a way, there seems to be some circular thing happening here. Something like: physical observations -> basic maths -> more advanced maths -> predictions about physical world.
Maybe a specific example or two would help to challenge this view. I'm curious now if complex numbers that are applied to the physical world in such fields as electrical engineering are really that surprising. My gut feeling tells me that while this is interesting, complex numbers are still nevertheless based on the square root of a real number, so there's an initial thing here that is easily mappable to the real world.
