Mathematics is a human construct. It it exists only in the same sense as any other idea exists. And that existence is constrained to sentient minds. If humans ceased to exist, so would our mathematics.
We can use mathematics to describe the universe. But the fit between mathematics and the universe must be supported by evidence. Because there is no evidence of things outside the universe, we cannot make any scientific conclusions about the applicability of mathematics to anything there.
I don’t have a lot of time to get in to this today, but for the purposes of discussions like this I suggest leaving “religion” out of it. It’s really a question about a Creator. Assume everyone agrees that every religion known to man is incorrect. Or even that if this Creator God does exist, he wants no notice by man. It’s really a philosophical discussion. Equating a Creator God with religion is a cheap way to frame the discussion. It ends up billing a straw man of “religion”, and has nothing to do with the degree to which the whole universe was birthed by a Creator.
That is, if you want to have an honest, serious debate about it. If not, feel free to disregard.
This is a subject of much controversy. It depends on which of several schools of thought you belong to (formalism, intuitionism, mathematical realism, etc.).
Good point! The standard (albeit paradoxical) belief of Christians, et al is that God is both transcendent and immanent. (See the linked article for what this means and its relevance to the discussion at hand.)
Yeah, I know. But from a scientific standpoint, it doesn’t matter unless any of the schools can provide a falsifiable hypothesis about the universe. Until then, mathematics is simply a tool for describing the universe or an intellectual pastime.
Very interesting. One thing in the article that relates to Voyager’s post and I to disagree with.
I don’t agree God cannot be both timeless and immanent within us. I think it could mean that some portion of us is also timeless which is what Jesus advised us to value in
Meaning, treasure that is not affected by time. I think it’s a matter of our perception and our priorities.
You didn’t quote my other possibilities, in which something which is partially existent outside of space and time does interact - which is where we need evidence. The part you quoted says solely outside of space and time.
I agree. Any god worthy of the name must also operate in space and time. But this makes the excuse that we can’t examine god because of his existence outside of space and time invalid - we can examine the worldly interactions, just as the Flatlanders can examine the two dimensional projection of Mr. Sphere.
Assuming this is directed at me, I’m not expecting empirical evidence of god, or his shoe size, but rather empirical evidence of God’s supposed interactions with the world. We have plenty of evidence against solipism - no proof, of course, but we don’t have nearly as good evidence for god.
Useful (as opposed to purely deistic) concepts of the divine, or theology and religious doctrine, include specific instances of god giving messages to at least some humans. Those messages are evidence. If they include statements that we now know are false, and which a deity would know are false, but a person at the time would think are true, that is evidence that the person did not have a connection to a deity. Not proof, since anyone can filter the falsehoods from the truth and claim the falsehoods are parables, mistranslations, or sugaring by the contactee, but they are certainly evidence.
I agree. To be fair, some religions try to demonstrate the necessity of a Creator God then use sleight of hand to use this as evidence of a certain dogma.
The interesting questions are: how does the existence of a Creator God, if one were demonstrated, affect us, and what would be the impact on us of various characteristics of a Creator God? There would certainly be a difference between a god who created the universe for a purpose versus one who did it more or less accidentally, for example.
Not really; it can describe a 3d creature the way we can describe a 4d one. Mathematics and analogy.
The argument is that it would have no medium to do so; that anything beyond space and time would be in no way connected to our universe, and therefore unable to interact with it.
“Concepts of the divine” ARE the same as “assertions about matter energy and/or life forms”. It’s just that believers want to pretend otherwise, and want a special set of rules. Because when you apply the same standards to claims about God that get applied to everything else, God is shown to be the silly fiction that it is.
And you know this how ?
Oh, right. God’s only unknowable when someone asks for evidence of his existence. When a believer wants to gush about how awesome he is, suddenly God’s nature is obvious.
First, an “honest, serious” debate would start with the assumption that God is just an evidence-free myth - just as a discussion of Zeus or Anu would. And second, leaving religion out of it is dishonest, because defending religion is the whole point. There’s no reason to believe that there IS a Creator, except that it’s asserted by various religions.
Consider the gamer who creates a backwards-running universe, the one we’re in. We perceive it as running forward, because that’s how we’re programmed, but in “real” time (i.e., that in which the computer running our simulation is operating), it’s running backward, and at 365 times the speed of “actual” time. For every day in the real world, a year goes backward in our simulated world.
After a millennium has passed in the simulation, the gamer-creator decides to tweak the system by adding a variable. The variable will only be a conclusion, not a cause: after this variable happens, nobody will remember it (because time runs backward, remember). Rather, it’ll become a new effect that must be preceded by causes.
Does this programmer exist wholly outside of our time and space? Does this programmer have an effect on our time and space?
I know this is a rather silly example, but I’m choosing it specifically to avoid complications of real-world religion; I’m interested in the underlying question, and figure we can hash out the implications later.
Considering that we don’t yet know what 97% of our known universe consists of, aren’t we being a little premature speculating what may lie outside it and whether it has any effect upon us?
Yes. Any religion is free to argue whatever the heck it pleases. But this discussion needn’t—and shouldn’t—go that far. It should be about the Creator God, and IF there was a Creator God. Period. Anything else is a different discussion.
The answer to questions like that is generally “money.” I expect the rent on OutsideSpace&Time went from Infinity Per Eternity to Infinity-Aleph per eternity, God decided he’d rather spend the Aleph on cable.
I’m afraid I’d get bogged down by discussions of entropy in your example. Would subtle changes in natural laws, or causing events that we’d call inherently uncertain to be deterministic work just as well?