Tuesday, 14 May 2024

For Christians, mathematics cannot be the ultimate truth

Mathematics - including geometry, which was the dominant type of maths in the ancient world; and for that matter the philosophical discipline of Logic; are a type of abstract model, and as such utterly de-contextualized and without-referents. 

For mathematics to have real-world relevance entails that it is legitimate to attach particular classes or categories of objects to the mathematical symbols. Clearly, the qualitative reality of these classes/ categories must be assumed. 

Furthermore, it must be assumed that mathematical procedures (as modelled by the maths functions etc) are valid and necessary real-world processes applicable to the the assumed classes/ categories. 

Thus, mathematics as-such has zero intrinsic real-world relevance...


Unless, like Pythagoreans and Platonists (ancient, medieval and modern) one additionally makes the fundamental metaphysical assumption that the real-world relevance of mathematics is necessarily true; because reality is ultimately mathematical

On this basis, the job of science, or any other empirical investigation, is to discover the real-world entities to which refer (perhaps approximately) the ultimate mathematical realities (e.g. Platonic "ideas"). 

In other words; for some Platonists (and those in this tradition), mathematics just-is valid; and the real-world is (merely) a temporary and perhaps partial approximation of these realities. 


In sum: one can assume that maths/ geometry/ logic is the ultimate reality; and explain everything else on that basis - and, because the assumption is metaphysical, it cannot be refuted by any observations.

But - if one does assume this, then one cannot be a Christian

At least not in the was that Jesus (especially in the Fourth Gospel) spoke and taught. 

If maths/ geometry/ logic is the ultimate truth; then God cannot be a person, cannot be our Father, and does not love us.