Did God write the laws of mathematics?

Question

As far as I can tell, they are the way they are because they HAVE to be.

--A Christian teacher of mathematics

Answer 1

I suspect most people have great difficulty with assigning any kind of existence to mathematical structures. However, I think objective mathematical truths are best thought of as timeless eternal entities and should never be thought of as having been created at the moment a human being first perceived them. As far as we can tell, objective mathematics may well be at least as old as the universe and may remain valid until the end of time. When I'm not being strictly rigorous, I sometimes tell my non-scientist friends that God's native language must have been pure mathematics. This seems to help them appreciate that the physical universe behaves according to strictly mathematical principles. Most regular folks seem to have great difficulty accepting that the universe is in fact orderly, without anthropomorphically assuming it must have been intelligently created. Of course, the real universe does not actually operate according to human expectations, it's merely that our human brains are reduced to thinking of it that way to make any sense of it. That's why we invented abstract mathematics, so humans could understand the true nature of objective reality.

-- An atheist physical scientist

Answer 2

No, God didn't WRITE the laws of mathematics : He made them. Man discovered and WROTE them. I wonder how many more there are that we don't even know they are there, much less express them in equations.


- A Christian teacher of physics.

Answer 3

God didnt write the laws of mathematics. As you should know, humans worked out mathematics by thinking. God didnt write anything because he isnt real.

Answer 4

I think mathematics has a lot to do with God Himself. I think He's one giant equation, that we'll never be able to unravel...

Answer 5

Only God is capable of creation, so yes. There are no "new" ideas.

JoMo

Answer 6

no

Answer 7

No.