"God does not care about our mathematical difficulties; He integrates empirically." said Albert Einstien, the famous You know Who on the planet.
Who or what is GOD? This has been a million dollar question for millennia. I don't want to start another discussion on God, but one sureshot answer that I can give is that 'GOD is a belief'. The presence of GOD in our lives is a mere belief that we created. So, let me latch the word belief.
The King of all arts and the Queen of all sciences, or probably the vice-versa, Mathematics, has always intrigued many scientists, thought leaders, philosophers, etc. since times immemorial. I say 'intrigued' because mathematics has always been a product of one's creativity. Be it the Zero invented by Aryabhatta, or the Calculus created by Newton, it was all an outcome them being intrigued by some of their own discoveries which made them create newer facets of mathematics to support their theories.
All of us right from our childhood, are aware of Mathematics. Numbers mean everything to us. However, did we ever attempt to question why zero is zero? or why one after zero and why not two? There is absolutely no rationale for the numbers but we are stuffed with them down our DNA that we blindly believe that the number line goes like 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 and so on... Is this not belief? Are we not believing in what the world around us is telling us?
1+1 is 2 because we believe that it is. so, the underlying thing is belief. I remember few of my Missionary teachers saying The aim of science is to prove the existence of GOD. As a firm believer in God, and having witnessed a lot of debates on the existence of God, I just felt excited when I heard this. In fact, there are also a lot of historical anecdotes of mathematicians who believed in God.
Pythagoras, who is well known across the student community for his theorem, headed a cult of number worshippers who believed that God was a mathematician. For the Hindu math genius Srinivasan Ramanujam, an equation made no sense unless it expressed a thought of God.
There are mathematical studies that calculated the probability of existence of God, the probability of Christ's resurrection, the happenings of the great Kurukshetra War, and many more events which we refer to as mythological tales. Even as science and religion have quarrelled for centuries and are only recently exploring ways to kiss and make up, mathematicians have been saying for millennia that no truer expression of God can be found in any equation, theorem or a formula.
Witness to this are beautiful mathematical constants that describe nature. These transcendent numbers (if I may refer them so) like phi (1.618.....) which is also called the Divine Proportion or the Golden Ratio, pi (3.142.....), alpha (1/137th), gamma (0.5772....), etc. are examples of expressions that describe the underlying beauty of mathematics (for mathematicians) however, for others, they are just planned that way and mathematicians only happened to discover them.
Scientists & Mathematicians are still looking for that one equation that can describe everything under the Theory of Everything, despite Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and Godel's incompleteness theorem strongly opposing the possibility of theory of everything. In fact, one of the recent discoveries in Particulate physics has been named the God Particle. So, let us wait and see if scientists successfully prove or disprove the existence of God.
I can't bet on my longetivity of life so until then, I can only care to say that God exists to me because I believe He does. And to end this never ending debate, I can only present one of my fav toons discussing the same topic.
Nice article Uday.
ReplyDeletenice one Uday
ReplyDeleteYou can believe in anything. For instance I believe I can make money gambling but I never make any
ReplyDeleteI read only the first few paragraphs about the belief and number system stuff....
ReplyDeleteIf this is not your creation... I do not want to further comment because I do not want to offend elder/unknown persons..
But if it is created by you... this is the worst ever analogy....
For instance.. I take your own lines and explain...
Uday>>
" or why one after zero and why not two? "
Basically, if the number 2 would be there before 1, then our number series would be some thing like 0, 2, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6 ..... and probably that was the thought as well and we would not have questioned anything about it.. but the meaning of "2" would be equal to quantity of "present 1" , and meaning of "1" would be quantity of "present 2" ...
So basically its not the belief , these are definitions and they have their own significance, it has nothing to do with belief system at all....
GOD on the other hand is a entirely based on " HISTORY " partly GOD could be related to belief which was created due to HISTORY (what ever it be.. the miracles or following for a person or the creation of stories... )...
So never compare in an funny and childish way...
PS: Please post the comment and respond/explain .. I would check back article if it is posted or not posted (means u are not courage enough to face open criticism of your articles).... Probably you could remove this PS section before posting
Dear J,
DeleteYou have answered part of your question. And to add to your point, even the number system has a history. Only because we believe it, we follow it.
You may want to read the concentional books written on Shivaji and want to believe that he is a great man, or read the book written by James Laine and believe that he was a good for nothing guy. Same goes for MK Gandhi too.
So, History is not anything absolute that can be blindly trusted. Scriptures are the ones that you can trust and they say that God exists, and hence, he exists.
My blog was only an attempt to show that even the so called science has a lot of references pointing to the divine. It is up to the readers how they want to interpret it.