Re: [asa] Tegmark and the mathematical universe

Many non-theists from the sciences and philosophy have noted the great
difficulty--the virtual impossibility, some of them say--of accounting for
our abilities to do higher mathematics, or to make great art and music, from
a purely naturalistic evolutionary story. Thomas Nagel (a leading
philosopher of mind) has been esp outspoken about this, and has admitted his
"hope" that there is no God. It is IMO no accident that the highest
percentage of religious believers among members of the extraordinarily
non-religious membership of the National Academy of Sciences is among
mathematicians. The Platonism (or at least, quasi-Platonism) that many
mathematicians explicitly or implicitly endorse (if they believe that math
truths are "discovered," not "invented," then I put them into this group) is
flatly inconsistent with a purely materialistic view of ultimate reality,
and very friendly to theism (though obviously in no way equivalent to or at
all close to Christianity). Even G.H. Hardy, among the most vociferous
atheists in the whole history of science, confessed that "mathematical
reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it..."

Although we don't know what the answer is (to the best of my knowledge),
the question, "what is the 10^25 digit of pi?" has an answer, and it has one
whether or not we ever figure out what the answer is. Not to say this seems
absurd (to me), and not then to say that there is a non-material reality
that our minds can tap into seems to betray either a lack of will (similar
to Nagel's hope that there is no God) or a lack of commitment to the
scientific spirit, which ought always to probe for a deeper explanation.

IMO, this is the single most powerful argument for theism that we presently
have. It's got nothing to do, obviously, with the details of biology or
cosmology, but it has everything to do with how any science at
all--including both biology and cosmology--is ever possible at all. Indeed,
going further with this, the very "beauty" of the laws of physics, when
expressed in mathematical form, something that is widely acknowledged by
practitioners of the relevant fields without regard to the presence or
absence of religious beliefs, is also something that cries out for a much
deeper explanation. I just fail to see how a smart person can seriously
claim that these aspects of our cognitive faculties are simply a result of
the fact that, at one point in our evolutionary history, we had to be smart
enough not to become lunch for large carnivores. I've never seen chimps or
dolphins play (let alone write) Mozart or prove that there is no largest
prime number. They had to be smart enough to avoid large carnivores, too.

Ted

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Received on Mon Nov 24 12:48:30 2008