How To Be An Agnostic
constant ‘the biggest blunder of my life’: it turns out that the
cosmological constant is in fact meaningful, standing for what
is now called the vacuum energy. In this sense, you could say
that the equations Einstein discovered were wiser even than he.
The implication is that without understanding why and how
the mathematics works, we may be justifi ed in concluding that
qualities like order, beauty and wisdom are written through the
fabric of the universe. Moreover, if mathematics is discovered,
to do mathematics is to discover these things as well. Could
that not lead to a cosmic spirituality? Mightn’t it say something
about the existence of transcendence?
Such aesthetic and epistemological aspects do indeed lead
theists – as opposed to Platonists – to call on mathematics
as evidence for the existence of God or, to put it in a more
nuanced way, they say that the power of mathematics is exactly
the kind of thing you would expect in a universe created by an
ordered, beautiful and wise deity. As the philosopher Leibniz
put it, ‘When God calculates and thinks things through, the
world is made.’
For the theist, the belief is that human beings can apprehend
God’s ‘thinking through’ by doing science. Religion and science
are, in fact, part of the same enterprise. As the physicist and priest
Michel Heller writes in his book, The Comprehensible Universe:
In the human brain, the world’s structure has reached its
focal point: the structure of the world has acquired the ability
to refl ect upon itself... In this conceptual setting, science
appears as a collective effort of the Human Mind to reach the
Mind of God... The Mind of Man and the Mind of God are
strangely interwoven.There is something profound in this line of thought and its
deployment of the metaphor of the mind of God. To conclude
the converse – that the natural world is determined by mathemat-
ics and that mathematics is itself formed from within the natural
world, without reference to any transcendent reality – seems to