Mathematics, Science, and the Love of God

A mathematical vision of reality lay behind the scientific revolution of the Seventeenth Century. The early scientists, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, were mathematicians, and they were intoxicated by the idea that the changing flux of reality could be captured by the eternal mathematical forms. Their extraordinary success has had a profound effect on western consciousness.

Modern consciousness has come to assume that the ultimate causes are realities that can be observed, quantified mathematically, and explicated in a theory. Space and time can be quantified, and therefore, objects that can be located in space and time, such as atoms, human genes, planets, biochemical processes, not only exist, but are the ultimate causes. Why is there day and night? The earth spins and rotates around the sun, and the motion can be described mathematically. Why are some people depressed, others happy? Biochemical processes, involving molecules located spatially and interacting temporally, give rise to psychological conditions. Or observable objects, human beings affecting each other over the course of childhood, affect how one thinks and feels. God's grace, however, cannot be observed, quantified, and developed into a theory that leads to reliable predictions.

Science profoundly affected theology. The entire realm of what is called finite causes, that is, things affecting each other in space and time, was held to belong to science, while the meaning of reality, or a mystical sense of a ground of being beyond finite causes, was the realm of theology. God never did "miracles" because God was never a "finite cause." Schleiermacher, 1768-1834, was the first great theologian to develop this perspective and it is continued today by such theologians as Tillich and Macquarrie. Before the scientific revolution, however, all the great theologians believed that God did miracles.

I want to make two observations. First, the original scientific vision, the idea of a closed universe ordered by mathematical laws, was an intuition based upon a particular vision of mathematics. It was assumed that mathematics was a complete unified system, that is, all of mathematics could be deduced from an initial set of axioms just as the early scientists believed that all of physical reality could theoretically be deduced from an initial set of physical conditions. This view of mathematics collapsed in this century with Godel's Incompleteness Theorem which showed that mathematics cannot logically be unified. The original mathematical intuition of reality which gave rise to science no longer corresponds to mathematics.

Secondly, and this to my mind is far more decisive, it is disastrous for theology to claim that God does not affect the world at particular points in space and time. The order of the world, its apparent laws, is not due to the rule of mathematics, but rather to a loving God who orders the universe so we may act effectively within it. There are no laws, but rather, a God who provides order. We use this order in such disciplines as medicine or psychology. God's love is expressed through these disciples, but God is not bound by the order he creates. God acts. God heals. God affects us, our minds, our bodies, the events of life, the destiny of nations. That is the fundamental reality, a loving God who heals and saves in the biblical sense of healing the whole person in the whole of society. (Plenteous Harvest, January, 1993)

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Mathematics, Science, and the Love of God

Theology