Science, Mathematics and Meaning

Does God Exist? Part 2 – Science, Mathematics and Meaning

Does the universe make sense at a mathematical level? And if it does — why does it make sense? Why are there dependable and predictable mathematical laws at all in the universe? 

Those are the question that the Oxford mathematician and philosopher of science, Professor John Lennox, often asks when he’s invited to speak about science and faith. As a mathematician, he has spent a lifetime immersed in patterns, numbers, and equations — and he says that the more deeply he studies the logic of the universe, the more convinced he becomes that it points, not to chaos or chance, but to (a Greater or Deeper) Mind at work.

But to understand why that’s such a remarkable statement, we need to trace our way back to the roots of modern thought — to the story we’ve been told about what the world is, namely, the birth of scientific materialism, and what some might even call atheistic materialism. 

Over two thousand years ago, an ancient Greek thinker, Democritus proposed something revolutionary. He reasoned that if you take a piece of wood and cut it smaller and smaller, there must come a point when you can’t divide it any further. He called that smallest unit atomos, meaning indivisible. It was an insight, born not of experiment but of sheer reasoning.

But then he made a leap, suggesting that these atoms, tiny, solid, indivisible bits of matter, were the ultimate reality of everything, the building block of all reality. that everything could be explained in terms of physical matter.

The long and short of it is that that idea rolled down the centuries and eventually became the dominant philosophy of Western science — what we now call materialism (or scientific materialism): the belief that all that truly exists is physical matter and energy, and that mind, consciousness, and meaning are nothing more than by-products of physical processes. 

According to this view, mind and thought are by products of the physical brain. And so materialists believe that mind reduces to brain, and brain reduces to physics and chemistry. In the end, it suggests that we are nothing but molecules in motion — clever animals governed by impersonal forces.

And if we are nothing but molecules in motion then we live in an ultimately cold and meaningless universe.  According to this materialist world view and belief system, there is no over-arching meaning to life. The only meaning is therefore the meaning that we ourselves attribute to things.  And who then is to distinguish between which made up system of meaning is better than another.  Using an extreme example: What if my made up system of meaning is in fact Nazism. On what basis could you argue that your system of meaning is superior to my beliefs if in fact there is no ultimate meaning in the universe – just random physical processes. 

But this ultimately meaningless materialist world view, as Professor Lennox and many others remind us, is not a scientific conclusion. It is a philosophical assumption. One could even say that it is a belief, or a belief system, because it is not in fact based on proven facts. 

What is often forgotten however is that the earliest scientists were not materialists at all.  They were people of faith.  C.S. Lewis once put it beautifully, he said that people became scientific because they expected law in nature, and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver, a Mind behind all the laws of the universe. 

The great pioneers of modern science,  Galileo, Kepler, Newton, all believed that the universe was the creation of a rational Mind. And because it was the work of that greater rational Mind, they believed it would be orderly, intelligible, and discoverable.  Far from their faith hindering their science, it was their faith that fueled their science. They studied the world as a way of understanding the Greater Mind of God.

That same insight shaped Professor John Lennox himself, a mathematician who came to believe that behind the language of mathematics, there must be a greater Logic, or Logos, a deeper rationality woven through all things.

Ironically, modern science, through quantum physics, has in fact moved far beyond the materialism it inherited from Democritus. We now know that the atom is not indivisible. It can be broken down into protons, neutrons, and electrons, and even further into quarks and strings. According to quantum theory, these are not solid particles at all, but patterns of energy, vibrations, even probabilities. The deeper scientists look, the less “material” the material world becomes.

As we saw last week in the short reading I did, about 95% of the universe — the so-called dark matter and dark energy — is invisible and unknown. Dark matter has mass and exerts gravitational pull, yet it is not made of ordinary particles like protons, neutrons, or electrons. And dark energy — an even greater mystery — seems to be the force driving the universe’s accelerating expansion.
It turns out that only about 5% of the cosmos is made up of ordinary, visible matter — the kind we can touch, see, or measure directly. The vast majority of reality is unseen and hidden, reminding us that science has so far only begun to glimpse the depths of the universe we inhabit.

Quantum physics has also revealed something extraordinary: that consciousness can affect reality, In certain experiments, the act of conscious observation changes what happens. Reality seems, in some mysterious way, responsive to consciousness. It was this realisation that led Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, to conclude that consciousness is in fact primary, that matter is derived from mind, not the other way round.

Likewise, as we looked at last week, when Watson and Crick discovered DNA, they found not just chemistry but encoded information, a digital language far more sophisticated than anything humans have ever written. And where there is code, the best explanation we know of is a coder, again suggesting Mind before matter.

Professor Lennox adds another layer to this insight, not from biology, but from mathematics. He says: the very fact that mathematics works is itself astonishing. In fact it was the Nobel Prize–winning physicist, Eugene Wigner, wrote a famous paper in 1961 called “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics.”  He asked: Why does abstract mathematics, something invented in the human mind, correspond so precisely to the physical world?" Why should symbols on a chalkboard describe the movements of planets or the behaviour of light?  How can the workings of a human mind map perfectly onto the workings of nature, unless both, in some way, arise from a deeper rational source?  

For Professor Lennox, that realisation became a key to faith. “The only thing that makes reasonable the effectiveness of mathematics,” he says, “is faith in God.”  Because mathematics is an expression of reason, and human reason he believes is a reflection of a greater Reason — the divine Logos — in whose image we are made.

Professor Lennox points out what he believes is the essential problem of atheistic materialism. He says he often challenges his atheist colleagues with a simple question: “What do you do science with?”

At first they’ll say, “With my computer and instruments and my lab.”
But he says, “No, I mean, with what do you think, reason, and discover?” And then, after a pause, they’ll say, “Well… with my brain.”

But according to materialism, the brain is the product of a meaningless, mindless, unguided process, the random result of unguided evolution and chemistry.

So Lennox asks them: “If your computer were the end product of a mindless, unguided process — would you trust it?”

And of course, the answer is no, they would not. And yet, that he suggests is precisely what materialism asks us to do: to trust our reasoning, even though it says that reasoning itself is only the by-product of blind and random forces. And if our thoughts are nothing more than by products of chemical reactions, then we have no reason to trust our thoughts. 

According to Professor John Lennox, that is the fatal flaw of atheistic materialism: it saws off the very branch of reason it sits on.

In the end, each of us is forced to answer the following questions: Are we simply accidents , floating in a random, dead and meaningless cosmos?  Or, just as there are mathematical laws that undergird the physical universe and give it order and structure, is there a Mind and a Consciousness from which all of these things arise in the first place, A Mind or Consciousness that in fact precedes matter and gives it ultimate meaning. 

I am not sure if I agree with all of his politics and views, but I agree with Jordan Peterson when he suggests that Western Culture is going through a crisis of meaning which is leading to the erosion of Western Civilisation. Is it possible that the current crisis of meaning in Western Civilisation  is caused precisely because we have been told that we live in a purely material universe that has no deeper or over-arching meaning and purpose… 

What if all our God-language over the millenia has been our human attempt to affirm the intuition that there is indeed a deeper logic, rationality, meaning and purpose to reality even if we cannot fully comprehend exactly Who or what God is, just as quantum physicists affirm that 95% of reality is made up of dark matter and dark energy, even if they don’t have a clue what that is. 

In Romans 11:34 St Paul writes: Who has known the Mind of God? And yet he writes with the conviction that in some way the mysterious Mind of God has been made known to us in the person of Jesus.