Mathematics and Faith

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Just how abstract discipline like mathematics find itself mixed up with an idea that is hard to pin down and to religion. What is this thing called faith anyway? As far as I can see, I never saw faith walking around, nor was I ever able to touch it. As much as I may want a huge dose of confidence for Christmas a few years, I’m not having anyone to tell me that they just picked me up a nice piece of faith in the local mall and got a lot of it.

Hebrews in the New Testament in the Bible we read in Chapter 11, Verse 1: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” This has always been one of my favorite verses I guess because of the profound impact statement. Faith has to be one of the greatest gifts that God could have been a man. Yet faith – in order to grow strong– is something that needs to be put into practice regularly, just like any other muscle in the body. Use it, or lose it, as the saying goes. Faith strengthens with use while it weakens through desu etude. Faith is simply not like some other tangible thing that you can get your finger. Consequently, to embrace this elusive yet noble grace, you need some kind of driver to bring faith to the surface of existence, a precursor, so to speak, causing faith bubbles into the life of people and allows easy access to such.

But what is this so-called faith driver and how to approach it so as to be able to implement faith in our lives? Moreover, how can mathematics show us that faith is something real and consequently that God the Creator, as an extension of our belief, is actually there?

In short, confidence is the key driver of faith. For what we believe is no longer necessary proof of its existence. Yet everything we believe in has required at some time or another – in one form or another – a giant leap of faith. And here is where mathematics, faith, and God all tie in together. Let me explain.

In 1931, a brilliant Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel named shocked the mathematical world with his now famous incompleteness theorem. Until that time, mathematicians were working feverishly at formalizing the mathematical disciplines and trying to show that any rigorous mathematical system was consistent within itself provided that the axioms that such a system built were solid. Kurt Gödel rocked this world with his statement that showed that within any mathematical system were necessarily inconsistencies and that there were theorems within the system that could not been confirmed or disproved. Seminal his work at one point in his career even produced a proof which mathematically would confirm the existence of God

From the above discussion, we are starting to see -. True, on the surface – some relationship between faith mathematics, and God. Work Gödels helped show that mathematics is one giant leap of faith. Yet we see evidence of this leap of faith all around us. Just think about this the next time you go to start your car and try to ponder the interconnection between mathematics, science, and the process of igniting the engine. Yes, math is all around us. Faith has crystallized religion.

For me the previous exposition is easy to accept and believe. Having studied mathematics from the basic to the advanced levels, I have firmly come to believe that God speaks to us through mathematics and his wisdom is strewn through many realms of this field. While some it is impossible to imagine the all-knowing power and creator, dive into the myriad oceans of mathematics quickly makes one thing clear that there is nothing more difficult to imagine that one than to ponder the complexities and realities of this amazing content

After all, what is difficult to imagine :. infinite number of infinities or Almighty? When I first discovered this fact about the infinity of infinities of set theory class my senior year in college, I was completely mesmerized. “How could this be?” I wonder. Infinity means just that – infinity. No end in sight; something that goes on forever. So how could it be more than one? Even millions. Billions? Infinity them? Yet strange realities such as these are what we of mathematics. Once these realities become validated, our faith in mathematics and a higher presence will be real. Faith is the evidence or proof of the things we can not see. Faith confirms that even though we can not see something, ie God, that something is still real.

We see and experience applications of mathematics in the real world every day. We have automobiles and electricity and television and computer, the latter of which has harnessed the understanding and power of binary arithmetic. We see these applications, touch these applications and enjoy these applications. They are real. Yet the very foundations of such applications are built, the derivation system system in all applications end to their sentence provable based on those axioms, are, according to what Kurt Gödel based on a certain degree of faith. The leap from proof to truth, in the end, is always based on faith

We turn on the light switch and know without hesitation the expected result :. The light goes on and the room is illuminated. We believe the light to go on because we have seen such faith demonstrated or used repeatedly. We hope no longer for the light to go on as we know it will. The light turns on because man has harnessed, via a leap of faith, electrons pass through the wire and generate the current necessary to illuminate the room. The light is the evidence of things (electrons) unseen, which through faith and we have come to trust and believe exist. Thus tangible things we enjoy every day to prove to us that God is no longer stretch of faith for us than the simple act of expecting the light to go on after flipping the switch.

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