As a degreed engineer, I’ve always had an affinity for math and physics. They were my favorite subjects in school and college (until I got to seminary.) Andy Bannister has written a wonderful apologetics piece here entitled “Have You Ever Wondered Why Mathematics Works? (Why numbers are a clue to a bigger story).”

He concludes,

“Numbers are not going to answer the question of the meaning of life for you. But I do want to suggest that numbers might be a clue as to where that meaning might be located. For if nature really is fundamentally mathematical; if numbers are as real as apples, aardvarks, and anticyclones, then it seems that whatever the deepest level of reality is, we’re looking at something more like a mind, rather than mere atoms and particles. Which is, fascinatingly, precisely what the Bible has always claimed—for in the beginning, it says, was not a molecule, nor an atom, nor a field of quantum particles—but God himself, the ultimate mind, in which numbers and mathematics have their source.“

Yes, numbers are indeed real – a concept that is foreign to most people who don’t deal regularly with high-level math. In a sense, mathematics is the universal language of the cosmos, of ultimate reality. As a universoty professor of mathematics asserts, “We don’t invent maths,” he said. “Maths is about discovery. Mathematicians are explorers—we head out into the unknown to find what’s there; that’s why maths transcends culture, time, and place.” And as Bannister correctly says, “The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.”

Amen.