… contrary to what evolutionary theorist E. O. Wilson thinks.
Yes, you heard that right. It’s the guy who doubts Darwin who thinks math is important.
Discussing the recent discovery of the Higgs boson, Berlinski offers some thoughts that provide a partial response to E. O. Wilson’s notion that real biologists don’t need math:
Across the vast range of arguments offered, assessed, embraced, deferred, delayed or defeated, it is only within mathematics that arguments achieve the power to compel allegiance because they are seen to command assent. And it is only by means of mathematics that the powerful ideas of an alien discipline such as theoretical physics may step by step be returned to the ordinary human power to grasp things without mediation and so to grasp things at once.
In short, the reason that Darwinian biologists and evolutionary psychologists don’t need math is that most of what they are doing isn’t science (and the rest is likely wrong, but at least science).
Berlinski, an agnostic, is at his best when puncturing pretentious atheists. Here are some of his better known essays in that line, including the most recent, “The Ineffable Higgs”, about the celeb boson that never quite turned out to be the hoped-for God particle.
If you’d rather vid than read, here’s Berlinski in a recent vid:
Or here.
Darwin and the Mathematicians – David Berlinski
“The formation within geological time of a human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of elementary particles and the field, is as unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its components.”
Kurt Gödel, was a preeminent mathematician who is considered one of the greatest to have ever lived. Of Note: Godel was a Theist!
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2…..cians.html
Dr. David Berlinski: Head Scratching Mathematicians – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEDYr_fgcP8
quote from preceding video:
“John Von Neumann, one of the great mathematicians of the twentieth century, just laughed at Darwinian theory, he hooted at it!”
Dr. David Berlinski
Yes math is really important. It just doesn’t appear to apply to evolutionism. Most likely because evolutionism is not important. 😉 (I see News covered that in the OP)
Back to P. Johnson’s “Wedge of Truth” again?! Bring on D. Berlinski for fun, since he doesn’t actually promote ‘ID’.
“Warm but distant” = Berlinski’s attitude towards IDism.
Shall we be holding our breaths for Dembski’s promised mathematical theory of ‘Intelligent Design’ (while for PR reasons, he doesn’t capitalise it anymore)?
The search engine Google gives No Results for quotes “Mathematical Theory of Intelligent Design.” Hmmm…anyone wonder why? 😉
Seeking validity in mathematics for obviously scientistic ideology.
Or maybe you want to check this guy out? Another great representative of IDism, nay, he even claims to be it’s ‘first individual’ (1979)…!
Gregoire, mon pauvre vieux, who ever mentioned ‘intelligent design…..?’ If ID were mythical, would that render Darwin’s extraordinarily fanciful theory, true? Of course, it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t even make it less comical.
Concentrate, there’s a good chap. Less animus and closer attention to the words on the page.
Academics = “akin to a criminal class” – D. Berlinski
Such trust IDism, or in Berlinski’s case, flamboyant agnosticism, entails! 😉
Ah, Berlinski! Pure enjoyment…
Math is a enemy of evolution because of its great claims of happanchance.
Yet math is useless in almost everything of discovery or invention done so far.
Its just measuring things to bits that already exist. how does that heal or improve anything.
The living force of biology has nothing to do with math.
Math is not intellectually relevant in figuring out the universe except in basic structures that are very unrelated to God’s ideas on biology.
Math gets in the way of true progress of entry level people with a desire to accomplish things called science.
Heinlein said it first, in a different form:
Galileo, a Christian whose story in science is severely misunderstood,,
stated:
I’m fairly certain that quotes from all the great physicists can found expressing such wonder. Even Einstein expressed wonder:
Dr. Craig argues that the applicability of mathematics to physics is a very strong argument for God here:
Dr. Bradley gives an partial overview of the ‘remarkably simple and elegant’ mathematical language in which God has written the universe here:
Quote from preceding video:
And indeed Wigner infamously said, ‘It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here,’:
Moreover Wallace, co-discoverer of Natural Selection, stated:
Out of all the quotes and links, I think Wallace’s quote comes closest to capturing the ‘miracle’ that confronts us with what we witness in man’s ability to reason mathematically and the correspondence of that mathematical reasoning to physics. The reason why this comes closest to capturing the mystery that confronts is that most of the other quotes, while expressing deep appreciation and wonder at that profound ‘miracle’, fail to deliver us from what I term a ‘Deistic lurch’. This ‘Deistic lurch’ is the thought that even though the universe strongly appears to be written in the language of mathematics by God, this still does not get us to the personal God of the bible who ‘sustains’ the universe mathematically and establishes the fine point that:
This ‘Deistic lurch’ is perhaps most simply expressed by a remark an atheist made in response to my observation that mathematics must ultimately be based in God:
This mathematical ‘Deistic lurch’, which fails to appreciate the fact that God constantly ‘sustains’ the universe, is also seen in the answer that Einstein gave to a philosopher who asked Einstein:
Einstein’s answer was categorical to the philosopher, he said:
The preceding statement was an interesting statement for Einstein to make since ‘the mind and its now’ has, from many recent experiments in quantum mechanics, undermined Einstein’s General Relativity as to being the absolute frame of reference for reality. i.e. ‘the mind and its now’, contrary to what Einstein thought possible for experimental physics, according to advances in quantum mechanics, and completely contrary to the ‘Deistic lurch’ which holds ‘maths just is’, takes precedence over past events in time. Moreover, due to advances in quantum mechanics, it would now be much more appropriate to phrase Einstein’s answer to the philosopher in this way:
Perhaps the best demonstration of this ‘now of the mind’ is Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment
Moreover,,
But why should a abstract mathematical equation, which ‘just is’ according to Deistic or Atheistic thinking, even care when I decide to implement boundary conditions for it to look at a particle? Abstract mathematical equations do not and can not care about anything! Only God can care if and when I decide to look at any particular particle! To drive this point home as to just how ‘weird’ all this is, in that I can freely choose when a ‘boundary condition’ for a mathematical equation is implemented, here is a recent variation of the Wheeler delayed choice experiment. An experiment which highlights the ability of a conscious observer to directly effect ‘spooky action into the past’,,,
That experiment completely blows Deistic and Atheistic ‘determinism’ out of the water for if my conscious choices really are just merely the result of whatever state the material particles in my brain happen to be in in the past (deterministic) then how in blue blazes are my present free will choices in the experiment instantaneously effecting the state of material particles into the past??? But it gets much, much, worse for Deists and Atheists who think ‘maths just is’. Fairly recently it was found,,,
Moreover, the magnitude to which Leggett’s inequality was violated model was staggering:
Now, I really don’t completely understand what it truly means for realism to violated by 80 orders of magnitude as to rigorously establishing the validity for positing a non-local, beyond space-time, cause for reality (i.e. God), but seeing that there are ‘only’ 10^80 orders of magnitude subatomic particles in the universe, that strongly suggests, at least to me, that they may have completely blown the ‘maths just is’ Deistic view of reality out of the water. (Perhaps someone else can help enlighten what it means to have a theory violated by 80 orders of magnitude). Just how troubling this ‘should’ be for the committed Atheist/Deist is highlighted here:
To further drive this point home, the point that abstract mathematics IS NOT ‘just is’, Godel derived the incompleteness theorem of mathematics,,,
In which Godel revealed that the truthfulness of any mathematical equation that is specific enough to have counting numbers within it cannot be derived from within the equation itself, but the truthfulness of the equation is dependent on a outside source in order to derive its truthfulness. And seeing that math is not based in time and space, then that requires the source for ‘truth’, for which any particular mathematical equation derives its truthfulness, must also be transcendent of time and space. Here are a few comments conceding that math will never be able to offer a complete description of reality:
Hawking seems to have forgotten his concession to Godel’s incompleteness and erroneously tried to assign causal power to mathematical law. Hawking stated in his book ‘The Grand Design’:
Confusing law with agency is a profoundly deep logical error on Hawking’s part:
A bit more nuanced view of Hawking’s profoundly deep logical error is here:
And to drive the point even further home that mathematical equations must be dependent on a beyond space and time causal agent, i.e. God, in order for them to have any truth as to accurately describing reality, it is found that our two most accurate mathematical descriptions of reality could not be properly elucidated until ‘higher dimensional mathematics’ were developed:
And indeed the reality that these ‘higher dimensional’ equations have revealed, and describe, to us are wondrous to contemplate:
As should be needless to say, such a reality speaks far more forcefully for a infinitely powerful ‘personal God’ than for any impersonal ‘maths just is’ Deistic God:
Verse and music:
Posters here are quoting or opining that math proves God or mans soul etc.
Fine but so what.
The point is about the relevance of math to discovery and invention in science.
I say its almost irrelevant in almost all objects so far touched on by science.
this because biology is not or to date has not been a object for math.
No healing has come from computations high or low. Likewise math has not been the prompt to insight in very much.
i don’t see Einsteins stuff as coming from mere math doings but insights unrelated to math. thats why he gets the credit for his stuff. not mere math principals he bumped into.
Order must mean it can be measured but one is wasting ones time looking to math whizs in school for any discovery or invention in progressing science.
I see math as a hinderance to figuring out things.
Its very over rated in prestige for intellectual gain of mankind.
Don’t encourage smart kids to go into it.