I’m tired of the puzzled looks I get when I suggest that science is a faith. Screw that. Let’s go beyond puzzlement. Let’s go for confusion, offense and maybe even anger.
Math is a faith. What’s more, it’s a faith that likely kicks the ass of your faith. It certainly makes Moses look like P.T. Barnum.
So let’s go at it.
I realized, after a talk with my mom, that getting people to accept science as faith was a non-starter for Western believers because they claim science as part of god’s domain. Witness my cousin, who puts the ”ist” in Baptist. After the recent successful surgery of a friend, she exclaimed “Thank God the science worked!” How do you respond logically to that?
The answer, I suspect, is that you don’t. But that shouldn’t hamper the effort to craft a better belief system, one specifically suited for the 21st century. Hence: Math as faith.
To be clear, this not a walk back — or double down — of the supposition that science also is faith. It is. But as a byproduct of math. Science is the corporeal form of math, which sits as the spinal cord of Evidentialism, the new faith with a track record!
Consider: since the discovery of quantum mechanics, virtually every physical movement in the observable universe can be codified, tested and predicted. Evolution is a mathematical equation. Save for black holes and consciousness, we have reduced our reality to ones and zeroes.
Speaking of which, those two numbers hold the infinite. Albert Einstein doubted the possibility of black holes, even though his equations screamed their existence. As the Large Hadron Collider demonstrated, once you have the equation, the math does the work.
The miracle of that work is hardly diminished by its simplicity. If anything, that simplicity becomes more profound. Ponder, please, the faith-level questions math poses:
*Eternity We know any number can be doubled or halved. Thus, math proves — but does not explain — infinity, in both directions, unaltered by time. We know it exists, but mortal creatures cannot ever see it. That’s some holy spirit shit, homes.
*Nature The universe’s spirals, from sunflower heads to hurricanes to galaxies, follow the Fibonacci sequence, or 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, and so on. Each number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two numbers. It suggests — but does not explain — some intent. Math is the one faith that abides laws without need for a lawmaker.
*The human capacity Our second invention (after booze) was the wheel, and we know, through pi, that the heart of its measure can never be fully known. Kind of like a god’s will.
*Beauty The Golden Ratio, a mathematical symmetry of 1 to 1.618, mysteriously accompanies innumerable examples of human beauty, from the Pyramids of Giza to the face of Mona Lisa.
*Music Virtually all Western music is composed of 12 notes. Those notes were discovered and scaled by the mathematician Pythagoras. Legend says that one day, he heard blacksmiths hammering on metal rods of varying length and wondered why they emitted unque clangs.
And on and on. The track record of math/science is clear: It’s the only faith that answers prayers. Did you know quantum mechanics has never been proven wrong? If it were, it wouldn’t get to be a quantum theory. Membership is that exclusive.
Plus, it’s harder to hijack math than science. Are believers going to shout ”Thank God the math added up!”?
Probably. But we’re faith-building here, folks. Remember the cause: Science, with math as its backbone, has more than doubled our lifespan since its arrival 400 years ago — or less than 15 seconds ago on the homo-sapien stopwatch.
Plus, it gives me a new bumper sticker:
Evidentialism: The numbers don’t lie.
Bring it, Moses.
