[Mathematical description of reality is where we're always led...
It's fantastically accurate.] The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.
Throughout human history, man has discovered a universal framework providing insights into
the deepest mysteries of reality. Math lies at the foundations of transformative technologies.
Its theorems led to the discovery of Einstein's general theory of relativity. The laws of physics
are all represented in surprisingly elegant mathematical equations. Every invention,
every advancement owes mathematics a debt of gratitude. In fact,
all of science relies on the assumption that we live in a mathematically imbued universe.
But mathematics is so accurate, so effective at describing nature that it presents us with a
puzzle. In 1960, the Nobel Prize winning physicist and mathematician Eugene Wigner published a paper
that stunned the scientific community. He called it the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.
Wigner realized that the universe does not have to exhibit the mathematical structure that it does.
His awareness led to a question that continues to baffle philosophers and mathematicians:
why does mathematics work? Perhaps even more puzzling: a mathematical framework exists not
only in the physical world, but in human minds as well. How is it that a mathematical theorist
like Peter Higgs can sit down at his desk, and by pouring over mathematical equations,
predict the existence of a fundamental particle? The idea that the universe should be imbued with a
mathematical structure that makes science possible cries out for explanation. Why is mathematics so
effective? Wigner concluded, "It is difficult to avoid the impression that a
miracle confronts us here." For on his worldview, the effectiveness of mathematics
is inexplicable. His account had to be a purely physical, scientific one. As a result, the
unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics seems to the naturalist to be just an amazing coincidence.
But the dismissal of the divine was never the initial target of scientific inquiry,
for it was the faith of early scientists that inspired the project of modern science.
Because there is a rational creator, you could study the universe logically.
Subsequent discoveries unveiled its elegant mathematical foundations. The universe indeed
had a logical structure. Mind seemed to be at its very center.
It turns out that the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics provides powerful evidence for
the existence of God. If God exists, then the effectiveness of mathematics
is actually something that we should expect. And on atheism, there just isn't any explanation.
As Albert Einstein famously remarked, The eternal mystery of the world is
its comprehensibility. "The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle."
If God does not exist, then the applicability of mathematics to the physical world is
truly incomprehensible. Yet we find ourselves in a world with a deep
mathematical underpinning that defies probability. The effectiveness of mathematics in describing the
physical world is literally a miracle, and therefore evidence for the existence of God.