A Theology of Mathematics

A theology of what?!.........................................................................................2
What is Mathematics?............................................................................................3
Where are we now?................................................................................................5
A note on Mathematics and Post Modernity..........................................................8
Beauty in Mathematics.........................................................................................10
Morals in Mathematics.........................................................................................11
The Mathematical mind strengths and weaknesses...........................................12
Why do so many people dislike Mathematics?....................................................13
Conclusion............................................................................................................16
Bibliography.........................................................................................................17

Numbers were beautiful things, numbers were funny

things, they were without a doubt God stuff Mister
God, This is Anna by Fynn

Roger M. Orr

November 2003

CMW project

A Theology of Mathematics

A theology of what?!
The first issue raised by this subject is the surprise usually
generated by putting together the two words theology and
mathematics. In his opening lecture for the Christian in the
Modern World course, entitled the Sacred/Secular Divide, Mark
Greene asks the question Who has a theology of mathematics?
There are very few people prepared to try and answer the question;
despite the fact, as he goes on to say, that we have each spent
perhaps an hour a day, five days a week (during term time!) for
eleven years or more in maths lessons during our schooling. Why
do we have no coherent way of relating this activity to our beliefs in
God? We seem to have lost the sense that God has anything to do
with mathematics. Incidentally this is true of other things too
Mark is using mathematics principally as an example of the
dichotomy between religious and secular activity that is present
in contemporary Western culture.
This separation of mathematics from theology is historically odd;
many of the famous names from mathematics in the past were also
known for their theological writing.
Blaise Pascal (1623-62) is probably best known today either for his
Pensees which are a collection of thoughts mostly on the subject
of human suffering and faith or for Pascals wager which says If
God does not exist, one will lose nothing by believing in him, while
if he does exist, one will lose everything by not believing1.
However he was also an important mathematician, who laid the
foundations for probability and also gave his name to the Pascal
triangle (which was actually known years before Pascal himself
studied it). This is the table which starts like this:
1
1 1
1 2 1
1 3 3 1
1 4 6 4 1
where each number is the sum of the two numbers in the row
above it.
This triangle was the basis for Isaac Newtons (16431727) work on
binomial expansions and he was another theological writer: God
created everything by number, weight and measure.2. Of course
he is best known for watching apples falling.
Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) is another famous astronomer,
theologian and mathematician who described his work in

1
2

Blaise Pascal at www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Pascal.html

Bar-Ilan University Physics Dept at http://www.ph.biu.ac.il/SRP.php

A Theology of Mathematics

understanding planetary orbits, which involved mathematical work

on ellipses, as thinking Gods thoughts after him3.
Before him Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was a free thinker who
was eventually killed by the Inquisition part of his crime was
explorations he had done on infinite which was deemed heretical
since the Catholic doctrine of the time held that only God could be
infinite. Here was a darker connection between theology and
mathematics. Before this, for both Arabic and classical Greek
philosophers, mathematics was seen as closely coupled to religious
thinking.
However for most of us today this connection is lost, so I intend to
show various ways that a Christian mind can interact with the
study of mathematics.

What is Mathematics?
This deceptively simple question is actually very hard to answer.
Ill try to give a brief overview without assuming too much
mathematics some of the slightly more technical bits are in
separate boxes and can be skipped without problem.
The ancient world
The Egyptians knew about right-angled triangles and used this
knowledge to build things like the pyramids, which are still with us
today.
They knew that a piece of rope knotted into twelve equal portions
could be used to measure a square corner - a bit like this:

However, as far as we know, they didnt seem to have been able to

work out why this was true; perhaps they werent interested in the
why since they mainly used mathematics to get things done.
We know that it works because 32 +
Optional information: Pythagorass theorem.
42 = 52.
For any right-angled triangle the square on
the hypotenuse equals the sum of the
squares on the other two sides.

Institute for Creation Research at http://www.icr.org/pubs/btg-a/btg-034a.htm

A Theology of Mathematics

As any school child knows this is an example of Pythagorass

theorem which was first proved by the Greek philosopher
Pythagoras (~569-475 BC). In fact the Babylonians had worked out
the rule a millennium before him although they seem to have been
unable to prove it.
So in this case mathematical knowledge progressed from:
- an observation that the 3-4-5 triangle has a right angle to
- a rule that a triangle with side a,b,c is right angled if a2 +
b2 = c2 to
- a theorem that this rule is true for any a, b and c
The Greeks were fascinated by pure thought and many of the
foundations of mathematics were laid by them. One of the greatest
of these Greek mathematicians was Euclid (~325-265 BC). His
Elements was one of the
major attempts to provide a
Optional Information - Euclids postulates:
systematic summary of the
results they discovered, and
1) A straight line segment can be drawn joining
is possibly the second most
any two points.
translated, published and
2) Any straight line segment can be extended
studied book ever written
indefinitely in a straight line.
3) Given any straight line segment, a circle can
(after the Bible).
be drawn having the segment as radius and
one end point as centre.
4) All right angles are congruent.
And the odd man out:
5) If two lines are drawn which intersect a third
in such a way that the sum of the inner angles
on one side is less than two right angles, then
the two lines inevitably must intersect each
other on that side if extended far enough.

Euclid wanted to provide a firm foundation for mathematics and so

he gave a great deal of emphasis to rigorously proving theorems
from axioms. For example, in geometry his hope was that we could
choose a relatively small number of key statements which every
reasonable person can see are self-evidently true (these usually
known as axioms or postulates) and then deduce the whole of
geometry as logical consequences of these axioms.
He was able to get his starting set down to only five postulates.
He was unhappy with the fifth postulate, mostly because it was
inelegant, and wanted to be able to remove it. However he was
unable to prove it true from the first four and neither could he find
a simpler equivalent. Over the next two millennia many
mathematicians tried, and failed, to do the same.

A Theology of Mathematics

Optional information Geometries

Euclid obviously believed the lines, circles, etc. he described were

those of the real world and so his mathematics was a description or
codification of the nature of the universe. His views led years later
to the statement God is a geometer which seems to have been
coined by Kepler. It seems fair to say that most mathematicians
at least those from Western traditions believed that they were
discovering truth about the universe and that intuition, science and
mathematics were all different views of the same thing reality.
Shaking the foundations
In 1823 this world view changed
forever although most people
didnt realise it at first.

Euclids fifth postulate is equivalent to

the idea that there is a unique parallel
to any line through a point not on the
line.
There are two main flavours of noneuclidean geometry, which correspond
to two different answers to the
question How many parallels are
there?. In hyperbolic geometry there
is more than one parallel line and in
elliptical geometry there is no such
line.
Note that they all share some theorems
any theorem which you can prove
using only the first four of Euclids
axioms is true in all of these
geometries.

Johann Bolyai and Nikolay Lobachevsky independently discovered

geometries which did not assume Euclids fifth postulate. This
produced three main flavours of geometry Euclidean, Hyperbolic
and Elliptical.

A Theology of Mathematics

The $64,000 question is: which one of these geometries matches

Optional Information - A paradox of infinite

the real world? The question cannot really be answered by

experiment since an infinite line would take some time to
construct and the question cannot be answered from within
mathematics since all three geometries are internally consistent.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the forest
Things were getting confusing in the world of arithmetic too.
Georg Cantor (1845-1918)
was playing around with
Take the natural numbers:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,
infinity.

Now double them:

2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12,
There is an infinite number in both rows
which row is bigger? Obviously the second row
is bigger because it is double the first row.
Start again but this time throw away every
other number:
2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12,
Now which row is bigger? Obviously the first
row because we took things out to create the
second row.
But wait the resultant row in both cases is the
same how can it be both bigger and smaller
than the starting row?

One of the biggest problems with infinity is trying to compare it

with itself many paradoxes lie waiting to trap the unwary.
Cantor realised that there were two ways to compare the sizes of
sets of things take knives and forks for example. One way is to
count the knives, count the forks and check the totals are the same.
Another way is to pair up the knives and forks until you run out of
pairs. If you have nothing left then you have the same number of
knives and forks; if you have something left over then this tells you
which youve got more or knives or forks. This second method
doesnt involve remembering totals or even being able to count.
He found that using this second method of comparing sizes dealt
with the paradoxes and enabled a rigorous treatment of infinity. He
went on to prove that there were many different infinities with
different sizes.
In particular he proved that there are more decimal numbers
between 0 and 1 (i.e. point-somethings) than all the whole
numbers (i.e. the numbers 1,2,3, etc. ). He was able to
demonstrate this by showing that however you pair up the decimal

A Theology of Mathematics

numbers with the integers there are always decimals left over.
Nowadays almost every mathematician accepts this result,
although it seems extremely unlikely when it is first explained.
He did not receive the same consequences as Giordano Bruno
above, or even those of another earlier mathematician Bernhard
Bolzana (a Czech theologian/mathematician who lost his teaching
post at Prague in 1819 following his investigations into infinity) but
he did have much opposition to his ideas from other
mathematicians and philosophers.
It is likely that this opposition contributed to his eventual madness,
although the subject matter of his thoughts probably had as much
to do with it.
Cantors work on infinity threw up a hypothesis the so-called
continuum hypothesis. Much effort was spent trying to prove or
disprove this hypothesis. Kurt Gdel (1906-78) proved that the
hypothesis was consistent with the rest of arithmetic and then Paul
Cohen (1934-) proved that assuming this hypothesis to be false was
also consistent with the rest of arithmetic. So you could take it or
leave it both ways produced a completely consistent system.
Once again, like Euclids fifth postulate, how could you know which
was true? I still remember the surprise I received while listening
to a maths lecturer who was proving a theorem when he said, My
proof of this theorem will use the continuum hypothesis. If you
dont believe this hypothesis (and I dont, but most mathematicians
do) then the proof is still possible but a lot harder. I had never
thought of belief before in the context of mathematics.
You just cant prove everything
Gdels most important result however is arguably the
incompleteness theorem. The full result is fairly complex and the
proof is quite hard to grasp. However the theorem states that,
given the rules of arithmetic, there are statements of arithmetic
which are true but cannot be proved. This shocking conclusion was
the death knell for the attempt to build up a complete picture of all
mathematical truth from basic axioms since even arithmetic, which
seemed deceptively simple, was incomplete in this sense.

Where are we now?

Without a doubt the relationship between mathematics and reality
is less obvious than it was. This has a big impact on how we think
about mathematics theologically.
As far as I can tell there are three strands in the approaches being
taken today.

A Theology of Mathematics

1) Mathematics is an a priori truth about the real world: 2 + 2

does equal 4
2) Mathematics is an empirical construction from observing the
world
3) Mathematics is a purely human construction it ought to be
an arts subject
These three basic approaches are in practice often combined in
various ways, but Ill treat them separately as I look at what a
Christian mind can affirm and challenge in these different views.
A Priori
The first approach is highlighted when mathematicians talk about
discovering a result. It is a very common view, both inside and
outside the world of mathematics, and is even reflected in law since
mathematical theorems cannot be patented. This view is most like
the traditional view that has been held almost universally, until
recently, since the Greeks. Many mathematicians really have the
feeling of moving in an abstract landscape of numbers or figures
that exists independently of their own attempts at exploring it4
As Christians we can affirm the sense of reality in this approach.
We would want to assert that absolute truth can exist - and does so
in God. If part of this truth is mathematics then when we do
mathematics we are in some sense thinking Gods thoughts after
him5. In previous times people have used the existence of
mathematics as part of natural theology attempts to prove the
existence of God. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was one such
philosopher and although many people today would reject the
validity of this sort of proof it still seems to be hard to believe in the
objective truth of mathematics without somehow putting some sort
of god into your world view.
However we would want as Christians to challenge attempts to
exalt mathematics as the ultimate truth - God may be a geometer
but he is much more than just a geometer. Gdels incompleteness
theorem stands as a reminder that mathematics cannot prove
everything that is true.
Empirical
The second, empirical, approach (which seems to have similarity to
the Egyptians view) is often associated with the philosopher John
Stuart Mill (1806-73) who wrote that geometry is built on
hypothesis; that it owes to this alone the peculiar certainty
supposed to distinguish it; and that in any science whatever, by
4
5

Dehaene, p242
See note 3

A Theology of Mathematics

reasoning from a set of hypotheses, we may obtain a body of

conclusions as certain as those of geometry, that is, as strictly in
accordance with the hypotheses, and as irresistibly compelling
assent, on condition that those hypotheses are true6. Those
holding this view often see mathematics just as a tool, or a
language, for doing other things whether science or economics.
Mathematics in this approach has no objective reality two plus
two is four by experiment and hence, presumably, could be proved
false.
A Christian critique would want to affirm that the reason that this
empirical approach works at all is because God created and
sustains both the universe and ourselves. Hence it is not surprising
that we can, at least in part, understand the universe. The book of
Job, for example, shows that Man was intended to argue with
God7 the force of the conclusion to the book is that it is a reply to
Jobs questions: Job 381 Then the Lord answered Job out of the
storm. It has often been noticed that contemporary science arose
out of a world view strongly influenced by Christian belief in the
order of the universe and the God-given rationality of man enabling
us to comprehend it.
A Christian would also like to point out that, without a belief in
God, the main problem with the empirical approach is why does
mathematics work like this Einstein said something like the most
incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is
comprehensible8.
Artistic
The third approach at its most extreme argues that mathematics
has no external reality at all. It is simply an attempt to impose
pattern onto a chaotic universe. Few people go that far; rather
more would be happy to echo G.H.Hardy (1877-1947) who in his
book A Mathematicians Apology (which he wrote towards the end
of his life) says Real mathematics, as he referred to it, must be
justified as art if it can be justified at all.9
In this approach if geometry is not God-given, then it is people
created, and how do we think about human creativity?10. We can
affirm the incredible richness of the creative project which is
mathematics. However, many Christians might be unhappy at the
privatisation of mathematics which is an effect of denying it any
external reality. The near universal agreement over mathematical
truth and the way even very abstract mathematics keeps popping
6

Logic, II. V. I, quoted at http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/m/milljs.htm

He Came Down from Heaven, Charles Williams
8
Collected Quotes from Albert Einstein: http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/EinsteinQuotes.html
9
from Understanding Analysis at http://community.middlebury.edu/~abbott/UA/UA1point1.html
10
http://www.stthomas.edu/cathstudies/1995/mclean.htm
7

A Theology of Mathematics

10

up years later in science are more consistent, to a Christian mind at

least, with the first two approaches.
The Bible and Numbers
There are a few thoughts and principles which can be drawn from
the Bible about arithmetic and rationality.
Reason and understanding are seen as gifts of God so
Nebuchadnezzar temporarily loses his reason as a punishment in
Daniel 4. God expects man to reason with him (Is 118) and he is the
source of understanding although his thoughts are seen as higher
than the thoughts of man. There is little sign of a dichotomy
between faith and reason in the Bible Christians are enjoined
to give a reason for the hope that you have (1Pet315).
However understanding in the Bible does not arise in a vacuum
Proverbs in particular stresses that mans understanding and
wisdom comes out of a relationship with God. I believe therefore I
am is probably closer to this than the Western I think therefore I
am of Descartes.
God creates order out of formlessness in Genesis 1; which is
reflected in the structured way it is written. For example there are
two triples of days ending with the special 7th day. God is seen as
creating and sustaining the order of creation sunrise and sunset,
summer and winter (Gen 822). The Bible sees the order and rhythm
of the world as a sign of Gods hand in it and I think this would
extend to arithmetic also.
Then too the Hebrews were very interested in numbers and their
symbolism. Most of the smaller numbers were associated with
specific ideas, and so their use of round numbers as
approximations was more complicated than that of Western writers.
One of the most important numbers was seven, which spoke of
completion and perfection - as for example the sevenfold spirit of
God (Rev 31).
The Bible sees being able to number things as giving some sort of
power over them the importance is shown by the way all sorts of
things get counted from people to drinking vessels. David gets into
trouble when he counts the Israelites in 1 Chronicles 21 which
seems to be because he is abrogating Gods right alone to know
this. In the New Testament we hear from Jesus that the hairs of
your head are all numbered (Matt 1030).
Things that could not be counted such as the stars, the clouds or
the grains of sand are used to express the restricted nature of
mans mind and contrast it with Gods omniscience. When God is
promising Abraham lots of descendants he compares them to the

A Theology of Mathematics

11

stars, which Abraham cannot count. However in Psalm 147 God

knows the number of the stars and his understanding has no limit
(literally no number). So too in Job 117 Zophar asks Job the
rhetorical question Can you probe the limits of the Almighty?
The interest in numbers can however become a wish to find hidden
significance in them. This is usually known as numerology and can
be found in the Cabbala of later Jewish thought hidden numbers
in Biblical (and other) texts which reveal to the initiate the secret
code unknown to others. A similar view seems to be behind some
of the extreme interpretations of the book of Revelation and the
famous number of the beast 666. Although it is undoubtedly
possible that God could embed prophetic numbers in the Biblical
text it is unclear why he would have done so the codes and
numbers which people find are generally only understandable when
looking back at events once they are completed and the events so
described seem arbitrary. It can be all too easy to find apparent
connections between historical events and numbers that are in fact
simply a coincidence there are so many events and so many ways
to combine letters and numbers that the range of possibilities
becomes immense. A simple example (using the King James
version) is the proof that Shakespeare wrote the Bible - Psalms is
the most poetic book of the Bible. Psalm 46. Take the 46th. word
from the beginning. Add the 47th. word from the end. You have
revealed the true author of the Bible.11
Additionally the bible itself does not claim to be a book of
numerology and Jesus made no references to this view of the
Hebrew Old Testament despite making many statements about it
and its role.

A note on Mathematics and Post Modernity

Mathematics does not sit very well with post-modernity. There are
a number of reasons for this, the most important being the
complete inability of mathematics to survive any sort of
inconsistency.
Alan Turing (best known for his code breaking in World War II)
apparently attended a series of lectures by the philosopher
Wittgenstein who argued that contradictions should not be rejected
Turing attempted to counter this view and eventually gave up
attending the lectures12. The inclusion of just one contradiction in
a mathematical system allows you to prove any result you want.
However, the postmodern world view has given mathematicians
increased flexible about which axioms are taken as the starting
point, even though they still use the same logic to produce results
from them.
11
12

From http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/4081/Shakespeare.html
Barrow2000 p300

A Theology of Mathematics

12

Perhaps Christian thinkers can learn something from mathematics

about making a clear separation between the choice of initial
axioms from the conclusions such starting points lead to. For
example we might recognise that although in many cases starting
assumptions cannot be proved the way in which these are used to
reach to a conclusion can be challenged. As Tom Wright wrote
The church must recoverits faith in God-given reason, not as an
independent source of authority but as the tool for thinking
clearly13.
Logic and reason is very much a product of the conscious mind
the unconscious mind which is so much a part of psychology does
not seem to follow the same rules of logic. One of the problems of
an over-rational approach to life is that it discounts many of the
things which are more associated with the unconscious such as
symbols, myths and poetry. These are often stressed in a
postmodern approach but sometimes it seems that the pendulum
swings too far in the direction of abandoning reason. In the same
way that psychology looks to restore a healthy balance between the
conscious and the unconscious there is a proper balance between
rationality and non-rationality.
One specific area where I believe there is a connection between
post modernity and mathematics is in the relatively recent
exploration of so-called Chaos theory (which is perhaps better
described as order without regularity) as seen in things like
weather patterns and the way taps drip. The mathematics at the
foundations of this theory is not hard but the Enlightenment
mindset didnt find it. This seems to be because people were unable
to accept that complicated behaviour could arise from simple
causes and so looked for increasingly complicated causes the
older world view understood order in a relatively deterministic
and predictable way which did not fit with the unpredictable nature
of chaos theory.
For example, consider the very simple formula f(x) = 2x2 1. If you
apply this formula to its own output again and again you might
expect to get some sort of pattern. However, if you try it with a
pocket calculator or a computer youll probably be surprised it
looks almost random. Here for example are the last 50 numbers
generated when I started with an initial value for x of 0.78 and
repeated the calculation 1000 times on a computer.

13

That special relationship, The Guardian, 18 Oct 2003

A Theology of Mathematics

13

1.5

0.5

0
1

51

-0.5

-1

-1.5

It might look random but it isnt!

A Theology of Mathematics

14

Beauty in Mathematics
Beauty also has an important place in mathematics
mathematicians and theoretical physicists have an instinctive
preference for elegant theorems; Paul Dirac is one of the best
known of many who apparently preferred a beautiful theory to one
which simply complied with observations. This fits well with our
understanding of the nature of the universe from Genesis that it
was initially created very good.
Here are a couple of examples of beauty in mathematics.
1) The Mandelbrot set.
This set was highly popular during the 1990s and extracts from it
appeared everywhere.

This is an image of the entire set.

The set arises out of chaos theory and is generated by using a
deceptively simple formula f(z) = z2 + c which is applied again and
again to its own output for different starting values of c. The
detail that is revealed when magnifying particular areas of the set
is astonishing and seems out of all proportion to the simplicity of
how it is defined.
2) An incredible relationship.
Five fundamental mathematical quantities:
e (the base of natural logarithms - it also appears in
probability)
(the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter)
i (the square root of minus one, much used in electrical
theory)
one
zero
are related in this equation:

A Theology of Mathematics

15

ei + 1 = 0
I personally find this result (and some other unlikely relationships)
almost unbelievably amazing since there seems no good reason
why quantities which were independently discovered should have
such an intimate relationship.
For many people the beauty of mathematics is a sign of the beauty
which God placed in the universe. I find it hard to see why beauty
should have any relation to truth if the universe were in fact
meaningless.

Morals in Mathematics
The work of pure mathematics seems to have little connection with
morality, other than the basic integrity of verifying, to the best of
your ability, that you have actually produced a complete proof;
which sometimes requires much more work than a partial one.
One obvious area where morals matter enormously in applied
mathematics is statistics. 37.4% of statistics are made up on the
spot14. Seriously though, statistics have a great deal of power in
todays world and are used to justify decisions of all sorts. Here
are a couple of ways in which morality is relevant.
The first call is to honesty in researching and presenting statistics.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics15, but statistics do not
need to be untruthful - there has been a substantial amount of work
done on what must be done to ensure that statistics are as truthful
as possible and an ethical approach to statistics must be informed
by this work. If we are creating fresh statistics it is important that
we take care, as best we can, that what we present has been
accurately researched and is presented without deceit. For
example, what is the difference between the two statements below?
(a) I asked, and Bill reads the Bible although Fred doesnt
(b) A recent survey found that 50% of people read the Bible
The same facts are presented in both cases, but the second time
they are presented in a way that implies far too much. There are a
lot of technical ways to prevent this sort of falsehood a good
beginning is to ensure the number of people asked, and how they
were selected, is always included.
There are more subtle ways both deliberate and accidental that
make statistics misleading. As another example, take the phrase:
In a recent survey 8 out of 10 people preferred brand X coffee.
14
15

You dont really expect a footnote for this one, do you?

Mark Twain and Benjamin Disraeli are both credited with saying this

A Theology of Mathematics

16

There are many dishonest ways to get a figure like this. One way is
to keep asking groups of 10 people until, eventually, you will find by
chance a group of ten people where eight of them happen to prefer
brand X. The other groups that were surveyed are quietly
forgotten. Morality here obviously means keeping all the results
and not just selecting the ones we happen to want.
Unfortunately all those who create statistics are subject to human
sins of dishonesty, bias and laziness and so we must take care when
reading statistics and be ready to question figures which may
require some work and courage on our part. Whenever we read a
statistic we should be prepared, as Darrell Huff says, to talk back
to it: You can prod the stuff with five simple questions, and by
finding the answers avoid learning a remarkable lot that isnt so.16.
Sometimes the bias may be obvious, or the figure given with so
little support that it means almost nothing, but often we have to do
some work to try and check whether what is claimed is true.
It is all too easy when presented with statistics to selectively
remember and re-use the ones that confirm our own beliefs and to
pass over the ones that challenge us. Integrity in this area means
facing up to statistics that we dont like rather than ignoring them;
without forgetting that they could be wrong. It is also tempting to
find a correlation between two figures and then to jump too quickly
to deciding one is the cause and the other is the effect. In practice
it can be very hard to identify what causes what.
When using statistics from other sources it should be part of our
integrity to use them fairly, to include any estimates of accuracy,
and to provide references to the original source of the figures.
Somehow people seem to be keener to do this when quoting an
author, or using verses from the Bible, than when quoting statistics.

The Mathematical mind strengths and weaknesses

The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone William Wordsworth
Wordsworths picture could be describing the archetypal
mathematician, someone lacking in the normal human emotions
and working principally alone. Although this is only part of the
picture I think it does show some of the potential dangers in an
excessively mathematical view of things. Mathematics is a very
abstract activity, and abstraction has been defined as selective
forgetting. Five apples and five stones do not have much in
common, apart from their fiveness, and to do mathematics with
16

How to Lie With Statistics p110

A Theology of Mathematics

17

them is to deliberately forget almost everything about the objects

themselves.
Some mathematicians become almost compulsively rational, trying
to use numbers to solve problems of human relationships and daily
living. In the book A Beautiful Mind (which inspired the
eponymous film) we read the true story of a John Nash, a
mathematician who lost his mind to schizophrenia and then
against the odds recovered it. One of his most important results,
and the one for which he received the Nobel prize, was in game
theory which is an attempt to provide a systematic theory of
rational human behaviour by focusing on the playing of games.
However, after his recovery, he comes to a life in which thought
and emotion are more closely entwined relationships more
symmetrical he has become a great deal more than he ever
was17.
Rationality believes that there are reasons for the world and one of
the strengths of a mathematical mind is the quest for finding
meaning in the world, even where it is not intuitive. However this
can decay to become the view that everything has a secret
meaning. (This also seems to be related to the numerological use of
the Bible mentioned earlier.) When John Nash suffered from
schizophrenia he had to wrestle against beliefs that Russians, or
aliens, were communicating with him through patterns of numbers
in newspapers, etc. that others could not find. The temptation to
believe that there are hidden meanings known only to the initiated
of which we are of course a part - is a hard one to resist for many
people.
The fifth personality type in the Enneagram model of personality,
the Observer, has a natural attraction to systems such as
mathematics that explain universal principles of interaction18
since this type of person tends to find the outside world and
emotions threatening and systems of thought can provide control
over this fear. The INTP temperament in the Myers-Briggs
scheme describes a similar type of person.
The strengths of this approach include being able to remain
objective even when personally involved in a situation and being
able to deduce principles from experiences. The weaknesses are
typically some reluctance to engage in relationships and shyness
about contributing thoughts unless the person is certain they know
almost everything about the subject.
A Christian viewpoint of the weaknesses of this personality type
would want to stress that the Bible reveals both a God in
relationship perhaps most clearly in Jesus prayer in John 17 - and
17
18

A Beautiful Mind p388

The Enneagram, Helen Palmer, p206

A Theology of Mathematics

18

also a God prepared to engage in this worlds troubles even to the

extent of becoming incarnate as a human being. So the
mathematical mind must be reminded that relationships and
vulnerability are very important characteristics and to be
developed as part of each persons call to become fully human.
G.K. Chestertons adage If a things worth doing its worth doing
badly19 can help provide courage to contribute even when the
person feels inadequate.
Hermann Hesses great novel The Glass Bead Game is a modern
parable of this it describes a group of people who seek to explain
everything through mathematical symbols and repudiate emotion
and strong relationships. The hero of the story, Joseph Knecht,
defects from this order, which he leads, and eventually gives up his
life in sacrifice for a fellow human being.
Of course, fortunately, not all mathematicians have this personality
but it does seem that some of the same strengths and weaknesses
will apply to many of them. Whether it is an explanation for taking
up mathematics or an effect of studying it is hard to tell.

Why do so many people dislike Mathematics?

The converse of a mathematical mind is innumeracy: a failure to
deal comfortably with the fundamental notion of number and
chance20. This is quite common in our society, and people even
take a perverse pride in being bad at maths. This is both strange,
since few people take pride in illiteracy or bad spelling, and
unfortunate, since so much of our society relies on familiarity with
numbers.
W.W.Sawyer wrote The two main conditions of success in any sort
of work are interest and confidence21. Sadly in many cases people
lack not just one but both of these conditions when it comes to
mathematics. This is most obvious in school where maths is often a
problematic subject but in many cases this lack is still present,
albeit hidden, once formal lessons are over since contact with
mathematics can simply be avoided. Many people, highly
competent in many areas, fear mathematics.
A Christian would want to begin with addressing this fear. Perfect
love casts out fear (John 418) applies to many things, and this
should also include mathematics. A love of God and of his creation
can stimulate interest in history, geography, science and so on
including mathematics. It can certainly give us a theological
backing for looking at it.
19

The Columbia World of Quotations, http://www.bartleby.com/66/49/12249.html

Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos, p ix
21
Mathematicians Delight, p40
20

A Theology of Mathematics

19

Reason, which perhaps reaches its purest form in mathematics, is a

gift of God and we can celebrate it. Mr God, This is Anna is a
wonderful book which tells a story about Anna, a small girl with
insatiable curiosity and able to see things from unexpected points
of view. Maths for her was fun, a puzzle, a branch of theology and
a game for sharing. Her enthusiasm and playfulness is exciting but
she is unusual few children would be able to cope with so many
abstract concepts so young.
The use of abstract ideas is one of the places where lack of interest
and confidence arises. One of the problems with mathematics is
that it does become increasingly abstract throughout schooling. A
classical model of child development designates the pre-teen period
as a key place for the rise of abstract thought. However childrens
development is very individual and so some will be earlier and
some later in learning to deal with abstraction. On top of this
different people have more or less love of abstraction even when
capable of it. So it can be helpful to give concrete examples in
mathematics to help people retain interest; some teaching is better
than others at providing this. In addition, a wide range of such
examples is helpful since each may demonstrate different facets of
the subject. Someone who has only seen examples of counting with
beads or blocks of wood may find negative numbers really hard to
understand has anybody seen 3 beads? The concept of
negative numbers should be a lot easier to understand for someone
who has played with another example, such as distance, where
negative numbers have a more obvious use if 4 means four
miles north then 4 has an obvious interpretation as four miles
south.
Picking good examples can help make it fun as well but it is
important to avoid contrived examples. The traditional problem of
how long it will take someone to fill a bath with both taps running
and the plug out was dealt with swiftly in Annas world by some
mothers do have em and they live22. This is an example of the
rigidity that sometimes dogs the teaching of mathematics the
child is expected to solve the maths problem by using often
unspoken rules. These rules are needed to find the right problem
in mathematics within the story there may be more than one way
of solving the story but only one will be marked as correct. The
rules may also apply inside mathematics itself for example a poor
teacher might insist on their preferred way of doing long division
even when the child already knows another way that also works.
Even something as simple as the times tables has more than one
way of doing it the Chinese teach children how to swap the
numbers round when multiplying so the smaller number always
comes first. This means they dont need to learn the cases where
22

Mr God This is Anna p123

A Theology of Mathematics

20

the first number is bigger than the second, so their tables are in
total just over half the size of the Western ones.
Rigidity like that above can lead to children doing maths by rote
and simply manipulating symbols without really thinking about
what they mean. As an example of this sort of error consider:
1/2 + 1/3 = 2/5
where the person doing the sum has added the tops and bottoms
of the fractions together by misapplying the rule for multiplying
fractions to adding them.
A wrong answer like this would not be accepted by someone with a
mental image of adding together half a pie and a third of a pie.
Maths can be seen as a tool, a tool which is useful for solving
things. A small number of people have the reverse of this
everything is mathematics and so it is the tool. This approach can
seem effective as in the proverb To a man with a hammer every
problem is a nail. For someone like this it is more important to
stress other aspects of life, things which fall outside the area of
pure reason such as love and intuition.
Unlike some other subjects mathematics is continually building on
what is already known. This means that if something causes
problems the underlying reason might be an unlearnt lesson from
earlier on revisiting this subject can both help to regain
confidence (since the problems here can be solved) and then mean
the newer subject matter suddenly seems to click.
Mans creativity comes out all over mathematics if it is allowed to.
Children count on their fingers and often come up with ways to add
and subtract small numbers on their fingers. Later on pictures and
graphs can help make numbers come to life. The number line
...___________________________________________...
| | | | | | | | | | |
-5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5
is a good way to see some of the secrets of small numbers, and
adding and subtracting them. A calculator can be a bit like a map
to explore the bigger numbers it
can provide games and puzzles with
A simple calculator game
numbers. These do not necessarily
need explaining like Jesus telling a
11 3 x 3 = 2
good parable the itch of the
1111 33 x 33 = 22
unsolved problem can get under the
111111 333 x 333 = 222
skin and lead the person to ask the
right questions for themselves.

A Theology of Mathematics

21

Numbers can be seen as fun, as known inhabitants of the mental

world. Some people make a few friends, some make a lot; it seems
the same with numbers. There is a well-known story of the Indian
mathematician Ramanujan which shows his enormous love of
numbers. He was in hospital in Oxford, and the English
mathematician Hardy was visiting him but found it hard to find
enough topics of conversation. On arrival one day Hardy started
the conversation by remarking on the boring number of the cab
that he had come in 1729. Ramanujan instantly replied that it
was not a boring number it was the smallest number which can
be formed by adding two cubes in two different ways. (The two
ways are 13 + 123 and 93 + 103).
Ignorance in mathematics is not treated in the same way as in
other areas Few educated people admit to being completely
unacquainted with the names Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, yet
most willingly confess their ignorance of Gauss, Euler or
Laplace23. This is not a good state of affairs and I think that there
are many things which can be done, some more explicitly Christian
than others, to encourage people of all ages but perhaps
particularly during school years that mathematics need not be
boring but can even be enthralling.

23

Innumeracy p77

A Theology of Mathematics

22

Conclusion
I have tried to show that there are various links between theology
and mathematics but that, like many such links, the privatisation of
religion in the West has greatly reduced the interest in and
perception of these links.
There are philosophical links between belief in God and the
existence and place of mathematics both pure and applied, and I
have tried to provide some theological views on three main theories
of what mathematics is. I myself do not believe that any single one
of the three theories is a complete explanation of mathematics it
seems to me to contain elements of a priori truth, empirical
discovery and creativity. However I do believe that there are
important things to be said from a theological viewpoint about
every one of these approaches.
There are some moral links, such as those in statistics where
temptations to laziness or bias can lead people into error.
Finally I hope I have shown how some theological basis to the
subject can help people to lose their fear of mathematics and
hopefully even come to enjoy it.

A Theology of Mathematics

23

Bibliography
Dead trees:
Adams, Douglas & Carwardine, Mark (1991), Last Chance to See,
Pan, London

Barrow, John D. & Tipler, Frank J. (1986), The Anthropic

Cosmological Principle, OUP, Oxford
Barrow, John D. (2000), The Book of Nothing, Jonathan Cape, London
Bomford, Rodney (1999), The Symmetry of God, Free Association
Books, London

Brown, Colin (1978), Philosophy and the Christian Faith, IVP, Illinois
Carroll, Lewis (1958), Pillow Problems & A Tangled Tale, Dover
Publications, New York

Crossley, J.N. & others (1972), What is Mathematical Logic?, OUP,

Oxford

Davies (1983), The Edge of Infinity, OUP, Oxford

Dehaene, Stanislas (1998), The Number Sense, Penguin, London
Eastaway, Rob & Wyndham, Jeremy (1998), Why do Buses Come in
Threes?, Robson, London
Fynn (1974), Mr God, This is Anna, Fount, London
Gardner, Martin (1990), Mathematical Carnival, Penguin, London
Gardner, Martin (1965), Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions,
Pelican, London

Gleick, James (1988), Chaos, Cardinal, London

God (Ed), The Holy Bible (NIV), Hodder and Stoughton, London
Hesse, Hermann (1990), The Glass Bead Game, Owl Books, New York
Hofstadter, Douglas R. (1980), Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal
Golden Braid, Penguin, London
Huff, Darrell (1973), How to Lie with Statistics, Pelican, London
Kiersey, David & Bates, Marilyn (1984), Please Understand Me,
Gnosology Books, Del Mar, California

Nasar, Sylvia (2001), A Beautiful Mind, Faber & Faber, London

Palmer, Helen (1991), The Enneagram, HarperCollins, New York
Paulos, John Allen (1990), Innumeracy, Penguin, London
Polkinghorne, John (1994), Quarks, Chaos and Christianity, Triangle,
London

Rayner, Eric (1986), Human Development (3rd Edition), Routledge,

London

Ridgway, Athelstan Ed (1949/50), Everymans Encyclopaedia (3rd Edition), J.M. Dent,

London

Sawyer, W.W. (1943), Mathematicians Delight, Pelican, London

Stewart, Ian (1990), Does God Play Dice?, Penguin, London
Stewart, Ian (1992), Fearful Symmetry, Penguin, London
Stewart, Ian (2003), Flatterland, Pan, London
Urnson, J.O. & Re, Jonathan (1991), The Concise Encyclopaedia of
Western Philosophy & Philosophers, Routledge, London
Wilkinson, David (2002), The Message of Creation, IVP, Leicester
Williams, Charles (1984), He Came Down From Heaven, Eerdmans,
Grand Rapids

Live Links:

A Theology of Mathematics

24

Herrmann, Robert A. Modern Mathematics - Its Relation to

Physical Science and Theology,
www.serve.com/herrmann/math.htm
McLean, Jeffery T. Mathematics and Theology: A Conversation,
www.stthomas.edu/cathstudies/1995/mclean.htm
Various authors at St. Andrews University, The MacTutor History
of Mathematics archive, www-gap.dcs.stand.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/