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A Beginner’s Guide to the Argument from Language

by Editor

If you ever visit Paris, it’s worth stopping by the art gallery in the Louvre.  There you can see Wikipedia calls “the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world”.  But why do vast crowds of people stand in awe before a framed wooden board with a variety of oil colours brushed all over it?  Because that’s basically what the ‘Mona Lisa’ is… isn’t it?

You don’t have to consider yourself a cultured person to know that my description fails to capture the beauty, artistry and mystery represented by this famous portrait by Leonardo DaVinci!  This illustrates the danger when we reduce something down to its parts, then we risk missing or failing to do justice to its overall significance.

That’s not just the case with art, but with language.  What is language?  Some of the sceptical philosophers would tell us that it describes specific sounds produced by our vibrating vocal chords, directed by electrical impulses from the brain, carried by sound waves to another person’s ear-drum, which people in a given society recognise and have given specific meaning.  For example, we associate the phonic sounds “ch-air” with a four legged piece of furniture on which people sit.  Therefore language is a game that we teach our children how to play and its worth playing because it enables us express our desires and co-operate to accomplish our goals.  Again, like with the Mona Lisa, this description is true, at a certain level.  However, it misses so much more.

Have you ever reflected on how surprising it is that everything has come from nothing; that life has arisen from non-life; that mind exists and not just matter?  The world in which we live is full of extravagant beauty and creativity, tastes and textures, colours and sounds – including the voices of children playing, choirs singing, and friends chatting.  Using the gift of language we can tell each other what is going on inside our minds – whether that’s telling a joke, making a complaint, arguing a political point, expressing heart-felt love, or a simply baby telling us why it is crying and what it wants .  Even though there are thousands of different languages in the world, we have learned how to reach across those communication barriers – so that although we use different words we can have a shared understanding of what is the meaning and intention behind those words.

All of these things we take for granted every single day, but the incredible phenomenon of language suggests that we live in a certain kind of universe.  One in which language is not just accidental but intentional.  One which makes better sense if its ultimate reality is not eternal matter but an eternal Mind.  Therefore, it is interesting that the opening words of the Bible announce: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).  How did God do it?  “And God said: Let there be light – and there was light” (Genesis 1:3).  God not only thinks but speaks – and when He does, things happen.  Some of the more colourful Christian writers have even suggested that God sang the words of creation, expressing His joy as a Master Artist producing a masterpiece.  We are speaking creatures who been given the gift of language by a speaking God.

The New Testament echoes these words, but applies them to Jesus: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  Through Him all things were made… And the Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:1-3, 14).

Just as a person expresses themselves through the words they say, revealing who they are, what they are like, how they think – so also God has spoken and revealed Himself to the world through His written word in the Bible and His living word in Jesus.  “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Hebrews 1:1-3).  Although so much separates an infinite God from finite humans – think of the difference between yourself and an ant.  Nevertheless, God has taken the initiative to come down to our level, to become one of us, in order to communicate clearly with us and create understanding in us.

Finally, we sometimes talk about suffering “the silent treatment” – when two people have fallen out.  We also recognise that something has gone wrong in a relationship when the people involved stop talking.  Sadly, there has been a break down in communication and in relationship between heaven and earth, God and humanity.  God not only designed a good world with scientific truths, written in the language of mathematics, but He also designed it with moral truths, communicated to us in our language.  However, the human race has decided to disregard those instructions and instead has sought to devise our own truths, pursuing meaning and happiness without God and in ways God has said are not good.  Nevertheless, rather than giving us the silent treatment, God has continued speaking to this world – raising up His messengers, giving us the Bible, and ultimately in sending Jesus.  Because God is pursuing us, seeking to be reconciled with us – if only we would stop running away and start listening.

David lives in Edinburgh, where he is a pastor of a city centre church and engaged in apologetics and public theology ministry.  He is married to Kirsty, a doctor, and they have two little boys: Joel and Daniel (who ask the hardest questions ever!)

Further Reading

Advanced: Is there a Meaning in This Text, Kevin Vanhoozer.

At the Scripture Union Scotland Staff Retreat

by Editor
Andy Bannister reports

I had the privilege of speaking at the Scripture Union Scotland staff retreat at Lendrick Muir recently. There must have been well over a hundred people there, Lendrick Muir’s main meeting room is this lovely long old room, which was full. They were a really happy crowd of people – great to be with for a few days too. It was quite lively and almost had the atmosphere of a student houseparty! The retreat was for all of SU Scotland’s staff, which included their front line workers in schools and holidays; their back office staff – as well as their many associate workers who with SU too. They came across as a group of people who really like working together. It was also a poignant time to be there, as it was last time that they all met together with Andy Bathgate at the helm of the organisation, where he has been for eighteen years! Andy is a member of Solas’ Council of Reference too – which is another good connection we have with SU.

I did three talks at the retreat. Firstly we looked at “Hope in a Culture of Confusion”, then “Identity in a Culture of Confusion” and “Faithfulness in a Culture of Confusion” in the main sessions. Then there was an optional seminar I did as an ‘extra’ on “How to talk about Jesus without sounding like an idiot!” which is our introduction to the key principles of conversational evangelism.

It was great to be with SU Scotland for a few days – they are a really great bunch of people to work with and be with! And they seemed really enthusiastic about the teaching sessions that we shared together. When he was briefing me before the event; Andy Bathgate reminded me that people often assume that all SU workers are out in the field, engaging with people all the time in their jobs. However, some of the back office staff will say that their evangelistic engagement is with friends and family; because their day job involves doing the accounts or running a website, or administrating holidays.

We have a great relationship with SU Scotland, at Solas, we speak at various events they hold; both for young people and for their staff. We share a similar passion for engaging young people, and really appreciate both their commitment – and their reach, into all kinds of different communities around the country.

Editor’s note: Since Andy wrote this report, Andy Bathgate (SU Scotland’s Chief Executive wrote to say, “It was great to have him. So often the main speaker sets the tone for the conference and Andy’s warmth, humour, passion and friendliness set a great tone for us. He was accessible across the wide range of our staff team and related well outside of the sessions. He really shone in the Q&A sessions after the talks (quite brilliant on his feet) and the seminar was incredibly well received.”

Why Is The Bible Full of Laws?

by Solas

In a culture whose highest values are often autonomy and liberal democracy, the bible’s many ethical commands – especially Old Testament laws on things like food and clothing – can seem both arbitrary and oppressive. In this Short Answers video, Solas speaker Gareth Black asks us to step back and think about the purpose and function behind any law, not just biblical laws. In doing so, we see how God’s laws are not arbitrary but specifically designed to reveal the Law-Maker’s character, increase our personal and social wellbeing, and show us that, if we truly want to live rightly, we are going to need a power that can change us at the deepest level.

https://youtu.be/zuzUHdQHx60

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Genesis, Artificial Intelligence and the Meaning of Humanity

by Editor
UNCOUPLING INTELLIGENCE FROM CONSCIOUSNESS

One of Yuval Harari’s contentions is that many people researching into AI do not concern themselves with consciousness for the simple reason that their AI systems are allowing them to create intelligence (simulated) that is not conscious – and that is sufficient for their purposes.

It is easy to get some idea of what this means. Suppose I take a taxi journey from the train station to a meeting in Oxford. The taxi driver is conscious – otherwise the journey is rapidly going to run into serious trouble. But if I undertake the journey in an autonomous  vehicle,  the  taxi driver  is  superfluous. All I need to achieve my goal is an AI system that “knows” the route and can guide the car along it, but there is no need for a conscious driver at any stage. Or suppose I need heart surgery. The last surgeon I experienced was a conscious human being; the next, should I need it, may well be a non-conscious robotic AI system.

Genesis tells us that when God created humans in his image, he linked intelligence and consciousness together in one being, for he is himself like that – a conscious intelligent being. However, God, who is Spirit, links consciousness and intelligence together in a non-material being. The fact that God is Spirit shows that neither consciousness nor intelligence necessarily depend on a material substrate – another reason to think that humans will never be able to make a conscious material machine.

Humans were assigned work

Genesis 2:15 informs us that God gave work, in a garden, as part of the human raison d’être before sin entered into the world. That is why people who try but do not succeed in finding work often feel deprived and unwanted. Yet, work, though very important, is not all of life as it was essentially thought to be in the Communist concept of a “worker state.” However, what is happening now is that, as suggested above, by decoupling intelligence from consciousness, AI would seem to be pushing us in the opposite direction to a situation where work becomes a smaller and smaller part of human activity. Even if Ray Kurzweil is overly optimistic in saying that most human tasks will be taken over by robots by 2030, we need to think about what even a partial AI/robot takeover would look like in light of the biblical view that work is part of our God- given significance as human beings.

Yuval Harari writes: “In the twenty-first century we might witness the creation of a massive new unworking class: people devoid of any economic, political or even artistic value, who contribute nothing to the prosperity, power and glory of society. This ‘useless class’ will not be merely unemployed – it will be unemployable.”16 Digital assistants, robots, and the like can  be regarded as slaves, and the world already experienced a slave economy where the very few were served by the many. That very few did little work, and when society collapsed, having forgotten how to work, they had no idea how to rebuild. Some suggest it was for that reason that the Roman Empire eventually collapsed.

The concept of a “useless class” is chilling and dehumanising. The New Testament advice for believers is: “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat” (2  Thessalonians 3:10).    It does not, however, say, if anyone does not work, let him not eat. It is almost as if Paul envisaged the possibility of unemployment. If certain AGI pundits are right, the prospect of future techno-unemployment is worse than grim.

The University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute has projected the time-scale of AI related job-erosion. It is obvious that there is an urgent need to create many new jobs, and if they are not to dis- appear too rapidly, they will have to be jobs that humans can do better than algorithms. This will mean that many, if not most, people will have to keep learning throughout life, a prospect that many will find either daunting or simply impossible.

The techno-optimists hope that even if such people cannot be employed, there will be enough financial surplus from the new technology that they will be fed, housed, and supported throughout life. But who will be paying for the new technological services – certainly not people who have no work? Where will the financial surplus come from? Such techno-optimism seems extremely naive! The extreme techno-pessimist view is,  as Nick Bostrom warns, that humans will not in fact reach the final stage of unemployability, as an ascendant AI may well simply exterminate them.17

Yet according to Scripture, work is an important ingredient in human flourishing. How can those of us who are convinced of that fact communicate and maintain it in the face of a technological invasion of the workplace? Is our stark choice really between learning to work with robots or being replaced by them?18   Once AI masters the art of horticulture, will there be a job for Adam?

The problem is huge, and it starts not with retraining those that have already been employed, but with the basic education of children. The World Economic Forum reports:

The jobs of the future will require students to have strong cognitive skills in mathematics and literacy, as well as soft skills such as problem-solving and creative thinking, to enable them to adapt to a quickly changing environment.  However, millions of children are not gaining these skillsets, either because they never started school, they have dropped out of school, or their school does not offer a quality education.19

 It would appear that 617 million children and adolescents fall below an acceptable standard in reading and mathematics.20 The tragedy here is that this represents an immense waste of talent and leads to severely reduced potential to escape long- term poverty.

It is a sobering thought that AI may leave millions of children far behind, totally unable to compete with the more privileged.

Humans have the faculty of language

God instructed man to name the animals in Genesis 2:19–20. The thought that an AI system might be able to name objects does not  sound completely far-fetched since, at the basic level,  a name is to a large extent an arbitrary sound attached to the object and then written down. Human capacities, however, go way beyond naming things. Theologian Keith Ward wrote: “There are here three distinctive capacities of the human person, unique among all organisms on Earth, so far as we  can tell – the capacity to be sensitive to and appreciative of information received, to be creative in responding to it, and to learn and develop such capacities in relation to other persons   in specific historical contexts. Human persons receive information, interpret it, and transmit it in a fully semantic way.”21 This would seem to be in a completely different category from the information-processing ability of computers or the image recognition of AI.

Yet AI systems are already beginning to invade the world of the artist, musician, and writer. At the time of writing (2018), one of the first AI artistic compositions is about to be auctioned at Christie’s. David Cope, former music professor at the University of California in Santa Cruz, who writes about AI and music, has developed impressive computer programs to create classical music in the style of any given composer. Audience response has shown that Cope’s music is indistinguishable from Bach, for example.

Cope has developed an even more sophisticated machine learning system called “Annie” that not only writes music but also various kinds of poetry. This is slightly misleading since what such a system produces is generated by Cope plus AI, not by AI alone. As Paul Ford, who attempted to write an article using machine learning, has said: “At least for now computers need people as much as we need them.”22 The reason is clear: all of these things are being done by unconscious machines that are, in turn, being guided by conscious humans.

GOD CREATED THE MAN/WOMAN RELATIONSHIP

The Genesis 2 account raises the question of a suitable companion for man. Animals have been human companions from time immemorial, and with advances in medicine resulting in ageing populations, the need for companionship is at an all-time high. That need is being increasingly supplied by lifelike companion robots, and it is spawning a huge industry, particularly in countries like Japan. At the other end of the age scale, robotic ducks have been developed to help children with cancer. Also, healthcare robots that combine AI with voice technology are being developed that will, for instance, remind people to take their medicines at the right time.

However, the biblical account indicates that like-for-like companionship cannot be supplied by a subhuman animal, since there is a category difference between humans and animals – as indicated by the information gap on Day 6 of the creation narrative.

According to the Genesis account, woman, the biblical counterpart of man, is built from man by God. What implications does this have for the way we understand the nature of human- to-human relationships as distinct from interactions with companion robots, robotic pets, robotic house helps, and even life-size robotic dolls? Will they, for instance, even enhanced by AI, one day be capable of responding to the complex blend of emotional, social, cultural, and physical needs of people in a way that satisfies the human need for understanding and compassion? Margaret Boden points out that other human beings, of course, don’t always provide these things either. Yet she goes on to say:

In a nutshell,  over-reliance on  computer  “carers,”  none of which can really care, would be a betrayal of the user’s human dignity . . . In the early days of AI, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum made himself very unpopular with his MIT colleagues by saying as much. “To substitute a computer system for a human function that involves interpersonal respect, understanding, and love,” he insisted in 1976, is “simply obscene.”23

Boden also issues a warning: “The users and designers  of AI systems – and of a future society in which AI is rampant – should remember the fundamental difference between human and artificial intelligence: one cares, the other does not.” However, in this context we should balance these comments by referring to Rosalind Picard’s positive work in affective computing, mentioned elsewhere, that is very much an expression  of AI care – simulated care, but nonetheless care as far as the patient is concerned.

The humans were told to be “fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28) to give life to succeeding generations by the natural process of the sexual transmission of life. Of course, at that stage, there was no question of one generation interfering with the genetic programming of subsequent generations. That would come much later, though thinking about it, as our generation must, will involve the next ingredient in what it means to be human.

Professor John Lennox will be a special guest on a Solas webinar on July 21st 2020, join us live on the day, and put your questions to him; or watch webinar subsequently on catch-up. All details are here.

This extract from “2084: Artifiical Intelligence, The Future of Humanity and the God Question” by John C. Lennox has been published here with kind permission of HarperCollins Publications. 2084 by John Lennox is available here.

John C. Lennox (PhD, DPhil, DSc) is Professor of Mathematics in the University of Oxford (Emeritus), Fellow in Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science, and Pastoral Advisor at Green Templeton College, Oxford. He is author of God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? on the interface between science, philosophy, and theology. He lectures extensively in North America and in Eastern and Western Europe on mathematics, the philosophy of science, and the intellectual defence of Christianity, and he has publicly debated New Atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. John is married to Sally; they have three grown children and ten grandchildren and live near Oxford.

NOTES:

  1. Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, 2nd (London: Mur- ray, 1838), ix.
  2. See Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
  3. “Letter to William Graham, July 3, 1881,” University of Cambridge Darwin Correspondence Project, https://goo.gl/Jfyu9Q.
  4. John Polkinghorne, One World: The Interaction of Science and Theology (Lon- don: SPCK, 1986), 92–93.
  5. John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta, 2002),
  6. Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 14,
  7. Keith Ward, Why There Almost Certainly Is a God: Doubting Dawkins (Ox- ford: Lion, 2008), 19–20.
  8. This was a comment at the end of a documentary entitled Transcendent Man: The Life and Ideas of Ray Kurzweil (Los Angeles: Ptolemaic Productions, 2009).
  9. Max Tegmark, Life 0 (New York: Knopf, 2017), chapter 2.
  10. See my God’s Undertaker (London: Lion, 2007) or God and Stephen Hawk- ing: Whose Design Is It Anyway? (London: Lion, 2011).
  11. I go into this in much more detail in my Seven Days That Divide the World: The Beginning according to Genesis and Science (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011).
  12. But see my Seven Days That Divide the World.
  13. James Tour, “Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Inference: International Re- view of Science 3, 2 (August 2017), https://inference-review.com/article/an-open-letter-to-my-colleagues; see also James Tour, “Animadversions of a Synthetic Chemist,” Inference: International Review of Science 2, no. 2 (May 2016), https://inference-review.com/article/animadversions-of-a-synthetic-chemist
  14. Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York: Scribner, 1994), 3
  15. David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), xiv.
  16. Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus (New York: HarperCollins, 2017),
  17. See Ross Andersen, “We’re Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction,” The Atlantic, 6 March 2012, theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/were-underestimating-the-risk-of-human-extinction/253821.
  18. See Bill Snyder, “Our Misplaced Fear of Job-Stealing Robots,” Stan- ford Graduate School of Business, 7 March 2019, gsb.stanford.edu/insights/misplaced-fear-job-stealing-robots.
  19. Silvia Montoya, “There Is a Global Learning Crisis Affecting the Lives of Millions in Developing Countries,” World Economic Forum, 27 August 2018, www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/global-learning-crisis-millions-without-basic-skills-unesco (emphasis added).
  20. See “The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2019: Sustainable Development Goal 4,” United Nations, https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg4.
  21. Keith Ward, “God as the Ultimate Informational Principle,” in Information and the Nature of Reality, Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregersen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 375.
  22. Paul Ford, “I Tried to Get an AI to Write This Story,” Bloomberg Businessweek, 17 May 2018, bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-17/i-tried-to-get-an-ai-to-write-this-story-paul-ford.
  23. Margaret Boden, “Robot Says: Whatever,” Aeon, 13 August 2018, https:// aeon.co/essays/the-robots-wont-take-over-because-they-couldnt-care-less.

 

 

 

Evangelism Training in The Highlands

by Editor

A small team from Solas went up to Kiltarlity, which is just over ten miles west of Inverness. We have good connections with Kiltarlity as two of our Solas board members live there, and attend the village church. In fact, one of them is the pastor of that church. It’s a small village of just a few hundred people, and we were originally going up there for a day of Solas administration with the board members. However Stephen, the pastor there asked if while we were up if we could do an evening meeting, which we thought was great idea. So we did the “How to talk about Jesus without looking like an idiot” session, which is our standard introduction to conversational evangelism, which we do in many places.

Stephen thought that it might be a useful evening for the 15-20 people he thought might be interested in a midweek session on evangelism training; hoping to pitch it primarily at the church’s young adults group. Stephen made 120 tickets available  – and sold them all about a week before the event, and then sold more! On the night, the building was packed to bursting. The audience were incredibly warm, and asked really great, very perceptive questions during the Q&A; they were really engaged and enthusiastic. We were then really encouraged to learn that in the weeks after the event, the group that had travelled up to Kitarlity from Glen Urquhart, took the material back to their church and shared it with everyone there.

At Solas we are deliberately trying to make space to go to places like Kiltarlity, which are somewhat off the beaten track. Some large Christian ministries will only go to the big cities, and do a tour around London, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow – but we’re also trying to get out to the towns and villages to serve the local church. The result is that you can have a massive impact in that community, and try and reach some of the places that other ministries don’t.

How to Talk About Jesus Without Looking Like An Idiot

by Solas

Andy Bannister walks us through three questions we can learn to ask when sharing the gospel. When we use them well, we can avoid looking like an idiot and, more importantly, have much more fruitful dialogue with our skeptical friends, family and colleagues. Gavin Matthews talks with Andy about questions submitted by viewers.

PEP Talk Podcast With Glen Scrivener

by Solas

When sharing the gospel, where do you start? Today on PEP Talk, Andy and Kristi speak with Glen Scrivener about his book 3-2-1: The Story of God, the World and You and how he works from the love of the Trinity down to our ultimate goal of union with Christ.

With Glen Scrivener – PEP Talk

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Our Guest

Glen Scrivener is an evangelist and directs Speak Life, a ministry reaching out with the gospel through preaching and media. They’re recruiting creative evangelists now for an internship called the Speak Life Foundry. Glen has written several books including Long Story Short and Reading Between the Lines. He lives in Eastbourne with his wife Emma, his daughter Ruby and his son JJ.

About PEP Talk

The Persuasive Evangelism Podcast aims to equip listeners to share their faith more effectively in a sceptical world. Each episode, Andy Bannister (Solas) and Kristi Mair (Oak Hill College) chat to a guest who has a great story, a useful resource, or some other expertise that helps equip you to talk persuasively, winsomely, and engagingly with your friends, colleagues and neighbours about Jesus.

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A Beginner’s Guide to The Argument from Mathematics

by Editor
Does mathematics have anything to do with God?

‘Great are the works of the Lord; they are pondered by all who delight in them’ (Psalm 111v2)

These are the words which James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79) had carved into the doors of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge when it was built in the 1870s. Well actually they were carved in Latin, but still you get the point.

Maxwell, now regarded as one of the greatest physicists of all time, was a man who saw ‘pondering’ the workings of God’s creation as a delightful thing to do. And certainly in my own mind, looking around at the shear grandeur, complexity and beauty of the natural world leaves me with the distinct impression that I am looking at one enormous Divine calling card.

The beauty of creation goes all the way down to the equations of physics.

Interestingly when as scientists we drill below the surface to produce mathematical theories to represent the world (chiefly in the area of theoretical physics) it turns out that beauty is also to be found in the equations we write down. More than that, some theoretical physicists see mathematical beauty as a requirement of a good theory.

For those readers who cannot conceive of what mathematical beauty might look like, and still find quadratic equations one of the more stressful parts of their teenage life, I can assure you that mathematical beauty is visible to those versed in the subject. Perhaps it is best described as a combination of concision and breadth of explanatory power.

I have pondered on the beauty of creation at the level of night skies and butterflies, and thought ‘Great are the works of the Lord’. But this particular applied mathematician has found himself thinking the same thing when he looks at the Schrodinger equation (describing things on the atomic scale) or Maxwell’s equations (describing all of electromagnetism).

For me the calling card of creation still has the marks of the divine when it is translated into the language of mathematics.

Whose equations are they anyway?

One of the odd things that many mathematicians experience is the sense of ‘discovery’ they feel when they prove a theorem, or solve an equation. Indeed some mathematicians insist that they are making discoveries. From this perspective mathematics is not a creation of human minds, but rather, as Roger Penrose (a very eminent British mathematical physicist) puts it, ‘mathematical truth is absolute, external and eternal, and not based on manmade criteria and…mathematical objects have a timeless existence of their own’. Now I hasten to add that not all mathematicians take this position (called mathematical Platonism), and furthermore Roger Penrose is an atheist. But, mathematical Platonism is a respectable position, held by  more than a few mathematicians.

Now, if we ask the question whether mathematical Platonism sits more comfortably with atheism or theism, it seems that atheism (which I will equate to materialism – ie there are no things in the universe which are not physical) is in real trouble. Where do these ‘absolute, external and eternal’ mathematical truths exist? In the materialist world there is simply nowhere to put them.

However, for the theist, the answer is quite straightforward. They are thoughts in the mind of God. Thus, if you are inclined towards the idea of mathematics as ‘discovery’ of independently existing truth, then it seems to me it sits more comfortably with theism than atheism.

Of course if you are an atheist you may simply be inclined to say ‘well OK, I wasn’t to fussed on mathematical Platonism anyway’. And that, of course, is absolutely fine. But there remains one other puzzle when it comes to mathematics…

How come the maths in my head describes the universe outside it?

This is not quite as silly as it sounds. The Nobel prize winning physicist Eugene Wigner (1902-95) describes it as the ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences’.

Let’s say that mathematical Platonism is false. This means that all the mathematics we have is a free creation of the human mind. Well, how come all this mathematical abstraction of complex numbers, partial differential equations, infinite dimensional vector spaces and non-Euclidean geometry turns out to be just the set of things that describe – really well– how the universe ticks?

An atheist response will be that much of the mathematics which humans have created has been done in a ‘co-evolutionary’ way along with our understanding of the natural world. In some cases that is indeed true. However, this is not true in all cases.

A theistic response is to say that we are made in the image of God. Broadly speaking theologians have thought of the image of God as a combination of ‘the three Rs’: Reason, Relationship and Regency. Relationship, in terms of our ability to have deep relationships with others and with God. Regency, in terms of our stewardship of the world we live in. And Reason, in terms of the fact that we can reason deeply about both God, His creation, and our place within it.

Thus, for the theist, the mathematics we create describes the physical world because both our mind and the created order were made by God.

Conclusion

You may have come to the end of this short article positively disappointed with its lack of strong arguments for theism from mathematics. That, in my view, is just how it is. Some perspectives on mathematics (such as mathematical Platonism and mathematics ‘unreasonable effectiveness’) certainly sit more comfortably with theism than atheism, but such perspectives are not universally held, nor are they bound tightly to mathematics.

The beauty and richness of the mathematical description of nature is, however, analogous to the beauty and richness of the nature it describes, and as such to me it a pointer to the existence of a God in the same way that the created order is.

Of course the careful reader will have noted that I have talked generically about ‘God’ and ‘theism’. From the huge grandeur of nature, and the beauty of its laws, we can gather that God is a great and powerful artist. But to find out anything more…well He would have to step into history and reveal Himself, wouldn’t he?

Mark McCartney teaches mathematics at the University of Ulster. His research interests are in the areas of nonlinear systems and the history of mathematics and natural philosophy in the nineteenth century. He is married to a wonderful wife, and has two wonderful children.

 

Further reading:

A good introductory read from an explicitly Christian perspective is:

Bradley & R Howell, Mathematics through the eyes of faith (HarperOne, 2011).

Two slightly more advanced books, which are made up of collections of essays from a range of scholars are:

S Lawrence & M McCartney (eds.), Mathematicians and their gods (OUP,2015).

J Polkinghorne (ed.), Meaning in mathematics (OUP, 2011).

In particular Chapter 1 of Lawrence & McCartney gives an extended form of this article.

 

Coffee Shop Evangelism – in Aberdeen

by Editor

In partnership we Trinity Church in Aberdeen, we put together an outreach event. A few weeks before that I had spoken about evangelism at the church’s weekend away; and their pastor, David Gibson was really keen to put what we had learnt into practice as soon as possible. I had spoken a bit about coffee-shop evangelism, so they booked a branch of Costa Coffee, and invited me to come and speak.

The Costa Coffee shop they booked, is just around the corner from their new church premises. They currently meet in a hotel, but have bought a wonderful building which is a huge former Church of Scotland building. They are in the process of redeveloping it, and it will be a wonderful place for them to meet, and worship and minister in.

Watch our webinar on “How to Run a Small Scale Evangelistic Event” just like this one!

The night I was in Aberdeen though they made a point of not meeting in the church buildings, but taking the gospel outside the church. They asked me to speak on “Where is God When Things Go Wrong?” Trinity is a really mission-minded church, because loads of people invited friends who aren’t Christians, who aren’t part of the church; and the coffee shop was nicely crowded. The coffee shop is “U-shaped”, so it was like speaking in the round!

I spoke for twenty minutes or so, and connected the “Where is God when things go wrong” theme to Christmas as I observed that when things go wrong, when we experience pain or injustice, we don’t want something just said; we want something done. And that’s what God did at Christmas, in the incarnation of Jesus Christ which is really God stepping into history – and that is the beginning of God’s answer to the problem of sin, evil and suffering. So although the starting point was the problem of suffering, the end-point of the talk was really Christmas; that God is with us – Immanuel!

Then, as usual we did a Q&A, and it was a great Q&A session! There weren’t any angry atheists there, but there were a lot of good questions from friendly people who are really searching. However I had a really long, and positive conversation, with one visitor who started the conversation with a question about suffering. However as we began to dig into the issues, it turned out that this person had really been put off by a very bad experience of ‘church’ and ‘religion’ and was deeply suspicious. The only thing you can do when people have been let down by the church is to apologise and to point them to Jesus.

And these sorts of conversations demonstrate the importance of taking the gospel of Jesus outside the church premises into places like coffee shops. The person I spoke to in Aberdeen would not have gone to a church; but was very happy to sit and chat about faith in a high street coffee shop. So it was wonderful to be able to share the gospel with folks in Aberdeen, and to renew our friendship and fellowship with Trinity Church too!

PEP Talk Podcast With Nay Dawson

by Solas

Today we hear from Nay Dawson who leads Passion for Evangelism, a mentoring and networking group for women evangelists. She speaks with Andy and Kristi about her own passion for evangelism, building community and how we can encourage both men and women to develop their evangelistic gifting in their local church context.

With Nay Dawson – PEP Talk

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Our Guest

Naomi (Nay) Dawson is the Regional Training Coordinator for IFES Europe. She has been one of the writers behind the UCCF Uncover project and is part of the UCCF Leadership Network. She is the founder of Passion for Evangelism and Community in a Crisis, an initiative to help churches get online during COVID19.

About PEP Talk

The Persuasive Evangelism Podcast aims to equip listeners to share their faith more effectively in a sceptical world. Each episode, Andy Bannister (Solas) and Kristi Mair (Oak Hill College) chat to a guest who has a great story, a useful resource, or some other expertise that helps equip you to talk persuasively, winsomely, and engagingly with your friends, colleagues and neighbours about Jesus.

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Book: God, Stephen Hawking and the Multiverse: What Hawking said and why it matters by David Hutchings & David Wilkinson

by Editor

At a conference few years ago I heard an academic (whose name I have conveniently forgotten) remark that ‘Stephen Hawking isn’t the best cosmologist in the world. He isn’t even the best cosmologist in Cambridge.’ It was, I suppose, a jealous remark, and since I’m  not a cosmologist I am not even remotely qualified to judge on its accuracy. It does however place on the table the fact that at the highest levels of science there are many razor-sharp minds and the general public only hear of a very few of them. Certainly one of the few they have heard of is Hawking. His combination of intellectual brilliance, dogged determination in the face of severe illness, and ability to write a number of hugely successful popular science books, made him a scientific celebrity.

At one level Hutchings & Wilkinson’s book on Hawking is quite simply an extremely good piece of popular science writing. They cover the major topics within physics; quantum mechanics, particle physics, general relativity and cosmology. This is all well pitched for a popular audience, and gives good scaffolding to enable Hawking’s ‘big ideas’ in cosmology to be explained. Each chapter is introduced with a story which nicely ‘hooks’ the reader into the topic to be covered and engagingly weaves narrative and science together.

The authors take Hawking’s major contributions to be the existence of (yet to be detected) Hawking Radiation from black holes; the idea that the universe began with a singularity (or infinity) in space-time; and the Hartle-Hawking model which uses the idea of imaginary time in the very early universe. All three of these highly technical ideas are described in clear, nontechnical language.

However, Hutchings and Wilkinson give us much more that great popular science. When we discuss fundamental physics, philosophy, and occasionally theology, are not far away, and Hawking was not shy of commenting on them. The authors take Hawking’s forays into these areas ‘head-on’ and point out that it is when Hawking moves onto this ground he was outside he own area of expertise and at his weakest.

Hawkings comment that ‘philosophy is dead’ (in The Grand Design, co-authored with Mlodinow deserves about as much respect as Albert Camus saying ‘physics is dead’.  (Though it has to be said that Hutchings and Wilkinson are much too polite to put it that directly.) His idea of an ultimately superfluous deity who, at most, did no more than light the blue touch paper of the universe, is rightly met with a shrug by theists, who don’t believe in a deity like that anyway. The authors point out, graciously, but firmly, that while Hawking was a brilliant physicist, when he stepped into matters of philosophy he was an amateur.

And then there is the multiverse. This is the idea (which does not originate with Hawking) that certain aspects of modern physics lend themselves to there being an infinite number of universes. Within this infinity of universes all things that can happen do happen. Thus there are universes with all possible variants of ourselves; universes where all the  PG Wodehouse stories are not fiction but fact; and universes which cover all the possible laws of physics.

The authors note that the multiverse is both highly speculative and (more importantly) is arguably not even a scientific theory, since in principle  none of the infinite number of alternative universes are open to any type of scientific interrogation by us. The multiverse is (in this reviewer’s humble opinion) the most ridiculous speculation to have come out of modern physics. I say this despite the fact that I really am a big fan of Wodehouse, and the idea that there is a universe where Bertie Wooster does indeed exist rather appeals to me.

However, in a very clever ending to the book the authors point out that Hawking and the Christian do indeed live in different universes. In one there are the laws of physics, and, amongst other things, further statements about the nature of God, the miracles of Jesus, his resurrection etc. In the other there are the laws of physics, and the negation of statements about Christianity. In this sense, claim Hutchings and Wilkinson, the Christian and the atheist ‘are not seeking to explain the same universe’ (p.183). It is a well placed observation. There is more to the universe than science, or to put in another way, the universe is too rich a place to be adequately explained by science alone.

To conclude, this is a book which works very well at more than one level. It is very good popular science, and a very good introduction to Hawking’s ‘big ideas’. But it is also takes apart some of the hype and unjustified bravado around suggestions that modern cosmology has everything ‘sewn-up’ and has disposed with a Creator.

A very good read!

David Hutchings is a Physics teacher at Pocklington School near York, England. A Fellow of the Institute of Physics, he has written several books about the relationship between science and religion and speaks regularly on the topic around the country at conferences, schools, universities, and churches. David has also run multiple training events for science teachers, specializing in dealing with common misconceptions in the discipline. He lives in York with his wife and two young daughters.

David Wilkinson is Principal of St John’s College and Professor in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University. He lives in Newcastle with his wife Alison and has two grown up children. He is a writer and speaker on Christianity and Science not just in the UK but around the world. He has doctorates in astrophysics and theology and is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. He is a Methodist minister, and author of many books.

Mark McCartney is senior lecturer in Mathematics at the University of Ulster

God, Stephen Hawking and the Multiverse: What Hawking said and why it matters by David Hutchings & David Wilkinson is available here.

Published by SPCK, 2020, 210 pages. £9.92 (Paperback)

Why Do Christians Believe That Jesus Was God?

by Solas

Many people think that Jesus of Nazareth was just a good man, a wise teacher of morals, or even a prophet. But Christians go further, claiming he was God’s own son, stepping into space and time to show us what God was really like. Why do Christians believe this? What’s the evidence that Jesus was more than just another religious teacher? In this packed episode of Short Answers, Solas Director Andy Bannister tackles arguably the most important question of all: who exactly was Jesus?

https://youtu.be/DxE9n6wmLHc

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