Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it. – Matthew 7:24-27
I was thinking the other day that science is such a flimsy reed. It is like a house built on sand and yet it seems so many people have bought in to ideas like evolution and black holes. I am not saying that I don’t believe in black holes. Mathematically it seems it would make sense. Or at least that is what Einstein thought. And that is what was cool when they found evidence that suggested that Einstein is most likely right. Even our own galaxy would seem to have one. The fact is, we have never actually seen one. It is like bigfoot, lots of blurry pictures and footprints. LOTS. And lots of math. So big foot….I mean black holes must exist. Right? And evolution is equally factitious. I mean, it must also be a fact. We can see all these animals adapting to their environment. In many cases, they change color. And one species of ape can become an entirely new species of ape. Ergo man must have come from apes and apes must have come from plants and plants must have come from nothing. Totally makes sense. Provable, in fact. Just like the Pythagorean theorem is provable. Although I have not seen the proof. It is science, so I am sure the proof is there somewhere.
So is math just the representation of ideas? What are ideas? Cogito ergo sum. If thinking is the evidence that I exist, the ideas I think must be equally tangible. Or maybe ideas are nothing but thoughts in our mind. We can write them down, but they don’t necessarily exist. I can think about a dragon, but that does not make dragons real. Could it be that math exists in the same way dragons exist? Maybe math is nothing. It is something in the same way this imaginary dragon is, some idea in my mind. It is something in that two sheep and two sheep ARE IN FACT four sheep, but “4” is an idea that explains the four sheep. There is no “4” outside our imagination and symbols we write on paper. So when we say, “what is the square root of negative 2,” it is in fact, in every sense, an imaginary number. There are no number that you can multiply by itself to get -2.
I have been learning about software. Codecademy offers all these free courses, so I took them. It seems all software is basically math. You have variables. Variables, like algebra, can be numbers. Oddly, they can also be words, collections of words, and collections of collections of words. And words are definitely not math. Except in this case where they are. Each letter is made up of 1’s and 0’s. A computer just calculates incredibly long strings of 1’s and 0’s. And somehow that does all this cool stuff. So if software is math. And if math is nothing but an idea. Is software just an idea? Then software is nothing? Have we built nothing out of nothing? That doesn’t make sense. Maybe we have built upon sand. We have built sandcastles on sand. And as Jimi Hendrix said (sang, whatever), “castles made of sand, melts into the sea eventually.” He also said “manic depressions a frustrating mess.” That’s another story.
If a mathematical proof is all we have to show us a black hole must be out there, can we be sure it is really out there and not that the mathematical formula which led us to believe it was there was just some imagined fiction? I think in the same way the theory of evolution is flawed. To believe it, you must stake quite a bit on math. And man made theories that came from the mind. In the end I think you will find science is built on sand. It is not provable. I am not saying the belief in God is provable, either because it isn’t. I have my own experiences, the Bible, witnesses, the prophets, and God himself. And to me, that is worth more than science.
