A wonderful elucidation concerning numbers crossed my desk a few days ago. In God by the Numbers (Christianity Today), Charles Edward White examines three numbers that “suggest evidence for God's existence.” After reviewing the numbers and their implications, he concludes: Today, numbers from astronomy, biology, and theoretical mathematics point to a rational mind behind the universe. To be sure, they do not point to the personal God of the Bible as such. Yet they are not inimical to the biblical God, either. The apostle John prepared the way for this conclusion when he used the word for logic, reason, and rationality—logos—to describe Christ at the beginning of his Gospel: "In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God, and the logos was God." When we think logically, which is the goal of mathematics, we are led to think of God.Since my last exposure to high math was a Calculus class I dropped in the second semester of my freshman year at college (and that was a long time ago), I emailed the article to a mathematician friend of mine to see if it held water. He wrote back with an affirmative, also recalling the time he personally stumbled across one on his own: “if you are creating a code like a newspaper cryptogram that involves matching each letter with a different letter, and you do it randomly, the probability that a random matching does not match any letter to itself rapidly approaches the number 1/e. There is a God and there is order in the universe is my reaction to something like that.”
I don't much understand that, but I get the point. He signed off with a quote by the mathematical genius Erdos who just died a couple years ago: “God has a big book with all the best proofs of all the best theorems in it. If you are fortunate, he might open the book just a bit and let you see one of those proofs. And you don't even have to believe in God; but you must believe in the book."
The proof then, as they say, is in the numbers.
(Image: jam343 - and no, I have no idea what it means, but I do know big words like "elucidation")