So What's this all about?
As one in Catholic theological circles, I have often encountered three responses with regards to mathematics from my fellow theologians (and more generally humanities oriented people) when I tell them that I am a mathematician. The first two are variations of- So you study math? I hated math/ I was never good at math!
- So you study math? Math is nice because things are always in black and white! You have only one right answer.
Maybe I'll talk about those two another day, but there is a third type of response that I think merits a bit more discussion. It involves a well intentioned philosophizing about mathematics and how it connects to truth, or variations on that. They might talk a bit about how mathematics traditionally was a precursor to philosophy or even make mention of the heading over Plato's Academy stating, "Let none ignorant of Geometry enter." These people do ascribe a high place to mathematics, but when they begin to talk about mathematics proper, their examples and actual use of mathematics to illustrate other truths stops at around a high school level. I've seen college talks with reference to the Pythagorean theorem or trigonometry as illustrative of some deeper truth. Surely the philosophical and theological contributions of mathematics don't end with arithmetic and rudimentary geometry!
Now those who do this aren't necessarily wrong, but they are severely limited by ignorance, even if it is an "invincible ignorance" of sorts. Can you imagine, biologist readers, what a discussion on Catholic moral theology with respect to medical ethics would look like if you had no more than a high schooler's understanding of biology? Or can you imagine theologically oriented explorations of literature, but sticking to the content that a typical American high schooler reads (which, given the state of modern education, is quite lacking)?
On the other hand, it might not be entirely our humanities oriented friends' faults. We mathematicians tend to get so absorbed in our increasingly idiosyncratic problems that we turtle ourselves away from the broader human project of the quest for truth. Sometimes, we even forget what the point of our work is. The definition of mathematics itself has been and still is now a debate among its people. The papers that we write only a portion of us can understand.
Now, I have also seen mathematicians, including non-religious ones, wonder if there is a spiritual side to the practice of mathematics. They find themselves in an almost ecstatic state as they are enthralled by a problem or a theorem. They see themselves as peering into the mind of God, or at least something like it. I myself have experienced such states when working on a problem or finally understanding the intuition behind theorems I have come to love. These too I do not begrudge, and they are on to something, but in the midst of this I began to wonder if this too was not enough. Most theorems that gave me that spiritual feeling had little actual spiritually formative content, and try as I might, I had trouble learning who God actually was in this supposed language of his! I wonder how much these mathematicians are familiar with real spiritual practice, which goes far beyond the experience of certain highs.
My project in this blog is to bridge, or at least begin to build a bridge, between my two intellectual loves at a higher level: Mathematics and Theology. I will also write some posts that are specific to each field at different educational levels, so hopefully something should be there for people of all backgrounds. Finally, some of these posts will also include issues more peripheral to either field, including topics like pedagogy (in both math and theology... pedagogy is a big deal in both of these!) The interaction with either field to real-world issues, math related or theology related topics in the news, etc.
What is this not about?
Numerology.... enough said.
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