Intelligent Design
Mathematics as a Frontier for Intelligent Design
Speaking of Berkeley mathematician Edward Frenkel and his argument that mathematics points to an objective reality behind and outside nature, our friend David Berlinski makes much the same point in his wonderful little book One, Two, Three: Absolutely Elementary Mathematics.
Do yourself a favor and go back and read my review of the latter here. Berlinski
returns again and again to the allusiveness of numbers and the operations we perform on them. They allude, they point to, they gesture to something beyond themselves. Just what that might be, of course — of course, if you know anything about David Berlinski — Berlinski won’t say.
I have not yet read Dr. Frenkel’s book but will do so shortly. I was going to say the "frontier" of math is virgin or unexplored territory for ID, but of course these two great math minds have already pointed the way.
Our world is one is one of concealment. Whereas in our everyday experience, ultimate reality is veiled by subjectivity — Plato’s cave, basically — elementary math, not unlike the other sciences, suggests in Berlinski’s words "as nothing else can the glory that is beyond."
In Greek, that is aeon, the world of ideas. In Hebrew it’s olam, whose root means "world," "eternity," or "concealed." Scientism is the project of attempting to convince people that nothing is really veiled from us. What you see is what you get: blunt, dead matter, that’s it.