The quest to understand the existence of God is one that is largely driven by faith. The majority of the experts in science and its various branches have questioned the theist view of the universe.
In a speech given on Tuesday by Robert Marks, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Baylor University, he put a spin on the clich and aimed to provide a rational, mathematical basis for establishing the presence of God.
Ratio Christi, a global organization with the goal of re-establishing a strong and reasoned presence of Christian thinking in academia, invited Marks to give a speech titled God ever Geometrizes.
I was part of the inception of the lecture series and the speakers were already chosen when I jumped on the bandwagon, said Lauren Simcic, president of the Texas A&M University chapter of Ratio Christi and junior political science major. But when I found out what this was about I felt it would make a huge difference on the campus.
Marks said the science fiction he read as a boy is boring compared to the mind-blowing mathematics of todays string theory and algorithmic information theory.
These exciting results from mathematics Ill talk about demonstrate that God is awesome, Marks said. Stephen Hawking famously said that any physics theory could never be proven. The best we can do is accumulate evidence. The same is true of proving God and the Lordship of Christ. Apologetics is all about gathering this evidence and Ratio Christi is all about scholarly apologetics. Im presenting some apologetics viewpoint of mathematics.
Marks discussed the possibility of existence of multiple dimensions and that God may exist in one of the dimensions that humans are unable to perceive.
Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott was a book that made a great impact on me when I was a child, Marks said. The beings in Flatland are all two dimensional, so the existence of a third dimension is oblivious to them. Similarly, there might be a four, five or infinite dimensions in our world but we might be completely unaware of them.
Marks also showed a video clip of an episode from The Twilight Zone, a TV series in which a child falls through a portal to another dimension.
Marks said a higher dimensional entity referred to as God can be infinitely close to humans without being visible, intersect the perceivable universe at will or even be able to see inside a person.
Extolling the works of mathematicians such as Kurt Gdel and Georg Cantor, Marks discussed the mathematics involving infinite numbers.
The presence of infinite numbers lead to absurdities such as the number of elements in an infinite set of counting numbers is equal to the number of elements in a set of infinite prime numbers, Marsk said. Hence, the universe had to be created by a higher being who is unknowable because infinities lead to uncertainties which are not provable.
He also said there are things that are known to exist that will never be proven, citing Chaitins constant.
Chaitins constant is a real number that informally represents the probability that a randomly constructed program will halt, Marks said. But at the same time this number is uncomputable, since no halting probability is computable.
Julio Ramon, sophomore general studies major, said he found the lecture to be very helpful as it provided an objective view to spirituality.
I am definitely going to look up most of the things that the speaker said in the lecture as the mathematical approach to faith was very interesting, Julio said.
The next speaker in line for the Ratio Christi Fall Lecture Series is Walter Bradley, dean of engineering at Baylor University. He will deliver a speech titled Is There Scientific Evidence for God? on Nov. 19.