Yesterday I posted on what Nobel winner in physics Eugene Wigner called the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" to explain the world. Today's post is something of a follow-up.
We often take for granted that the operations of nature can be explained in terms of mathematical equations. We learned in high school physics (if we took physics) that all physical phenomena are describable mathematically.
Mathematical patterns are ubiquitous in nature from quantum mechanics to the Fibonacci sequence in the whorls of disc flowers of a sunflower to the trajectories of planets in their orbits around the sun. Indeed, it's hard to think of any scientific phenomenon that can't be described mathematically.
What few of us ever do, though, is stop and ask why this should be so. Why is mathematics able to so accurately describe the world?
As the following five minute video points out, naturalism has no good answer to this question. The only satisfactory answer is one that involves an intelligent engineer, a mathematical genius who designed the universe according to a mathematical blueprint.
If some wish to say that this is just the way the universe is and that there's no need of deeper explanation they have to acknowledge that they're essentially admitting that they have no answer to the question, that it's just a bizarre coincidence.
Perhaps it is, but believing that it is requires a lot of faith in blind coincidence. Here's the video:
