Kerrigan mentions that his son Joe is a senior math major in college and that over dinner recently Joe was discussing the concept of infinity:
He said that between integers—say, 1 and 2—there are infinitely many real numbers, like 1.1 and 1.265. Such thinking scared me straight into law school at his age, yet somehow I grasped it now, if only conceptually.The rest of the article is an amusing read although you may need a subscription to access it.
“Like the Incarnation,” I offered. An instance of the Creator, while remaining fully God and fully man, entering into his creation: the infinite bounded by the finite.
“I suppose,” Joe answered, checking my catechism against his set theory. Then he said something even trippier.
Although whole numbers can be listed out to infinity, the hypothetical list of real numbers is necessarily larger than the hypothetical list of whole numbers. Not all infinities are equal.
Infinity and infinity-plus? Had that notion entered my mind in college, I’d have reclined in darkness with a cold compress on my head. I didn’t get the underlying math but, thinking I understood the broader concept, parried with another analogy: “Like higher and lower degrees of heavenly perfection.”
Long ago I’d accepted how a shotgun shack in heaven’s outermost borough was good enough for a sinner like me. Joe concurred, and when he did, I was relieved.
In any case, it highlights an interesting point about mathematics - at it's most arcane and abstract it gives us insight into the nature of the Creator.
We gain similar insight in quantum physics where, to take just one example, we learn that the light of our everyday experience behaves as a wave and also as a particle, and which it shows itself as depends on the nature of the observation that we make of it.
It seems paradoxical to think that light can be an immaterial wave and a material particle at the same time, just as it seems paradoxical that God can be God and human at the same time. Yet the former is a truth of physics and the latter a truth of Christian theology.
The nature of light, like infinity, teaches us something very interesting and important about the nature of God.
