How It All Adds Up

Last updated on: May 9, 2025 at 12:14 pm by Richard E. Simmons III

How It All Adds Up 2025-05-09T12:14:59-06:00 Richard E. Simmons III

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I recently came across a compelling book that explores how forty prominent scientists and academics came to believe in God. Among them was Dr. Malcolm Cutchins, a distinguished aerospace engineering professor who spent 33 years teaching at Auburn University. Renowned for his technical expertise and dedication to education, Dr. Cutchins received numerous awards for both his research and teaching.

Cutchins sought to find out how the whole of mathematics “just happened” if there was no God, and therefore resulted by time and chance. He also wondered how all the transformations in advanced mathematics could have happened by chance. In his work, he observed how mathematic formulas “speak” profoundly to purpose, not to an aimless, purposeless, chance dominated interpretation of the world. He concluded that mathematics offers compelling evidence for a rational intelligent designer behind the cosmos.

In her wonderful book Total Truth, Nancy Pearcey makes this observation:

“Science offers mathematical formulas to express the cause-and-effect relationships in nature, but that only intensifies the dilemma. For if the universe evolved by blind, material forces acting randomly, why should it fit so neatly into mathematical formulas we invent in our minds? In short, why does math work? In a famous essay titled ‘The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,’ Eugene Wigner says the fact that math works so well in describing the world ‘is something bordering on the mysterious.’ Indeed, ‘there is no rational explanation for it.’

No explanation within scientific materialism, that is. But within the Christian worldview, there is a perfectly rational explanation – namely, that a reasonable God created the world to operate as an orderly progression of events. This was the conviction that inspired the early modern scientists, says math historian Morris Kline: ‘The early mathematicians were sure of the existence of mathematical laws underlying natural phenomena and persisted in the search for them because they were convinced a priori that God had incorporated them in the construction of the universe.’”

This was such a mystery that the physical world could be described so well mathematically.

It is quite apparent that all of the laws of the universe that have been discovered by science seem to be written in the language of mathematics. It is all so orderly. The world of science finds this to be strange and mysterious. Physicist Steven Weinberg writes:

“All my experience as a physicist leads me to believe that there is order in the universe…As we have been going to higher and higher energies and as we have studied structures that are smaller and smaller, we have found that the laws, the physical principles that describe what we learn become simpler and simpler…The rules we have discovered become increasingly coherent and universal…There is a simplicity, a beauty, that we are finding in the rules that govern matter that mirrors something that is built into the logical structure of the universe at a very deep level.”

The role of mathematics, which is seamlessly woven into the laws of nature, seems to have been done by deliberate design. It does not seem to be possible that this is a result of blind forces. The popular English physicist Paul Davies, who is a religious agnostic, is deeply impressed by this. He says:

“It is hard to resist the impression that the present structure of the universe, apparently so sensitive to minor alterations in the numbers, has been rather carefully thought out. The seemingly miraculous concurrence of numerical values that nature has assigned to her fundamental constants must remain the most compelling evidence for an element of cosmic design.”

How is it that the laws of physics and chemistry are articulated in very precise mathematical formulas and equations? Why are nature’s laws mathematical? Why is there such mathematical order and not chaos if there is no God? For so many they just throw up their hands and say “It is a mystery.”

I, on the other hand, would say that mathematics and the laws of mathematics suggest a divine law giver who arranged the universe to be governed by mathematical laws. As Albert Einstein simply put it: “The mathematical precision of the universe reveals the mathematical mind of God.”

In the first century A.D., the apostle Paul wrote in the book of Romans:

“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20)

More and more people in the world of science are finding Paul’s words to be true.

Richard E Simmons III is the founder and Executive Director of The Center for Executive Leadership and a best-selling author.

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