My reaction was the opposite of Murlough's: I hate math, even though I have a mathematics minor.
There is much in this article that is compelling, but honestly I just see it as so much Christian wankery. I mean, where was this published? Christianity Today. How many atheists do you suppose have a subscription to CT and read that article thinking "oh, wow, I guess I was wrong this whole time"?
It derives from a formula by Jacob Beckenstein and Stephen Hawking and describes the chances of our universe being created at random.
As Murlough said, in the infinite, anything can happen. If you view all of time as an infinite continuum, then eventually every possible thing
must happen, no matter how improbable it is. The ten to the ten to the 123rd number does not prove either the existance of God or the intelligent design of the universe.
For Darwin's theory to have a chance of being right, the universe would have to be a trillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion times older than it is. Because the universe is so young, Darwin's argument fails, and William Paley's contention that design presupposes a designer becomes more persuasive.
This reasoning does seem to point to a fatal flaw in macroevolution. Evolution sans God makes absolutely no sense to me, and I can't even fathom the mind of someone who would intellectually analyse it and still believe in it enough to play devil's advocate here.
The idea that these two irrational numbers should combine with an imaginary one to yield so utilitarian a result is breathtaking. It is like deconstructing a chemical necessary for life (salt) and finding that it consists of two deadly poisons (sodium and chlorine). That these three strange numbers with such diverse origins should work together to produce a result so basic to mathematics argues that there is a profound elegance or beauty built into the system.
I personally don't think that God created our numbering system. I am certainly open to arguments on this since whenever I think about it too hard my mind boggles and I have to go do something else for a while, but it seems to me that the system we use for numbers and counting transcends creation, existing merely because it
is, because it describes something. A pre-existant God almost necessitates a pre-existant number, since for there to be one God, the number one has to be conceivable. While the fact that these trancendentals can combine in such a way is amazing, I don't think it's a proof of the divine.
I don't think that God is something that truly needs proof. It's sort of like love. You can deny that love exists, deny that what you're feeling is love, deny that two people can really be in love, but ultimately, in order to make it work, you have to lie to yourself. At some point something will hit you and you will know that it is love, and you will have to convince yourself that it is not in order to continue down the path which denies that love exists. Articles like this are good if only to prove that atheists and agnostics aren't the only ones with science and reason on their side, but really I look at links like this the same way I look at people who try to convince members of the Flat Earth Society that the world is truly round: you're trying to prove something that these people already know innately but refuse to admit.
