Science once set out to prove the most difficult theorem of all: That God exists. Science comes, if I remember correctly, from Latin “to know” and it’s the pursuit of knowledge. I can’t be arsed to look it up, it’s something like that anyway. It’s not knowledge itself! A library is not science, just like a car isn’t speed. Science is a process and during the process we’ll get it wrong many times.
I’ve got a mathematics and computer science background. I spent five (*cough* eight *cough*) years buried to the neck in mathematical theorems and proofs. And then I went on to make the Big Mistake that nearly cost me my life, but that’s a story for another time. So, maths. There are quite a few techniques you can try to prove that a mathematical statement is true. Stuff like proving that: multiplication is just a way to add up the same number a bunch of times. And: exponentiation is just a way to multiply a number by itself a bunch of times. Mostly, proving such a statement is about rewriting it until you can recognize it’s original shape again. Let me give you an example.
If you add two even numbers, the result is again an even number.
Let’s prove this, shall we?
Take two even numbers, a and b.
We want to add them, that’s a + b.
We know that they’re both even.. So a is 2 times some number (we’ll call it x) and b is 2 times some number (we’ll call it y). So we can rewrite a + b to: 2*x + 2*y.
And because of mathematics rules that other clever people before us already discovered (we’re standing on the shoulders of giants), we know we can rewrite that to 2*(x + y). In other words, our outcome is indeed an even number!
That’s straightforward. But proving God turned out very difficult indeed. Despite heated arguments, the scientific process didn’t result in such a straightforward road to God. No matter how many steps you take, you’re always some fundamental rule short. The smallest whole positive number is 1. What’s the smallest piece of God we can start from? Let’s grind up the universe in ever smaller fragments.
So, all right, sometimes we get stuck. Now what? That’s when you could try another way by applying “reductio ad absurdum”. This is a technique that says: To prove something must be true, let’s look at what would happen if it wasn’t true. If gravity weren’t real, apples would float around in the air, and they obviously don’t, so gravity is real alright, that sorta thing.
Lets take an easy maths example.
Adding two positive numbers gives a result that is larger than either of them.
For example 2 + 5 = 7 and see: 7 is larger than 2 and also larger than 5. I admit, it’s not much of an example, but it’ll get the point across.
You could say it’s trivial. Sure, that’s what some people would say about God. Isn’t it obvious? Well, what if it isn’t? Back to our maths. How will you prove this? Because that’s the whole point, really. We don’t take things at face value here, proof is required. Are you going to manually check every combination of two numbers? That’s impossible, there are infinitely many numbers.
Instead, we’re going to try from the opposite end. Let’s assume it isn’t true.
Well, then a + b might be smaller than a or equal to a. But that would also mean that a + b – a is smaller than or equal to a – a, because again we can apply known maths rules and subtract a from both sides. And because all the a’s now cancel each other out, that would mean that b is smaller than or equal to 0. But we said at the start that both a and b were positive! So our assumption really can’t work.
In short, when you apply reductio ad absurdum and your mathematical universe comes crashing down, you know that the wall you are trying to kick down is a load-bearing wall.
Now imagine the wall you kicked down is God.
It made me laugh so hard when I first realized this. And mind you, I have spent plenty of time being upset and angry that I had wandered so far away from God. I’ve learned since that the road back only feels longer, it isn’t really any longer than the road away from God. It might even be shorter. And lately I can laugh about it. In our diligent effort to prove that God exists, we said “Well, suppose he doesn’t?”. That’s what we did! Just attack the problem from the other side! That’s all fine when you’re working on paper, but this one had real repercussions for real people.
We denied God in an effort to prove his existence! Isn’t that amazingly human?
So, where did that proof end up? How did it work out for us? Well, just look around you.
So… You’re part of a society that is living through an attempt to prove God’s existence by throwing him in the bin and seeing what happens. And it basically comes down to this: How much more suffering are you willing to take before you’ll conclude that our universe has come tumbling down? How much further will you walk away and stray from God, until you must concede that, even though you will never get direct evidence, the reductio ad absurdum exercise is as complete as it’s going to get. The irreconcilable contradictions just keep piling up. Walk back. You’ll find that the rules of your universe will start to make sense again.
God is a load-bearing wall in your existence.