Many moons ago, after surviving an algebra class in my freshman year of college, I bid adieu to mathematics and intended never to take up the subject again.
Even in childhood, when for a short time I dreamed vaingloriously of studying astrophysics in the footsteps of the great Einstein himself, I disliked math – naturally, since few people love subjects they struggle to understand. On my wall hung a poster of Einstein, with words of hope for me: “Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics,” the wild-haired genius proclaimed. “I can assure you mine are still greater.”
Thankfully, this childhood fantasy soon faded, and God led me toward a life and ministry of the written word. So, in my freshman year of college, I tipped my hat to algebra and said, “Goodbye for good.”
No one warned me, however, that years and decades later children would still be studying math, that my very own children would study math – worse still, that I would be expected to help them.
Even so, it came to pass that, during the past year, I’ve taken pencil in hand once again to square the circle and circle the square, to comprehend the height, width and depth of every cube and to multiply the square of the radius of every circle by Pi.
On that note, March 14 (3/14) is celebrated yearly as Pi Day – unfortunately, not Pie Day, but Pi Day – since Pi is the name for the Greek letter (π) used to represent the mathematical figure beginning with the numbers 3.14. Or, to be more exact, Pi is 3.14159265359…, followed endlessly, by trillions of numbers.
To this day, no one has calculated Pi to the last digit, yet using this mysterious number we can calculate the surface area and volume of every sphere, even of the moon itself.
And, in my recent struggles with mathematics, it is this reality that has most amazed me – that math actually works in the real world. Indeed, according to Christian apologist and research scientist Neil Shenvi, the “success of mathematics” in describing the real universe has led some scientists to speak of the “miracle” of math.
“Why,” Shenvi asked, “do the same beautiful mathematical equations apply uniformly across all time and space?” Why, in other words, can we speak of “laws of mathematics” that operate consistently throughout the cosmos? Why don’t we live in a random universe where 2+2 sometimes equals 4, sometimes 457 and other times, well, Pi? The atheist is hard put to answer these questions.
But Shenvi’s answer is simple: God.
“If God is a rational, intelligent Being,” he wrote, “it is no surprise that the universe He created reflects His reason and intelligence.”
Other apologists make similar claims about the “laws of nature,” which have so often been described mathematically. Several years ago, Peter Williams, who serves as principal of the Tyndale House, Cambridge, said the miracles surrounding Jesus’ life, death and resurrection do not violate the laws of nature. They do not “disturb … the nice predictable order of science.”
“In fact,” he explained, “the ordering principle is Jesus. … Jesus is the focal point, and what we are seeing is that, time and time again, Jesus explains everything.” So Christ, who died and rose again, is the crux of all that exists.
As the apostle Paul writes in Colossians 1:15-17 (ESV), “For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities – all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
In other words, even the unfathomable number Pi exists because Jesus has forever been the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End (Rev. 22:13). And, alongside all other created things, even the “miracle” of math exists ultimately to point us back to the voluminous height and width and depth of God’s love for us in Christ (Eph. 3:18).