Ekeko is a god of good luck in Peru and the surrounding region.
Photo by Marjorie Manicke.
Cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz has offered the following definition of religion:
Religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive and long lasting moods and motivations in people by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.
Mathematics is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful,
pervasive and long lasting moods and motivations in people by formulating
conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions
with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely
realistic.
A careful exploration of the role of mathematics in the value-oriented
world of humankind shows that, time after time, mathematical pursuits intertwined
with religious preoccupations.
“From the very beginnings of the development of scientific thinking in the ancient world, first in Babylon and then in Greece, thought about God or the gods – theology – and thought about the world natural science – were so intermingled that often it was quite impossible to differentiate between the two... It was primarily for religious reasons that people from the unnamed Babylonians through the pre-Socratics, the Pythagoreans, Plato, and Aristotle attempted to understand the heavens, to trace their geometry and calculate their ratios.”
When viewed from this perspective mathematics does, indeed, act to formulate conceptions of a general order of existence.
In Descartes' Dream: The World According to Mathematics, by Davis and Hersh, we find a surprising echo of the Pythagorean claim that “all is number”: “God is a Mathematician” is a modern formulation meaning that the way of the world is mathematical, that mathematics provides the key to the universe, that God, as the Prime Mathematician, set up the universe according to the principles of mathematics. This view may be slightly egocentric, perhaps, and not necessarily subscribed to by theologians. It is a view that is widely held today by physicists (who mayor may not use the word “God”) in order to answer the unanswerable question of why mathematics is such an effective tool in theoretical physics. It is the view which lies behind a great deal of the recent mathematizations of a variety of disciplines, history, sociology, psychology. The world is mathematical, and hence, to interpret it properly, one must use mathematics.
Voss, Sarah, Depolarizing mathematics and religion
