It’s an on-going debate as to whether maths is discovered or created. I was wondering today if we can find a middle way between these. The sketch of the idea is this…
In his book Resounding Truth, Jeremy Begbie emphasises that creation has a flexible order — there is structure but in our development of the world we are not tightly bound to that structure. Primarily thinking about music, he puts it like this:
Before leaving the issue of the givenness of sonic order, we should … remind ourselves that it is not to be understood in inflexible ways. For … we are able to shape it. This itself points to the fact that humans are not automatons, bound by iron necessity to their environment, but exercise a freedom, an openness that God has granted them. And this itself can be set in a wider context, for such freedom, presuming it is not an illusion, is part of and testifies to the openness with which God has endowed his entire creation.
So, perhaps we can put it this way: Maths both discovers and develops the order that God has embedded in creation. It reflects the glory of God that we see order and can follow the consequences of that order in ways that demonstrate richness and beauty. But, also, we are not constrained by that order. We have the freedom to develop it in new directions. So, for example, we can imagine what the world might be like if it had 11 dimensions instead of 4 and we are free to pursue that and discover the consequences of our conjecture. In some sense, we develop the order beyond what is intrinsically given.
Again, in Begbie’s words:
We are called not only to discover and respect but also to develop. To be an image bearer of the God who himself develops created realities, improvising through his Spirit freely on the given order as he draws things towards their goal, means we will find ourselves bringing about new entities in the world by selecting, re-forming, combining what we are given. We take cocoa pods and transform them into chocolate; we take blues bass and improvise somthing never heard before. However small our patch of creativity, we are to enable creation to find fresh, perhaps even richer forms.
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