Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

So God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth.  So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out.  This is how you are to build it:  The ark is to be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high.  Make a roof for it, leaving below the roof an opening one cubit high all around.  Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks.  I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish.  But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark—you and your sons and your wife and your sons’ wives with you.  You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you.  Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive.  You are to take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them.”

• Genesis 6:13-21

That same day he removed all the male goats that were streaked or spotted, and all the speckled or spotted female goats (all that had white on them) and all the dark-colored lambs, and he placed them in the care of his sons.  Then he put a three-day journey between himself and Jacob, while Jacob continued to tend the rest of Laban’s flocks.

• Genesis 30:35-36

In the Scripture above, the two Scriptures both discuss mathematics in the form of distance, the length, width, and height of the ark and the distance that Laban moved away from Jacob.  And even the distance that Laban moved involved a different measurement, time.  It is a distance, but the distance that a shepherd could reasonably move in a day.

The following video is worthy of my “Heavy Topics” series and it is not made very light either, but it got me to thinking.  I followed the link from a post on The Domain for Truth, from SlimJim.

To dig past a lot of the Philosophy jargon, there are two truths that I heard in the video: 1) Two plus two equals four.  It always was.  It always will be.  And 2) The universe lives under the laws of science.  There is structure within those laws and there is mathematics that can illustrate how each law works.  Maybe I should say “real science,” what the God-deniers refer to as “experimental science” and what sane people refer to as science that is proven, regardless of what you believe.

When I graduated from college, I had a military commitment, but I also had a graduate school deferment, delaying entry into the military.  I needed employment to pay for the graduate school.  Only one company gave me a chance.  The big companies did not want to train me in their ways and then lose me before I was fully useful.  A small chemical company in Texas hired me, a company that no longer exists.  The chemical plants are still there, but the owning company has changed hands numerous times since then.

I graduated college with a chemical engineering degree and a love for computer programming.  I knew a lot of those mathematical equations that described how the world worked.  I felt that I could reduce anything down to its mathematical structure and figure out how it worked.  The small company hired me to do just that, until Uncle Sam came calling.

I was very successful, but there was a couple of areas that I realized early on that I could not mathematically model:  1) Life, as Scripture says, “the breath of life.”  And 2) the Soul.

In the video above, Mike Robinson questions whether the physical laws in nature could form themselves spontaneously and as consistently repeatable as the laws of science are.  I agree.  Even if evolution and millions of years could be true, and it is not, who then established the laws of science that govern everything in this universe.  I can only think of One who is infinite in every way, God.

In the explosion within computer development in the 70s and 80s, I had been on the cutting edge, but my years in the Army put me way behind in only four years.  When I got out of the military, I opted for other avenues of work, but the concept of mathematical modeling always intrigued me.

The global weather patterns are so well known that they use huge models to predict when and where storms will form.  They are getting rather good at it, better as the storm is more imminent.  I am sure that they are using some form of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software.  I took a course in doing CFD calculations by hand.  To model the earth’s atmosphere, you would need a supercomputer.  While I have used CFD (data developed by others) to show how the gases inside a furnace swirl around, I can take those basic calculations and expand them to include all the air on the planet.  Sure, there are too many variables and the models that are used run through the calculations many times and what you see on the weather report is usually the average, but sometimes they give a range of possibilities – for hurricanes, the cone.

All of that fascinates me, and I wonder how well I could have done programming such software.

Yet, Mike Robinson, in the video above, uses the concept of all these mathematical calculations that can accurately predict things from the flight of an arrow shot at a target to the flight of a spaceship destined for Mars.  And then Mike Robinson establishes how math and God have a lot in common and only God can even fully understand and conceive of such things as infinity.

I have mused in Sunday school about how God is outside time and space, but we are trapped within it.  If God were to have an angel who gave one of us the opportunity of going to Heaven for a day and looking around, we could bump into ourselves, because I think (just me thinking) that once we are with the Lord, we will be outside of time and space also.  We could, in a time-trapped existence, be able to meet ourselves, who after having passed from the time-trapped existence, could be at that same point.  I say this only to explain why I suggested that the only one of the 24 elders in Revelation that had the most vested interest in the Apostle John calming down because no one could open the seal on the scroll is the elder “John.”  And if I am correct, I doubt if the earthly John seeing the vision before him could recognize himself in his Heavenly form.

Does that make sense?  Probably not, because we are stuck in time and space and it is hard to even imagine what it might be like to not be in that trap.  And again, it is only my imagination.

But I do not know if I fully follow what Mike Robinson is saying.  Math is unchangeable, although common core seems to have changed it for the worse, but that is just a teaching technique in explaining how it works.  Or as many complain, does NOT work.  We still have two plus two equaling four.  Of course, in a ternary system, two plus two is equal to eleven, but let’s not go there.  (Okay, I brought it up.  In a ternary system, you have only three digits: 0. 1. And 2.  Thus, in counting to one hundred, you would count 1, 2, 10, 11, 12, 100.  Thus two plus two equals eleven in ternary.  Do not worry.  This will not be on the test, but rest assured that when in ternary, you always get eleven.  The answer does not roam around as everything else in the world seems to be doing these days – and as some who do not understand mathematics pretend that it does.)

But as God and Math are the only things that are infinite, the only things that are immutable, the only things that exist of their own accord…  Can that be as Mike Robinson states, using logical formulas instead of arithmetic formulas, A is equal to B and B is equal to C thus A is equal to C (basic Logic)?  Math exists.  Math and God are similar. (a Geometry term – Two triangles with the same three angles are similar, even when they are different sizes.)  Thus, God exists.

The argument is elegant, but does it really hold up?  And even if it does, which I would hope it does, would it sway an atheistic mathematician to leave the darkness and approach the Light?  To see the Light in Jesus?

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.