Religion, Science and Mathematics

I mentioned briefly in a previous blog post that I consider myself a Christian and I wanted to elaborate on that briefly here. Forgive me if this entry seems overly religious to you, I'm trying to address it to non-religious and religious people here, because 1: I want people to understand my viewpoint and 2: I think a lot of Christians need to re-evaluate what they consider their Christianity to be.



Religion

A lot of people seem to think that the cornerstone of Christianity is the Ten Commandments that Moses gave to the Hebrew people in the book of Exodus. I'm sure everyone's at least mostly aware of what they are, but they're effectively the following:

1. I am the Lord your God and you shall have no God before me.
2. You shall not make any idols and worship them.
3. You shall not take the Lord's name in vain.
4. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.
5. Honour your mother and father.
6. You shall not murder.
7. You shall not commit adultery.
8. You shall not steal.
9. You shall not bear false witness.
10. You shall not covet your neighbour's belongings.

I'm not gonna go into too much detail there, most of them are pretty self explanatory, except perhaps the third, which is just confusing as hell, because what exactly does God have against people saying "God"? A better explanation I've heard is that it's actually telling people to not swear an oath on God's name, then break it. In other word, don't break your promises.

Now, the thing about all of these is that, they all can be effectively sorted into two groups, which conveniently, is done for us in the Bible, courtesy of Luke 10:27 (Incidentally, this is the prelude to the Good Samartian parable):

“You should love the Lord your God with your whole heart, and your whole spirit, and your whole strength, and your whole mind, and love your neighbour as yourself,” the man answered.

The first fourth belong to the first bit, the last six belong to the second. I actually watched a George Carlin bit recently, where he eliminated the ten commandments into effectively the second one (And ignored the first, because if you're not religious, why are you doing that?). But I think even the non-religious readers will agree, "love your neighbour as yourself" is a pretty decent rule to live by. If you wouldn't want someone treating you a certain way, don't treat other people like that, and I think that's something a lot of Christians forget. You hear about Christians assaulting atheists or Muslims or various other people, and hey, that's just not on. Would you want people attacking you because of your beliefs? Apparently not, because a lot of those same people get very defensive when you try to pull the same thing on them.

Now, I think a lot of Christians also like to break the second in the name of the first. Protesting against homosexuality, for instance, because apparently God hates gay people or something stupid like that. While, yes, the Bible does emphasise the first of these two over the latter, really, is it your place to tell God what he hates? To do some famous people quoting, when quantum physics was in its infancy and it was discovered how much of the universe depends on random chance, Einstein made a comment, "God does not play dice with the universe." Because, hey, surely an electron is in a discrete location and it's not just an area where it probably is (For the record, the latter is true). To which Niels Bohr, a physicist who sadly, not enough people have heard of, replied "Don't tell God what to do with his dice."

Seriously people. Stop telling God what to do with his dice. Or his gay people. Sounds hot.

One last thing on the topic of religion. I've noticed (and a lot of other people, I'm sure) that there are certain Christians who like to chain post the whole "I'M A CHRISTIAN! JESUS SAID IF YOU DENY ME IN FRONT OF YOUR PEERS, I WILL DENY YOU IN FRONT OF MY FATHER! I'M NOT AFRAID TO POST THIS, ARE YOU?" No, you idiots, he's not saying "REPOST THINGS ON FACEBOOK AND ANNOY PEOPLE", he's saying "If you claim to not be a Christian in front of your friends, Jesus will tell God that you're not a Christian." You're not making yourself look like a better Christian, in fact, quite the opposite. To quote Matthew 6:1-8:


¹Be careful not to do your good deeds in front of people, so they can be observed—otherwise you have no reward from your Father in heaven. ²When you give to the poor, don’t trumpet this before others like the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets so that they will be praised by people. I tell you the truth: they have already got their reward. ³When you give to the poor, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand’s doing, ⁴so that your charitable giving may be secret, and your Father who sees what happens in secret will reward you.
⁵And when you pray, don’t be like the hypocrites because they love to stand up and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that people can see them. I promise you, they have already got their reward. ⁶But you, when you pray, go indoors and close the door, and pray to your Father in private, and your Father who sees what happens in private will reward you. ⁷When you pray, don’t babble on meaninglessly like the Gentiles do, who think they will be heard because of all the words they speak. ⁸Don’t be like them, because your Father knows what you need even before you ask him

In other words, you aren't supposed to be doing good deeds, or shouting about how Christian you are to receive recognition from your peers. To good deeds for the sake of doing good deeds. That's why their good deeds and not just you being selfish. I need to start copy-pasting that bit onto people's statuses, I think.

Science

I'm gonna touch back on my evolution topic from the earlier blog, where I mentioned that Young Earth Creationists are all idiots. But surely, the book of Genesis says about how the world was created in seven days!

No, people, stop taking all that so literally. I mean this in the nicest way possible, but the ancient Hebrews were kinda thick. Seriously. Look at Exodus 32, which I'm not gonna copy-pasta because it's kinda long but basically, Moses goes up Mount Sinai to get the ten commandments and a bunch of other rules and guidelines and such. The Hebrew people decide that, y'know what, screw the fact that Moses and his God just saved them from a life of slavery in Egypt, we dunno what's taking him so long, let's make our own newer, calf-like God! Seriously, you guys? You really thought that one was a good idea?

My point is, they apparently weren't terribly bright and you're expecting them to understand concepts such as millions of years of changes in the earth? The Bible is not a scientific textbook, stop treating it like one. There are things that are described using poetic imagery rather than direct scientific explanations because a: the people back then needed something they could understand and b: poetic imagery is cool!

I mentioned in my evolution blog also, that science is not 100% completely accurate. Science, in its nature, acknowledges the fact that it might be wrong and is fully willing to change and adapt when new things come to light and, for all we know, it could suddenly turn out that the Earth is actually 6000 years old. It's just that that is so ridiculously unlikely, we ignore that possibility.
I'm reminded of a comment made by one of my lecturers. Someone asked about having to calculate errors in a lab we were doing, and the lecturer said "Of course you have to calculate errors, you always calculate errors in science. If you don't calculate errors, you aren't doing science, you're doing aromatherapy." (Yes, he made the jab at aromatherapy :P)
Science makes mistakes. Mistakes are good. You don't learn anything from doing everything right, or assuming things are always correct. You learn from the things that are wrong and from having an open mind and learning is one of the most amazing things humans as a species can do. Don't throw away our gift for nothing. For all you Christians, we ate from the tree of knowledge for a reason (Okay, that was a pretty idiotic reason too), don't waste that gift. Knowledge is awesome.

The other point that I see raised a lot is that science is trying to remove all the beauty from the universe. I... what? No! No it isn't! There's an old saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I find a lot of the science I've learnt to be beautiful. Look at, say, Schrödinger's equation:

iħ ∂ψ/∂t = Ĥψ

Or, the version that doesn't depend on time:

Eψ=Ĥψ

Most of you are like "lewut?" right now, but that's such a beautiful equation to me. Not only does it govern basically the entire universe in those 10 (or 5) characters, it's also deceptively simple. The simple version is, i is the imaginary number (Hurr durr I'll mention this more later), ħ is the reduced Planck's constant (It's a number, basically), ψ is what's called the wave-function and is basically what a wave looks like, E is energy, ∂/∂t means how something is changing with time and the deceptively simple part is the Ĥ, which is called the Hamiltonian and is a very shorthand way of writing what is usually a much huger and insaner equation. Really, you didn't think we could actually govern the who universe with 10 characters, did you?
Also, it has nothing to do with cats. Schrödinger's cat is something unrelated to this.

My point is, it's a very cool equation. Or, it is if you're a nerd like me.

Or hell, look at the Hubble Deep Field image.

Each one of those little points of light? An entirely galaxy. Not a single star, it's an entirely galaxy, filled with stars and planets, many probably like our own little Earth. How can you look at that and tell me science is removing the beauty from the universe?

Or Cosmic microwave background radiation:

You know what that is? That's the start of the universe. Well, the edge of the observable universe anyway. Seriously. That is the fingerprint of the Big Bang. If you have the right equipment and you point it at the right bits of space, you can see all the way back to the beginning of time itself and see what the universe looked like. Kinda.
Oh, and when your TV isn't picking up a station and you see static? About 1% of that is that picture. Yes, part of the static on your TV is from the beginning of the universe.
Again, can you look at all that and all the intricacies of the universe that science has uncovered and tell me there's nothing beautiful about that? You don't need to understand nothing about the universe to see beauty in things. I can look at a blue sky, understand why it's blue, understand what causes rainbows and all that and still see the beauty in them. I can listen to a piece of music, understand how the sound waves are generated by instruments, why tuning a guitar changes its pitch and still hear the beauty in the music. Don't tell me science is stripping the beauty from the universe. Even if science could do that, the universe is an amazing place and it would find a whole new way to do that.

(by the way, Schrödinger's cat was his way of pointing out the nonsense behind how a subatomic particle can be in two separate states at the same time. For example, if a particle has a half life of, say, 5 seconds, after 5 seconds, there's a 50/50 chance it's decayed, and unless we check whether or not it has, it exists in a state of being both decayed and not decayed and until we actually check it, that's it. If we then put this particle in a box with a vial of poison that will break if the particle decays and put a cat in the box too, after 5 seconds, the particle exists in a state of being both decayed and not decayed, which means the vial of poison exists in a state of being broken and not being broken and the cat exists in a state of both being dead and not being dead and until we open the box and find out, it won't be either and it'll be both. See why it's screwy?)

Mathematics

Okay, I admit it, I'm a gigantic nerd, but there's beauty in mathematics too. People are always like "HURR MATHS IS ALL QUADRATIC EQUATIONS" and all that, but that's not right. Advanced maths isn't about numbers, it transcends that. I've mentioned to people before, that I wasn't allowed to bring a calculator to my university maths exams because even if you could, you wouldn't need it because advanced maths isn't about number-crunching, it's about understanding the rules and logic behind how numbers and equations and number systems and all that work. One of the last things I learnt in university maths? Why integration and differentiation are opposites.

I think one of the coolest papers I did was one called Modern Algebra and while I moaned about how boring it sounded when I started doing it, I quickly grew to really enjoy the paper. Why? Because I was learning about how maths and how algebra works. Why does our number system work the way it does? What make 1 and 0 such interesting numbers? Maths is very fascinating if you're in to that sort of thing (Yes, I'll admit, it's not everyone's thing but I find it all very fascinating.

And besides, I still think one of the coolest things every is The Officially Most Awesome Equation Evar. Yes, I'm about to go on a maths tangent.

What is this equation, you probably aren't asking because you're probably not all nerds like me?

e^iπ+1=0

Why this? Well, just look at it. It has everything!

• e. What's e? e is a little hard to explain if you don't understand maths because the technical definition is that e is the number such that if y=e^x, y'=e^x so y' = y. Or, for the simpler version, basically, if you draw a graph of e^x, then you find the slope of that graph, it's also e^x. The slope of the graph is the graph itself and it's a really quite useful thing for things like population growth and rates of changes of things and so forth.
• i is the imaginary number I mentioned before. Yes, it's a stupid name, but there's a good reason. Basically, it's the solution to y=(-1)². Or, again, for the simpler version, it's the square root of -1. This is important because, as you probably all know, any number multiplied by itself is a positive number. 2 times 2 = 4. -2 time -2 is also 4. There's no real number that, when you multiply it by itself, will give you a negative number, so mathematicians some time ago were like "Well, let's just make up a number and say that's the solution" and some other mathematicians were like "No, you can't do that! You can't just make up imaginary numbers!" and the name stuck, then they went on to write Alice in Wonderland.
• π is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. If a circle is 1 meter across, it will be exactly π meters around the outside.
• 1 is the unit of our number system. It's the first whole number and every single integer is a multiple of it.
• 0 is a very screwy number because it represents nothingness and does some funky things. Anything multiplied by 0 is nothing. 0 added to anything doesn't change it. It's neither positive nor negative and if you successfully divide by it, you possibly break the universe.
• It has addition too, the most fundamental operation in our number system.
• And it has multiplication, which is repeated addition.
• And lastly, it has a power, which is repeated multiplication.

Seriously, all these entirely unrelated things and they're all put together in one formula. It's a very cool equation and yes, it is entirely true and for a kinda good reason. Basically, e^iθ is a shorter way of writing cosθ + i sinθ and I'm not going to go into the details why. It involves Taylor series's and other things that I think I've written too much already and you're all asleep by now. cosπ = -1 and sinπ = 0 (Do both of those on a calculator if you don't believe me, make sure your calculator is in radians first) Put these two together, you get -1 and you can easily rearrange it in the form I gave you. Doesn't change how awesome that equation is though.


Anyway! I think I've blathered on enough here for now. I'ma publish this thing and get some sleep. Hopefully, some people have become slightly more enlightened and if not, meh, your loss as far as I'm concerned.