A reader sent me a link to [this amusing blog][blog]. It’s by a guy named George Shollenberger, who claims to have devised The First scientific Proof of God (and yes, he always capitalizes it like that).
\nGeorge suffers from some rather serious delusions of grandeur. Here’s a quote from his “About Me” bio on his blog:
\n>I retired in 1994 and applyied my hard and soft research experience to today’s
\n>world social problems. After retirement, my dual research career led to my
\n>discovery of the first scientific proof of God. This proof unifies the fields
\n>of science and theology. As a result of my book, major changes can be expected
\n>throughout the world.
\n>…
\n>I expect these blogs and the related blogs of other people to be detected by
\n>Jesus Christ and those higher intelligent humans who already live on other
\n>planets.
\nSo far, he has articles on his blog about how his wonderful proof should cause us to start over again in the fields of science, mathematics, theology, education, medical care, economics, and religion.
\nAlas, the actual First Scientific Proof of God is [only available in his book][buymybook]. But we can at least look at why he thinks we need to [restudy the field of mathematics][restudy].
\n>The field of mathematics is divided into pure and applied mathematics. Pure
\n>mathematicians use mathematics to express their own thoughts and thus express
\n>the maximum degree of freedom found in the field of mathematics. On the other
\n>hand, applied mathematicians lose a degree of their freedom because they use
\n>mathematics to express the thoughts of people in the fields they serve. Most
\n>mathematicians are applied mathematicians and serve either counters (e.g.,
\n>accountants, pollsters, etc.) or sciences (e.g., physicists, sociologists,
\n>etc.).
\nThat’s a pretty insulting characterization of mathematicians, but since George is an engineer by training, it’s not too surprising – that’s a fairly common attitude about mathematicians among engineers.
\n>The field of physics is served by applied mathematicians who are called
\n>mathematical physicists. These physicists are the cause of the separation of
\n>theologians and scientists in the 17th century, after Aristotle’s science was
\n>being challenged and the scientific method was beginning to be applied to all
\n>sciences. But, these mathematical physicists did not challenge Aristotle’s
\n>meaning of infinity. Instead, they accepted Aristotle’s infinity, which is
\n>indeterminate and expressed by infinite series such as the series of integers (
\n>1, 2, 3, ….etc.). Thus, to the mathematical physicist, a determinate infinity
\n>does not exist. This is why many of today’s physicists reject the idea of an
\n>infinite God who creates the universe. I argue that this is a major error in
\n>the field of mathematics and explain this error in the first chapter of The
\n>First Scientific Proof of God.
\nSo, quick aside? What was Aristotle’s infinity? The best article I could find quickly is [here][aristotle-infinity]. The short version? Aristotle believed that infinity doesn’t really *exist*. After all, there’s no number you can point to and say “That’s infinity”. You can never assemble a quantity of apples where you can say “There’s infinity apples in there”. Aristotle’s idea about infinity was that it’s a term that describes a *potential*, but not an *actual* number. He also went on the describe two different kinds of infinity – infinity by division (which describes zero, which he wasn’t sure should really be considered a *number*); and infinity by addition (which corresponds to what we normally think of as infinity).
\nSo. George’s argument comes down to: mathematics, and in particular, mathematical physics, needs to be rebooted, because it uses the idea of infinity as potential – that is, there is no specific *number* that we can call infinity. So since our math says that there isn’t, well, that means we should throw it all away. Because, you see, according to George, there *is* a number infinity. It’s spelled G O D.
\nExcept, of course, George is wrong. George needs to be introduced to John Conway, who devised the surreal numbers, which *do* contain infinity as a number. Oh, well.
\nEven if you were to accept his proposition, what difference would it make?
\nWell – there’s two ways it could go.
\nWe could go the [surreal][onag] [numbers][surreal] route. In the surreal numbers (or several similar alternatives), infinity *does* exist as a number; but despite that, it has the properties that we expect of infinity; e.g., dividing it by two doesn’t change it. If we did that, it would have no real effect on science: surreal numbers are the same as normal reals in most ways; they differ when you hit infinitesimals and infinities.
\nIf we didn’t go the surreal-ish route, then we’re screwed. If infinity is a *real* real number, then the entire number system collapses. What’s 1\/0? If infinity is *real*, then 1\/0 = infinity. What about 2\/0? Is that 2*infinity? If it is, it makes no sense; if it isn’t, it makes no sense.
\n>I believe that the field of mathematics must restudy their work by giving ample
\n>consideration to the nature of man’s symbolic languages, the nature of the
\n>human mind, Plato’s negative, and the nature of dialectical thinking.
\nPlato’s negative is, pretty much, the negative of intuitionistic logic. Plato claimed that there’s a difference between X, not-X, and the opposite of X. His notion of the opposite of X is the intuitionistic logic notion of not-X; his notion of not-X is the intuitionistic notion of “I don’t have a proof of X”.
\nIn other words, George is hopelessly ignorant of real mathematics; and his reasoning about what needs to be changed about math makes no sense at all.
\n[aristotle-infinity]: http:\/\/plato.stanford.edu\/entries\/aristotle-mathematics\/supplement3.html
\n[blog]: http:\/\/georgeshollenberger.blogspot.com
\n[restudy]: http:\/\/georgeshollenberger.blogspot.com\/2006\/07\/restudying-field-of-mathematics.html
\n[buymybook]: http:\/\/rockstarramblings.blogspot.com\/2006\/06\/doggerel-19-read-my-book.html
\n[surreal]: http:\/\/www.tondering.dk\/claus\/surreal.html
\n[onag]: http:\/\/www.akpeters.com\/product.asp?ProdCode=1276<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A reader sent me a link to [this amusing blog][blog]. It’s by a guy named George Shollenberger, who claims to have devised The First scientific Proof of God (and yes, he always capitalizes it like that). George suffers from some rather serious delusions of grandeur. Here’s a quote from his “About Me” bio on his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-debunking-creationism","category-fundamentalism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-1k","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}