Welcome to Matheology! You may be wondering what in the world a matheologian does, and I admit that neither of those matheological words have been seen recently by many. So here's the deal:
For thousands of years, the human race has been awed and wondered by nature and its beauty, so much that many humans can recognize a creator who takes credit for the sights and sounds we are astounded by. In some cases, people worship the creation instead of the creator, but it's pretty explicit in itself: things work out great because of their great creator!
Of course, while there are many theists who agree on creation, a minority of people choose to believe that the world and universe occurred by chance as a result of numerous probabilities “working out”. Ironically, there seems to be more evidence in the fields of sciences that are gathering that point toward a creator. Ultimately, I am sure that most of us agree that science is a field where we discover it, instead of inventing it.
However, the debate around mathematics still runs: Is math invented or discovered? And that, exactly, is a pivotal point of Matheology—to challenge that question with another: If math is discovered by humans, then where did it originally come from, and how does it not contradict itself?
We're talking about something pretty big here: This is a topic which the Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, and all sorts of other empires agreed on. Thousands of different mathematicians speaking different tongues working on similar problems came up with identical methods of proof and solutions. Billions of humans have gone through school learning the fundamental skills of mathematics while no argument has arisen over “which is the right answer”. How can this be?
On the other hand, Matheology deals with theism, specifically the Bible, which similarly was written by more than forty writers to concur on one authorship such that no part of it contradicts another. The consistency within mathematics is akin to the consistency of the Holy Bible, and I reckon there's more than just that.
Over a century ago, Leopold Kronecker, a German logician, mentioned that, “God made the integers; all else is the work of man.” If such a statement is true, then we would have to assume that everything else in the natural world that isn't composed of integers is not a work of God then. That would include almost everything from the motion of the planets to the nanosciences naked to the eye.
On the other hand, Kronecker's student begged to differ, and working with concepts of infinity and set theory, this theistic mathematician believed that "the transfinite species are just as much at the disposal of the intentions of the Creator and His absolute boundless will as are the finite numbers." His work overlapped both the mathematical and miraculous, and he is remembered in history as the great father of set theory: Georg Cantor.
So Matheology is about uncovering the awesome character of mathematics to see if it is merely a set of coincidences or something greater. If the latter case is true, then we ought to consider if a master designer was there in the beginning to make math work perfectly. After all, Ecclesiastes 3:11 says, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”
