Some atheist cats

Trying to organise atheists is often compared to herding cats. So the huge Global Atheist Convention, starting in Melbourne this Friday, is quite an achievement. The convention will feature evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, broadcaster Phillip Adams and many other atheist superstars.

That is well and good, but why chat about atheism in a maths column? Does studying maths lead one to a disbelief in gods? Well, your maths masters are indeed atheist, but we have a number of mathematical colleagues who are religiously inclined. So where's the maths?

With the rise of religious fundamentalism, there has been a corresponding rise in concern over religion. However, from a logical perspective, fundamentalism is boring. For example, more than 40% of Americans believe that God created humans within the last 10,000 years. And there seems to be no shortage of Australians willing to believe Mary McKillop cured a person's cancer, after Mary's death no less. But what can one argue in response? Nothing. Reason has nothing to do with such beliefs, and reasoning won't alter them.

There may not be much left to argue, but argument continues regardless. For instance, there is the famous Oxford theologian Richard Swinburne. He fell in love with probabilities, and in 2003 he proved that it is 97% probable that Jesus rose from the grave. Swinburne's work was respectfully reported around the globe.

We cannot be so respectful. We shouldn't have to say it, but Swinburne's work is pseudomathematical nonsense. His arithmetic of probabilities is fine, but the base probabilities that he worked with were nothing beyond wild guesses.

Swinburne's work is by no means the first time silly mathematics has been used to defend religious belief. A story from the 18th Century involves the great mathematician Leonhard Euler. Apparently Catherine the Great was annoyed by the atheistic arguments of philosopher Denis Diderot, and Catherine asked Euler to intercede. Euler challenged Diderot: "Sir, (a+bⁿ)/z = x, therefore God exists. Respond!" Of course, the correct response was "Euler, you've been out in the sun too long". Supposedly, however, Diderot just walked away, defeated.

Whether or not this story is true, the technique of Eulerian Bluff is well-known in religious discourse. It plays a major role in the current Christian fad of intelligent design (ID).

In brief, the goal of ID is to demonstrate that some biological forms are complex in an "irreducible" way. Since it is not understood how such forms can be simplified and still function, the argument is that such forms could not have evolved, and therefore they must have been designed. We'll let you guess who the Designer is.

Actually, many excellent biologists have been demonstrating that the "irreducible" is in fact quite reducible. In any case, at its heart, ID is just an old and thoroughly discredited argument for the existence of God: there is simply no reason why current gaps in scientific understanding require a god to fill those gaps.

However, ID also has a (pseudo)mathematical component. The question is, how can we quantify the "complexity" of a system? Brilliant mathematics has come out of tackling this question: ID is a parody of this mathematics. Jeffrey Shallit and other mathematicians have painstakingly critiqued the mathematical work of ID proponents, exposing it as one long exercise in Eulerian Bluff. For a short survey of this pseudomathematics we recommend the excellent article by mathematician Jason Rosenhouse, available here.

So then where does mathematics stand with belief in God? People are of course free to believe in and have faith in whatever god they wish. But employing mathematics is unlikely to help. The proofs of God are just not there to be had, and mathematics will easily expose the naivety of any mathematical attempts. And of course proof runs counter to the very notion of faith. All in all, a very silly exercise.

Puzzle to Ponder

Feel free to email us with your suggested solutions, or post them in the comments section. Later in the week we'll post our solution in the comments section. Please also email us if you wish to be added to our email list.

The physicist Paul Dirac famously declared that God is a mathematician: let's say the chances of that are 98%. And let's say that it's 99% probable that a mathematician thinks Richard Swinburne's mathematics is ridiculous. Then, what are the chances that God thinks that Richard Swinburne's mathematics is ridiculous?

Burkard Polster teaches mathematics at Monash and is the university's resident mathemagician, mathematical juggler, origami expert, bubble-master, shoelace charmer, and Count von Count impersonator.

Marty Ross is a mathematical nomad. His hobby is smashing calculators with a hammer.

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