Apr 28, 2018 09:29 PM
https://newrepublic.com/article/148150/math-kill-god
EXCERPT: . . . In a new book called *The Great Rift: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Religion-Science Divide*, Michael E. Hobart offers a new twist on a huge old metanarrative: the death of God.
Something or other happened in Renaissance Europe, the story goes, and it eventually distanced scientists from religion. Hobart locates this great shift in the field of mathematics. Other historians have given credit to experimenters who pioneered the scientific method, or astronomers like Galileo or Kepler, but Hobart claims that Renaissance mathematics is distinct from its medieval predecessor because it reconceived numeracy as a tool for describing the quantities of things into an abstract system for describing relations between them. Scholars began thinking “with empty and abstract information symbols,” which catalyzed a revolution from “thing-mathematics” to “relation-mathematics.” Because this form of knowledge went beyond ordinary language, which previously was the primary means of conveying information, people slowly began to conceive of a world contingent on “natural” laws rather than the word of God.
To make this argument, Hobart presents a virtuosic array of evidence. He opens by laying out the context of the religion-versus-science debate, pointing to various thinkers’ conflicting accounts of whether the two fields conflict. He cites Steven Jay Gould’s theory of non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA)—the idea that science and religion belong properly to two different domains of knowledge and thus can remain separate—and Huston Smith’s assertion that science is subservient to God. Hobart does not come down on one side, but rather shows that the debate is not over, and that he has a new interpretation of the problem to offer....
MORE: https://newrepublic.com/article/148150/math-kill-god
EXCERPT: . . . In a new book called *The Great Rift: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Religion-Science Divide*, Michael E. Hobart offers a new twist on a huge old metanarrative: the death of God.
Something or other happened in Renaissance Europe, the story goes, and it eventually distanced scientists from religion. Hobart locates this great shift in the field of mathematics. Other historians have given credit to experimenters who pioneered the scientific method, or astronomers like Galileo or Kepler, but Hobart claims that Renaissance mathematics is distinct from its medieval predecessor because it reconceived numeracy as a tool for describing the quantities of things into an abstract system for describing relations between them. Scholars began thinking “with empty and abstract information symbols,” which catalyzed a revolution from “thing-mathematics” to “relation-mathematics.” Because this form of knowledge went beyond ordinary language, which previously was the primary means of conveying information, people slowly began to conceive of a world contingent on “natural” laws rather than the word of God.
To make this argument, Hobart presents a virtuosic array of evidence. He opens by laying out the context of the religion-versus-science debate, pointing to various thinkers’ conflicting accounts of whether the two fields conflict. He cites Steven Jay Gould’s theory of non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA)—the idea that science and religion belong properly to two different domains of knowledge and thus can remain separate—and Huston Smith’s assertion that science is subservient to God. Hobart does not come down on one side, but rather shows that the debate is not over, and that he has a new interpretation of the problem to offer....
MORE: https://newrepublic.com/article/148150/math-kill-god