As always, we use the latest dispatch from The Embassy for our discussion - here is an excerpt:

The debate concerning the origin or foundation of mathematics has been around for a very long time. Particularly, this question: Is mathematics invented or is it discovered? Because mathematics describes to an unreasonable level of accuracy how the physical world operates, is it something like a part of or an addendum to our universe? Or, is it something humans are inventing, which may be what it seems like in the moment of thinking up new mathematical ideas. For those who are interested in the question, here are a few (very non-technical) minutes from Roger Penrose, one of the most prominent physicists of the past number of decades, on the question. One of the arguments against mathematics being discovered is the unresolved, and probably scientifically and mathematically insolvable question: how did it get there? God doesn’t often come up in these discussions, but that might be the beginning of an answer. I suspect this is one of the motivations of those who favor view that mathematics is invented.

I have always been on the discovered end of the question, not that anyone cares. As Penrose points out, there are many examples, Einstein’s theories being some of the most prominent, where the known mathematics was extended far beyond our knowledge of the physical universe, only to find, through experimentation, that this apparently invented mathematics predicts the outcome of these experiments to an incredible degree of precision. The mathematics, along with those aspects of the universe that the mathematics describes, was waiting, from the very beginning of the universe, for us to discover it. Some on the invented side of the question seem to believe that everything is invented, that nothing exists on its own, rather we make it up and live according to these invented rules. It is all in our heads because everything is. Okay, okay, enough about mathematics, or at least let us move from mathematics to life. This is our question: is our life invented or discovered? And what difference does that make?

This is our question: is our life invented or discovered? And what difference does that make?

I don’t assume you have ever thought about the question, at least not in those terms. But our answer, or our assumed answer, whether we have reflected on it or not, impacts how we approach, think about, and live our lives. As Carl Trueman writes in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self …

… most of us do not self-consciously reflect on life and the world as we live in it but instead think and act intuitively in accordance with the way we instinctively imagine the world to be.

Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, p.73

As we reflect, with aid from Trueman and his book, we can draw on the work of philosophers Philip Rieff and Charles Taylor. Neither are religious, to my understanding, but both have wrestled with how we have thought about what life is over the course of Western Civilization. Rieff describes society’s moral values as finding their foundation in a sacred order (at least until our current age). He describes three successive worlds, with the first two worlds justifying these moral values by appealing to something transcendent, to the sacred. The first world is pagan and is controlled by fate, based on the whims of capricious gods or spirits. The second world in the West is Judeo-Christian and is characterized by faith, and at it’s moral foundation is a loving God who made us and everything else. We can move past fate because, in this second world, our lives have a purpose beyond ourselves, we are part of a larger story. The third world, by contrast, moves past belief in anything transcendent. It is only us, no larger purpose, nothing else to justify us, we have to justify ourselves. We have to invent our lives instead of discovering them in a larger story. Rieff writes,

Culture and sacred order are inseparable, the former the registration of the latter as a systematic expression of the practical relation between humans and the shadow aspect of reality as it is lived. No culture has ever preserved itself where it is not a registration of a sacred order.

Philip Rieff, Sacred Order / Social Order, Volume 1, p.13 - referenced by Trueman, p. 76

What Rieff calls the third world, Charles Taylor in his work A Secular Age, calls the immanent frame. Previously, as Rieff describes as the first and second world, we operated in a transcendent frame. In this shift from the transcendent frame to the immanent frame, Taylor describes a shift in how we understand our lives. In the transcendent frame, we view our life as deeper than what is on the surface, the world we see is representative of a larger reality. In the immanent frame, there is no larger reality, there is no order or meaning to discover. We are the creators of the meaning of our lives, instead of the discoverers of the meaning our lives already have. I think it is important to note that Taylor is not arguing for the transcendent frame, I don’t want to misrepresent him. He is simply noticing this shift and some of the impacts it has.

I have summarized and oversimplified very large ideas - but it is clear we have moved from the idea that our lives are given to us, along with the meaning and purpose that is a part of this gift, to the idea that our lives are completely our own, that we enter in Act 1, Scene 1 of our stories and it is all about the play that we write. Which is pretty much what we are left with if we reject the transcendent frame.

Many of us, perhaps most of us, ourselves, our friends, family, and neighbors experience life as chaotic, bewildering, maybe even apparently meaningless. That is true as well for Christians who have signed up for the transcendent frame, and a life of meaning - but who expect to understand the meaning at every step. At various times, I suspect, this describes all Christians, though we may not want to admit it to ourselves. We are impacted by the immanent frame all around us even as we believe in a transcendent frame. We seek to form our beliefs in this transcendent frame, but we feel the pull of a world that has largely rejected it

Read the whole thing here.

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