"D. F. Siemens, Jr." wrote:
> George,
> If I restrict myself to your exclusion of temporal considerations, the
> answer is "Yes." But this is like the infamous "Have you quit beating
> your wife yet?" I contend that a proper view of the deity recognizes that
> the Creator is never surprised, indeed, cannot be surprised, whether by
> what is being studied in complexity theory or by the free choices of
> human beings. My question was posed to show that mathematics is a human
> activity, a task taken on by a subcreator.
If we assume for the sake of argument that God is indeed immutable &
is never surprised then the God who was aware of the work of Bolyai and
Lobachevsky ~1820 is identical in all respects with the God who spoke with
Moses ~1000 years before Euclid. & while speaking with Moses, God knew
non-Euclidean geometry. & I don't think that he got that knowledge simply by
foreknowing what B & L would do.
My question was, you will realize, posed in a somewhat whimsical
way. What I would say more substantively is that math pattern is a
fundamental aspect of the world that science discovers, and if we believe
that the world is God's creation, that pattern is God's creation. & since
God created the world freely, God could have (& maybe did) create worlds with
other math patterns.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
"The Science-Theology Interface"
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