From: Don Winterstein (dfwinterstein@msn.com)
Date: Thu Sep 04 2003 - 07:33:34 EDT
Richard wrote in part:
"Moorad wrote:
">One ought not to confuse our mathematical
>description of nature with nature itself.
>Remember a map of a city is a useful construct
>but it should never be confused with the real city.
"Agreed. But it has not been demonstrated that the mathematical description
of Reality is "our construct." On the contrary, it is eminently reasonable
to view it as our *discovery* of God's design. Remember, the revelation of
Almighty God declares that "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos
was with God, and God was the Logos." What then could be more logical (i.e.
pertaining to the Logos) than the view that the Divine Logos designed
Reality according to the absolutely astoundingly overwhelmingly beautiful
mathematics that we behold all around us? "
Moorad has made a good point for a reason so far not explicitly cited here: The real world rarely or never precisely complies with our "astoundingly overwhelmingly beautiful" mathematical representations. Real phenomena are too complex to fit our equations. The equations are precise only for simple, isolated systems, which physicists love but are never more than approximate. For planetary motion, for example, first order approximations are often good enough; but if you want precision, you have to deal with the full many-body problem. So the maths are analogous to Platonic ideas: they look "beautiful" as abstractions but find implementation only in the simplest systems.
Don, speaking as an ex-experimental physicist/geophysicist
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