The Mysteries of Math with Kate Loop-cannon

Creation Fellowship

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I'm going to introduce you, so okay, so here we go. So I am Terry Camerizal and I'm here on behalf of Creation Fellowship Santee.

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We're a group of friends who love to learn about our Creator God and believe that the Bible, when read properly, rules out the possibility of long ages.

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We met for 10 years at the Creation and Earth History Museum in Santee, California.

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Then, and online, our goal is to equip believers to defend their faith. You can find over four years worth of our

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Virtually There archives by visiting tinyurl .com forward slash cfsarchives, c for Creation, f for Fellowship, s for Santee, and the word archives.

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Christian Perspective is the ministry of Adam and Kate Hannon, in which they share encouragement and resources from a worldview.

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Over the last decade, Kate has been sharing with homeschool parents how they teach math from a, how they can teach math from a biblical worldview, along with various other topics.

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She loves helping parents understand the worldview battle in math and be encouraged that the God who created it can help them teach it.

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And so tonight, not just for parents of homeschoolers, but for all of us, we're excited to listen to the presentation that she has about math being

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God's language. So here she is. Well, thank you. It is a joy to be here.

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Let me get my slides working and we will get started here.

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So I titled tonight's talk, Revealing Math from a Biblical Worldview. And I know that's a rather odd title because when most people think of math, they don't think of a biblical worldview, right?

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I know if you had asked me 30 years ago about math and a biblical worldview, I would have thought, are you going to talk about how

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God divided the red sea when you teach division? I mean, how can math be taught biblically?

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And I was brought up in a Christian homeschool family. We were trying to see God in everything.

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We'd been blessed to learn about creation and that we could trust the Bible from the very beginning. But when it came to math, we just kind of saw it as this neutral zone and we didn't see

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God in it. We just learned, learned it and we moved on. And I was always good at math.

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I didn't have a choice. My dad was a CPA. My mom loved math. My grandmother was a CPA. We just didn't have a choice about doing math, but I didn't really understand why

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I was learning what I was learning, especially when it came to A's and B's and X's and Y's that suddenly appear in high school.

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And I didn't see much of a purpose to a lot of the upper level math until my senior year, when my mom had me read a book called mathematics is

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God silent by James Nickel. And it totally shifted how I saw math because he goes through in there, the history of math and really shows how apart from a biblical worldview, we can't even explain why we're able to do math.

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And that really all of math is shouting out that God is faithful and that we can trust him. And I was blown away.

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I was like, okay, how did I miss this all those years growing up? And all of a sudden now

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I understood why I had X's and Y's and A's and B's. And I wanted other people to be able to understand that.

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Um, and so the Lord ended up calling me to start writing materials and speaking on math from a biblical worldview.

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So whether you love math right now, or you hate it, it's okay. I hope that as we go through this workshop, you'll see just how math really is declaring

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God's praises. And as you do that, I've seen over and over and over again, how that helps really make sense out of math.

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Um, and so you might find yourself liking it more than you thought at first. So let's just start with where is

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God in math? Because when most of us think of math, we think of numbers and symbols on a piece of paper, right?

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And it seems pretty factual. I mean, one plus one equals two, whether you're a

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Muslim, a Christian or an atheist, right? So where is God in that? Well, I want you to sit back and think about creation for a minute that we know that God created all things, right?

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But when you look at a flower, whether you're a Muslim Christian or atheist, you can agree about photosynthesis and some of the mechanics of that flower, what color it is, things like that, the texture, but your worldview, that's not neutral.

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That flower is not neutral, right? Your worldview affects where you think that flower came from, who the design that's in that flower, is it proclaiming

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God's praises? Or is it just the result of random chance? Your worldview affects your view of that flower.

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And it's that same way in math. The Bible tells us that in, for by him, and that him is referring to Jesus, all things were created.

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It doesn't say all things, but math, it says all things. God is the one who created the consistencies and the quantities that are all around us that we're describing with math.

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You know, when we write one plus one equals two outside of a textbook, you can take one apple and another apple and you end up with two apples, right?

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There's a real life consistency and order in creation. And that's why math actually works.

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You would not bother to learn math or teach your children math if it didn't actually apply outside of a textbook, right?

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It's useful and important because it does describe the order and the consistency that's all around us.

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And God created that order and consistency. And, you know, we, we've come to associate our modern way of writing math equations as math itself, but it's really just one way of describing that order and consistency.

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I was fascinated when I started researching about math to go back and see how in the middle ages, every math book had a different, different symbolism.

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You had to kind of learn, okay, what are they using to show plus here? And throughout history, there have been a lot of different ways of representing quantities.

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These are different ways of representing the, a single quantity or what we would say one today.

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They look very different, right? There, a lot of math is just like a language system that is helping us describe those quantities and consistencies that God created.

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There are also different methods for working with those quantities and consistencies.

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We're used to thinking of multiplication in our traditional step -by -step algorithm, where you carry the place, but there are other ways to multiply.

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And during the middle ages, when math was switching to paper math, because paper was becoming more readily available and there was the printing press, you had fierce competition between different methods as to which was the best way to actually multiply.

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Again, the, these are just things that men using their God -given ability have come up with to help us describe the order and the quantities that God's put around us.

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God also sustains everything. He's the one who day in and day out is holding creation together, right?

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Hebrews 1, 3 tells us he upholds the universe by the word of his power. And again, that he's referring to Jesus.

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So think about this day in and day out. Jesus is upholding all things by just the power of his word in such a predictable, such a reliable fashion that you can take it to the bank, that one plus one is going to equal two.

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And you can memorize that fact and you can use it over and over and over and over again with confidence because Jesus is faithful and his word is powerful.

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Math's message is really that God is faithful. Jeremiah 33, 25 through 26 says, thus says the

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Lord, if I have not established my covenant with day and night and the fixed order of heaven and earth, so fixed order, those are those consistencies around us, which is what we're describing with math.

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Then I will reject the offspring of Jacob and David, and will not choose one of his offspring to rule over the offspring of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

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In other words, God is saying, look around you. You can tell him a covenant keeping God. I'm keeping these consistencies of creation together.

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And I'm going to be just as faithful to my covenant with you. He is a covenant keeping

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God we can trust. So math really is telling us we better pay attention to what God has said in the Bible, because he's going to keep his word and he is a faithful God.

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And he will be faithful to save those who have put their faith in Jesus. He will also to be faithful to punish those who have not.

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So really math's message is ultimately pointing us to the gospel that we need to trust God and come to him his way because he is faithful to all he said.

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And if God created and sustains math, then math isn't disconnected from science, not disconnected from creation.

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We tend to think of them as like these separate subjects, but really they go together. And as we use math to explore creation, we see

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God's wisdom and his care. And I want to show you that just really briefly with a sunflower. So in a sunflower, you can see that the seeds spiral in two directions.

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Some are spiraling this way, some are spiraling that way. If you were to count up the number of spirals in each direction and look at the ratio between them, it's always approximately the same for any given sunflower.

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And it turns out that that precise ratio enables the most number of seeds to fit in a sunflower head.

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So God created them to reproduce in the most efficient way possible. And it's math that helps us see that math reminds us that God is faithful.

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He's wise and caring. He's infinite. You know, infinite numbers are pretty hard to get our mind around, right?

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And yet they exist because God is an infinite God and he has created a universe that we can't reach the end to.

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He's beyond our understanding. You know, some of upper level math can make your head hurt, right?

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Why do we need calculus and trigonometry and all these different branches of math? Well, we need it because creation is so complicated that we need all these different tools just to begin to describe what

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God spoke into existence and what he is sustaining day after day after day.

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He is great. He is sovereign. You know, he is over all things, no matter who's in power or what's going on in the world, creation is still operating consistently because God is still sovereign over all that.

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He is powerful. He's unchanging. You know, aren't you glad math operates consistently?

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If it didn't, you know, we record the law of gravity. Mathematically, we build airplanes based on that knowledge.

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If math changed because God changes his mind every day, when he wakes up, how he's going to operate the universe, you would get in an airplane, not knowing if it would take off that day or if it wouldn't.

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All of modern technology is based on the fact that math works consistently. Why does math work consistently?

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It works consistently because God consistently holds all things together and he is unchanging. We can trust him.

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He's the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow he's all present. You could find yourself in the darkest dungeon of your life, the worst situation you could imagine, and you can still pick up one of something and another one and you got two, right?

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Because God is still there and he's still in charge. He's orderly, precise, just, and more.

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As we look at math, it's a part of God's creation. It's pointing us to our creator.

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We have this opportunity to behold God in math. In second Corinthians 3 .18, it says, but we all with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror, the glory of the are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, justice from the

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Lord, the spirit. So if we want to be transformed into God's image, we want to live how

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God wants us to live. What do we do? Pull ourselves up by the bootstraps? No, it says we're supposed to behold the glory of the

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Lord. As we see who he is, as we see how faithful he is, as we see that he is so powerful and that he really is in charge.

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It changes us. It humbles us. It takes away our pride. It takes away our fears.

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It changes us from the inside out. And so we have this opportunity and Larry Zimmerman puts it this way.

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I become like Christ by beholding his glory. One cannot see Christ physically, but one is able to physically view evidence of his power and glory in the creation.

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The basis of which is mathematics. As if that weren't enough to excite you about math, math also helps us with the tasks that God has given us to do.

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You're back in the garden of Eden. God gave Adam a task, right? He said, and he said, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion.

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Math is a part of what we use to do that and to, to rule over creation.

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We see an example of that same process right there in the garden as well with Adam naming the animals.

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You know, God brought the animals, his creation to Adam and Adam assigned a name to them.

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In math, we are looking at the order and the consistencies that are around us.

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And we're assigning names and symbols to describe them. It's the same naming process. It's part of this exercising of dominion.

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And just like Adam did that while in the creator's presence through Christ Jesus, sin separates us from God, but Jesus died to make a way for us to again, have a relationship with God and be in his presence as we explore his creation, as we use math to exercise dominion over it.

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And we have an opportunity to depend on and trust the Lord while we use math. Colossians 3 17 says, and whatever you do in word or deed, do everything in the name of the

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Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God, the father through him. Notice it does not say do everything except math in the name of the

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Lord Jesus, right? It says do everything that includes math. And so within math, we have this opportunity to praise

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God, to depend on him, to grow in him. Walter W Sawyer says mathematics is like a chest of tools.

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And I really like that imagery because tools come in different shapes and different sizes, right?

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You have really simple tools, like a screwdriver that you might learn to use at a young age, and that you might use over and over and over again in a lot of different uses.

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And it's pretty intuitive how to use them. And then you have other tools, like maybe a specialized router that just does something very specific.

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And it takes a little bit of training to learn to use it, but it's very powerful at what it does.

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And it's that same way in math. You have some concepts like addition and subtraction that you're going to learn early and that are pretty intuitive how they apply.

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You can see that, okay, if I take three of something, I add three, I get six. And you're going to use them over and over and over and over in your life.

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And then there's other tools like calculus that take more time to learn, and yet they're very powerful tools as well.

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And they do important things in helping us describe God's creation.

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So whether it's a simple concept or a more advanced concept, all of math, when you boil it down and you look past all the fancy lingo, it's a tool ultimately that helps us describe an aspect of God's creation.

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All right. So if that is what is typically taught in math,

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I'm sorry, that is what we should be seeing in math. What's typically taught in math? Because how many of you have had your child or have ever had in your own life, finishing a math lesson going, wow, that was so amazing.

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I was just so encouraged spiritually by my math lesson today. I've asked that question all over the country and nobody's ever raised their hand.

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So obviously what we just looked at is not what's coming across in math classes.

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And then the question is, well, what is? And I want you to put yourself in a third grader's shoes for a minute.

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You're taught over and over and over again, fact, fact, fact, fact, memorize this, solve this, but you're never taught where those facts came from, why they work, what might be your logical conclusion?

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Well, I know my conclusion as a child was just that math was pretty amazing.

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I mean, I would ask my mom why it worked and her answer was just, it does go do it.

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And so I was left being odd at math. And I want you to think like, what worldview is that really?

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If we're odd at math and yet math is really a way of describing consistencies in order that are all around us, then we're really left in a naturalistic worldview.

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We're left thinking of math as just something that's always been there, which if math has always been there, then the consistency of creation has just always been there.

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That's really a disguised form of naturalism and evolution. And it's so subtle, but it's what comes across in most math courses.

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Or you could end up thinking that man created math and that man is pretty smart. I mean, after all, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that one plus one does equal to outside of a textbook.

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And so how did it happen that what we learn in a textbook actually applies in creation? Well, you can end up in humanism thinking, well, man, man must be pretty smart in figuring that out.

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And this can be a huge hurdle. It was in my life. So like I said, I was brought up in a Christian family, accepted

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Christ at a young age, but I went through a period of questioning as a teenager. And one of my big hurdles was like,

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I wanted mathematical proof of God's existence. Well, why did I even want that? It was because I I'd been steadily thinking, okay, well, math is this source of truth.

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And so I need to, and I can trust mathematicians and some people are saying something different that there's not a

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God. And so I was all confused when really math should have been shouting out to me that, Hey, apart from the biblical world, biblical

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God, there's no explanation for why math actually works outside of a textbook. Why in the world is what we come up with on paper match creation, unless the same

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God created our minds as created creation and gave us that ability to explore it and record it.

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And, and unless there's a God who's consistent holding all things together, why would we expect to see these consistencies everywhere?

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So math should have been building up my faith and leaving me odd at the crater. And instead it was subtly creating this hurdle for me in trusting the

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Lord. When you think about it, math is really central to the sciences. You cannot get a degree in any field of science without a lot of math.

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And it's because they're really not these separate entities. Math is the tool that scientists use to explore

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God's creation. And there is a philosophy behind the facts. It's not neutral. We have to give the glory for math somewhere.

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I mean, it is amazing how math describes things like gravity and, and creation around us.

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And that is going to leave us odd at something either at math, at man or at our great creator.

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And so when we don't approach math with that biblical heart, we end up giving the glory to either math or man.

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So it's really important. I'm going to give you some quotes and I want you to think about whether this person is giving the glory to math or to man.

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One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulae have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser, even than their discoverers, that we get more out of them than was originally put into them.

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Where is that giving the glory? They have this independence, right?

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It's pointing to math itself. It's saying, Hey, math itself is something amazing rather than, wow, the creator of all this is amazing.

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Mathematicians are architects of complex systems. Who's he giving that glory to? He's giving it to man.

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Here's a quote from a high school math course. The property describes the way something is.

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We can't change properties. We are stuck with properties because they are what they are.

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Where's the glory going there? A property where you're left thinking about properties as something wonderful, right?

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I'm going to reword this so that you can see the glory instead of going to properties, going to God.

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A property describes the way God governs an aspect of creation. We can't change properties because God decides how things work, not us.

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We are stuck with properties because God is who he is and he is going to govern creation the way he has decided he's going to govern them.

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Do you see how a student would leave with a totally different perspective just based on that little reword?

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One, they're left viewing properties themselves as some sort of self -existent truth. And the other they're left viewing our

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God as the source of all truth. And it's a huge, huge difference. Math is not a neutral zone.

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We have an enemy who wants to get us to trust ourselves and not

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God. And he does not take a break when math class comes up. There's not this little neutral zone sign where Satan is not going to try to distort and get our eyes off of our creator.

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The same seeds of self -trust and pride and independent thinking that we have to guard against in science, we need to guard against in math as well.

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It's not a neutral zone. There's ultimately two hearts in math. I put the word heart up there because when you think about your heart, it pumps blood through your entire body.

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So if you have a bad heart, it's pumping blood, bad blood through it. If you have a good heart, it's pumping good blood. And our heart affects everything.

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And when we approach math, we're either approaching it with a heart that's dependent on God, that it recognizes

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God created this, math is dependent on God, or an independent heart. God did not create math, math is not dependent on God.

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And which heart we have is going to affect how we see every aspect of math.

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And we'll explore that more in a few minutes here. I'll give you a big picture overview, and then we're going to break it apart for some specific concepts.

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But if we view math from a dependent heart, it leads towards seeing math as a meaningful tool.

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If we really believe that math is a way of describing God's creation, then we're not going to want to learn it as this isolated textbook exercise.

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We're going to want to learn how it really does describe God's creation. And we see that through history.

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I just finished doing a timeline of math history, and it's fascinating to see how worldviews really affected how people used math and how it was really a return to a biblical worldview during the middle ages that slowly helped people start using math practically and led to the scientific revolution, as they were able to use math to explore creation and view it as that meaningful tool.

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And it brought tremendous joy in the process. I think I have a, no, I don't have a slide about that. We'll get to it in a minute.

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But the independent heart on the other hand is more just doing math as a pursuit of knowledge.

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So like the Greek philosophers are an example of they just saw math as truth in itself. So they didn't really focus on trying to use math to help the common man.

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They were more focused on just learning more intellectual knowledge because they were viewing math as this pursuit of truth.

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And it led to confusion because apart from acknowledging a biblical God, there is no explanation for why we're able to even use math.

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And I have some quotes on that. So this is from a article by Freeman Dyson.

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Some of the most abstruse concepts of mathematics have an uncanny way of becoming essential tools in physics.

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Many physicists have been so impressed by the usefulness of mathematics that they have attributed to it almost mystical power.

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So here's a man who's like baffled. Why does math actually work in real life?

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Why are we able to use what we come up with on paper in real life? And they don't have an explanation.

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It's just this mystical power. He goes on in this article, I shall not attempt any deep philosophical discussion of the reasons why mathematics supplies so much power to physics.

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The vast majority of working scientists, myself included, find comfort in the words of the French mathematician.

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I'm going to mess up his name. I'm not really good with French, but you see it up there on the screen.

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In my opinion, a mathematician, insofar as he is a mathematician, need not preoccupy himself with philosophy.

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Now, I want you to think about what he's saying here. He's saying the vast majority of scientists are just going to use this tool day after day, after day, after day, after day.

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And they see that it works and they don't have an explanation for why it works. They're just going to ignore that piece. As a

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Christian, we don't have to. We have an explanation for why we're able to use math. Norman Campbell, a

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British physicist and philosopher, said, why do they predict we return? He was talking about numbers. We return once again to the questions which we cannot avoid.

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The final answer that I must give is that I do not know, that nobody knows, and that probably nobody ever will know.

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Again, apart from a biblical creator, there is not an explanation for why math works.

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Albert Einstein, even if the axioms of the theory are posited by man, the success of such a procedure supposes in the objective world a high degree of order which we are in no way entitled to expect a priori.

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Therein lies the miracle which becomes more and more evident as our knowledge develops. And here is the weak point of positivists and of professional atheists who feel happy because they think that they have not only preempted the world of the divine but also of the miraculous.

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I know there's a lot of big words in there, but basically what he's saying is it doesn't make sense.

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There's like this miracle of why what we discover on paper and because a lot of math concepts were just discovered by figuring things out intellectually and then it ends up applying in creation.

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He doesn't have an explanation for it. He calls it miraculous. Biblically, the explanation is the same

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God created our minds, has created creation, and he gave us the ability to, as Johannes Kepler said, think his thoughts after him.

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And so we're able to develop tools that do apply in creation. We have an answer, but apart from a biblical worldview, we don't.

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And so people are left learning this tool with no explanation for why it really works.

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The biblical heart makes sense. As Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton and other men of the scientific revolution were making the discoveries they did, they were using math, but they were also praising the creator.

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I found it fascinating to pull out their books where they talked about their mathematical discoveries that rocked the world.

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And they have quotes like this in the midst of them. These quotes that are on the screen there are not coming from devotional books.

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They're in the midst of where they were explaining their great discoveries. You would read about their discovery.

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There'd be lots of math involved in it. And then all of a sudden they would just be like, I can't help myself anymore. I'm going to proclaim

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God's praises. So like Johannes Kepler crying out with the royal psalmist, great is our Lord and great is his virtue.

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And of his wisdom, there is no number. So like they saw, and their worldviews were faulty.

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If you go back and you look at them, they had some dangerous theology in there, but they did see math as a way of describing

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God's creation. And they did, as they used math then practically to describe it, they were odd at the creator and at what he had created.

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The biblical heart makes sense. There is actually a current movement in math to try to go back to being more practical because what happened is in the early 1900s, as men, our nation was kind of moving away from a biblical worldview, math became much more abstract as a result.

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And it didn't work. People are confused. They think they hate math because they're being taught all this stuff without being shown how it's actually a tool and what they're supposed to do with it.

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And so there is a current movement to move back to being more practical with math.

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Those are some quotes on that, but just a word of caution with that, just being practical is not being biblical.

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Just because you wear a police uniform doesn't make you a policeman. You could wear one and still not be a policeman.

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You can teach math practically and not be teaching it biblically. However, if you want to teach math biblically and you want to really show your students how it's proclaiming

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God's praises, you're going to want to teach it practically. You're going to want to show them how everything they're learning really is a tool that describes

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God's creation. And just before we go on from there, one more thought about the scientific revolution.

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For years, the church was blamed for teaching that the sun circled the earth, right?

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But really that teaching came from the Greek mathematicians and they had mathematically proven it.

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And their proof was solid. It just started with a faulty assumption and nobody questioned it because the view that math was the source of truth.

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It wasn't until people started returning back to the Bible and returning to seeing math as a tool to describe

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God's creation, that they were able to question the Greek teaching and were able to say, oh no, that doesn't tie with what we actually see.

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So again, just to encourage you, that biblical heart really does make sense. So how can math be taught biblically then?

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So within math, there is like this bomb of naturalistic and humanistic thinking.

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And if you had a bomb, would you fix it by just taping Bible verses over it? Because a lot of times, and I know for me, when

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I first thought about, well, how do you teach math biblically? I just thought, well, you add a Bible verse to the top of the page. That fixes it, right?

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Does it fix the bomb to add a Bible verse? No, it does not. You would need to diffuse that bomb, right?

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So within math, we want to totally change our approach. We want to diffuse the bomb and we want to show the truth.

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And I have show underlined there because show is very different than just tell.

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If you were trying to teach your child to cook, you would not give them a textbook for eight years or even more than eight years and never let them in the kitchen, right?

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If you did, they would think they hated cooking, but they never really had an opportunity to cook, right?

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Or if you were teaching your teen how to drive, you would not just give them a book to read and never put them behind a wheel, right?

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If you did, they would never really learn to drive. It's the same way with math.

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It's one thing to just say, Hey, God's in math. Now go learn it. That's not really showing.

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We want to really show students how every concept they're learning truly is a way of describing his creation.

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That does point us to the Lord because that's letting them in the kitchen, getting their hands dirty.

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And so many people think that they hate math because they were never really shown what math is.

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And they were taught all of these facts to learn without ever getting a chance to really see what those facts did and how they described creation.

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And so we want to show it as a tool that points to the Lord. We want to help the child learn to use that tool.

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And the things that can help you do that are bringing in history, science, and real life.

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Those will really help show why we're learning what we're learning. And I have up there, the picture of the gardener unwrapping a hoe because within math, a lot of times concepts are taught with a lot of fancy words and step -by -step processes to learn.

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And you can get lost in all that. But what I want you to think about is all that is really just like wrapping paper.

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And if you dig past it, you're going to find this useful tool that helps us describe

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God's creation. And so you want to keep digging until you get to the tool. So let's do that for just some concepts here to kind of give you a glimpse of how you can really go about seeing

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God in math and teaching math from that biblical worldview. So we'll start with arithmetic. And arithmetic is like what you learn in elementary school.

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It's writing numbers, it's memorizing facts and algorithms or step -by -step processes. So like up here, you've got your addition algorithm.

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This is how you add, you're going to add your ones, and then you're going to carry your tens and add your tens and how you subtract, how you divide, how you multiply.

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Again, at first glance, all of that seems really factual and neutral. But again, our worldview is really going to affect how we view it.

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And let's look at how can we show these things as tools. So for one thing, can help them see how this really is describing consistency that God created and sustained.

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So this is the multiplication table. As a child, I was really blown away by the multiplication table, because if I looked at the right square,

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I got the right answer. And I thought that was really cool, but I had no idea why. It was like, how in the world did this table always give me the right answer?

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But you can show your child that by simply building it. So we're going to build this twos column together.

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So you can start with just two objects and they can be any object. They can be beans, they can be raisins, they can be toy cars, whatever.

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If you start with two of them, well then let's say you have two sets of two of them. You're going to have four, right?

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If you have three sets of two of them, count them out. How many do you have? You have six and you can tell your child, you know,

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God is so faithful and so consistent that rather than counting them out every single time, we can just write down the answer here.

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And then we'll, we'll just look at them at that column to see the answer.

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Next time we need to find it. That's all the multiplication table is. And we could, we could keep going here. When it comes to these step -by -step algorithms, rather than just teaching the mechanics of do this step one, step two, step three, step four, help them understand why, what are we really doing with those steps?

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Let's do it with multiplication. So once you've, once you've memorized all of your multiplication facts, so we can write it in a table, right?

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And we can just consult it next time we need to find it. If we want to find what two sets of two is or two times two, we're going to look here in this second box because that's where we wrote it down.

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And then eventually we're going to memorize it because we don't want to have to always pull out our table each time, right? Well, we can't possibly memorize every, all the values that we would ever need to multiply.

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It would just be impossible because we're not God. We have a limited amount of information we can store in our brain.

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So let's think of a way that we can use a limited set of facts to help us solve whatever problem we need to solve.

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Cause we don't want to have to sit there counting out cars every single time. That's what the step -by -step process is really doing.

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So in four times 14, I've gone ahead and shown it, and you could show that visually using all kinds of different manipulatives.

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So we have four sets. I'm sorry. We, yeah, we have four sets of 14. So each of these has 14 and there's one, two, three, four of them, right?

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So now I'm going to view that as four sets of four or four times four, because I've memorized that fact and four sets of 10.

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Cause I've also memorized that fact. So I know what those two equal. And then I can add them together to find what four sets of 14 or four times 14 equals.

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So I'm just using the, what I have memorized to help me find what I haven't memorized.

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Cause I can't possibly memorize everything I need to. That's all our step -by -step process does, which is over here.

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So this is what we just did. This is the same thing, except now I'm writing these answers here underneath.

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And instead of writing all this addition down here, we can do it as we go. So we can just perform that addition in the process by carrying that, that one's place.

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But that's all we're really doing is breaking down a problem.

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We don't have memorized into ones that we do. And you can, you can show it to them with other things such as money.

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You know, you have here, each one of these is 14 cents, right?

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We have one nickel, I'm sorry, one dime and four pennies. So 14 cents there. So we have four sets of them.

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And what would that equal? This is showing them why, why do we need to learn this? Well, because it helps us in real life.

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And that's just one, one simple example of that. You can also show your student how these methods are really just one way to write or solve problems.

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I mentioned earlier how when math was first switching up over to paper math, there were lots of different methods.

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One of those methods is the gelosha method. So I'm going to walk through the same problem with gelosha method so you can get an idea.

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So here they would draw squares and draw diagonals through the squares, put the numbers you were multiplying along the side.

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So this is four times 14, and then you'd multiply your ones four times four, 16.

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And we're breaking it down into problems we know, and then four times one.

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And I don't even have to think about how that's really 10. I can just think one, cause this is going to keep track of that place for me.

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So when I write this four here, you're going to see in a minute that it will view that as four tens automatically.

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So now you add up along the diagonals. So this is six, one plus four is five.

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The answer is 56. It's just keeping track of the place value so that we're not having to think of that ourselves.

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And we can use what we've already learned. The method that we typically use, it's doing the same thing.

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It's keeping track of the place value for us. So we're not having to think it through each time. It's helpful to understand there are other ways.

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You don't want your child left thinking this way of solving math is math itself. It's just one tool that men using their

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God -given abilities have come up with. It's like the language side of math. One way to help us describe consistencies, looking at other ways can help them see there's other ways that can do that as well, but be careful.

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Don't show your child this when they're first learning how to multiply. You don't want to confuse them, but it can be helpful at some point to help them reinforce and understand that the paper methods that we came up with are just one way of describing that real life consistency of multiplication.

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And abacus is another example. I'm going to show it here with addition. So for years, paper wasn't readily available.

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And so people use devices such as the abacus to help them perform math problems.

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So 25 plus 13, I'm going to form 25 on here by moving two beads from the second row.

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Every bead here represents a set of 10. Every bead here represents a single value.

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So two sets of 10 would be 20 and then my five ones. So I formed 25. Now to add 13,

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I'm just going to move one 10 and three ones over. So I've moved one 10 over and three ones, and then

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I can count up what I've got. I've got 38 as my answer. Now here are different symbols used for division.

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So this is how we write division today, typically in elementary school. There's other ways that it has been written and just making your child aware of that can help them understand that a lot of math is just like a language system.

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After the Tower of Babel, there's more than one language. People spread out over the world. God gave them creativity.

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They came up with different ways to approach describing quantities and consistencies, and God gave them different languages.

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So it's important to help the child understand that so they don't think that this sign is anything special in and of itself.

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And then help them apply it practically. Show them why they're learning what they're learning. How much will

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I make in a week if I make this amount per hour? Well, that uses multiplication. The cost per year of a magazine, if it costs this amount per quarter, that uses multiplication.

41:38

If you're having a pizza party and everybody needs two slices and you got 20 guests, that's multiplication to figure how many slices you need to buy.

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You can play scenarios with toys. So like with my son, I would make up stories about like, all right, if I have, or this stuffed animal has three oranges and you need to get three more, how many is he going to have?

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And you can make it fun. But there's lots and lots of ways in everyday life that we use elementary math.

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If you're stuck, just start making a notebook, start writing it down. When you see it, make it a game to go on an exploration and see how many, how many different ways do

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I really use math throughout the day? You'll be surprised. And it can be something fun you do with your children as well as have everybody go on like a hunt for how many different ways are we going to find math today?

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And above all, as you're doing all this point back to God, he is the one who's faithful and consistent enough that we can come up with these step -by -step processes to perform addition and multiplication and division and rely on them to work because he's that consistent in governing creation.

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And we can thank him for giving us that ability to think his thoughts after him to explore this order that he's put around us.

42:51

All right, let's move up into geometry. So when people think about geometry, you probably think about things like this, right?

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Angles, lines, solving proofs related to all of them. Where is God in that?

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Well, these lines here actually represent how light reflects off of an object.

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God made it so light reflects at the same angle. It hits the object. And we can describe that with geometry.

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Geometry actually means earth measure. Geo is earth and metric is measure. So earth measure when you put them together.

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And it really is an incredible branch of math where we can measure the earth and describe the objects that are around us.

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And then as we do, we see God's wisdom and care in something like how light bounces off.

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He is the one who spoke light into existence, right? And so it should point our eyes to our creator.

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Now within geometry, the Greeks, as I mentioned, were very humanistic in the way they approached math.

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They viewed geometry as a source of truth. And yet the fascinating thing about it is geometry is what kind of shattered that whole worldview, so to speak.

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So for many years, nobody questioned Euclidean geometry. It was absolute fact. And then other geometries came out that had contradictory definitions.

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So in Euclidean geometry, which is the geometry that most students learn in high school, a line is defined as breathless length and just keeps going and going and going and going.

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But in Riemannian geometry, a line is defined as a great circle.

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Now a great circle is not breathless length, right? These are contradictory geometries.

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And yet both of them are very useful. Euclidean geometry helps us describe lots of different aspects of creation, but so does

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Riemannian. It works very well for spheres, while the earth is a sphere. So it helps us describe things on the earth, such as the equator.

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The equator is really a line or a great circle in Riemannian geometry. And so both of them are very useful, and yet both of them are contradictory.

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Now, if they're both self -existent truths, you got a problem, because how can they both be self -existent truths and contradict each other?

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But if you view each one as a tool to describe aspects of God's creation, then it doesn't, it's not a problem that you have different definitions for different tools.

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Both tools are useful in the areas in which they're useful. They describe that aspect and area of God's creation.

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And so this can be helpful to show students, and again, help them see we're not learning the source of truth in itself, we're learning a way to describe the truth that God put around us.

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And there are different branches and different tools for different areas. So there's just a lot you can do with geometry and seeing

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God's handiwork as we use it. So I have up here a honeycomb, and notice that a honeycomb has shapes, right?

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That shape is a hexagon. Well, it turns out if you look mathematically at the hexagon, it's an ideal shape for the bee to use to store its honey.

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It creates a very sturdy honeycomb and if you look at the area per parameter, so like the parameters, the distance around, so that's all the supplies that the bee has to put together.

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And a bee would want the least amount of supplies needed, right? And to store the most amount of honey would make it efficient for that bee.

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And that's what the hexagon does as opposed to like a triangle or a square. If you look at the ratio between the parameters and the area of these shapes that don't have gaps between them, you wouldn't want gaps either because that would be wasted space.

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You'll find that the hexagon is an ideal shape for the bee to use. Who gave the bee that wisdom?

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God did. But it's math that helps us really see that handiwork. And so as you're teaching geometry, you want to show again your child, hey, this is how we use math.

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Let them apply it. Let them go to the kitchen, so to speak, and get their hands dirty. You can look at history and worldviews, looking at the

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Greeks versus the scientific revolution is great during geometry.

47:15

In looking at algebra, a lot of people get lost in algebra because all of a sudden you've got

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A's and X's and Y's, and what in the world are letters doing in the math course?

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Well, let's take a look. So just as a simple example, those letters are really helping us describe consistency.

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So say you went to the store and you spent a certain amount of money. Say you started with $200 and you spent $150, you're going to have $50 left, right?

47:50

Well, algebra would say, let's write an equation that would hold true for everybody on this

47:56

Zoom call. So we're going to, instead of using actual values, we're going to just say we've got a starting amount, we're going to subtract our ending amount, and we'll get the amount that's spent, right?

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And rather than writing out all these words, let's use symbols to describe that.

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So I'm going to use X for my starting amount. I could have picked any letter, but I'll use

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X, Y for my ending amount, and Z for my amount spent. Now I have a relationship that would hold true for all of us if we were to head into a store with whatever amount of money we started with, and whatever amount of money we ended with.

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So algebra is trying to generalize about the relationships around us. Why are we able to generalize?

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Well, we're able to generalize because there are relationships that hold true consistently around us.

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So for example, the power of voltage and current flowing through an outlet, the power always equals the voltage times the current.

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That's the way God set it in place. And day after day after day is sustaining by the power of his word.

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And so we can describe that mathematically. We can say the power equals the voltage times the current, and rather than writing out all those words, we can just use the first use some letters to stand for what those values are.

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And then an electrician can check ahead of time before they install a new circuit to make sure it's not going to blow up your house.

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Aren't you glad? Again, algebra is a way of recording relationships. Cannon.

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You know, have you ever wondered how they would fire the cannon and make sure they hit the and not their men?

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Well, you can look at how far that cannonball is going to go or its range using algebra because God made a consistent world.

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Gravity operates in a consistent way and motion. And we can describe all of that algebraically and then plug in the values for a specific situation and be able to tell ahead of time how far that cannon is going to fire.

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Why can we do all that? Because of God's faithfulness. Think about how faithful God is and let that change you from the inside out.

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You know, Jesus, that same one who's holding all things together by the power of his word consistently enough that we can rely on electricity to be consistent and describe it algebraically is the same one who said that no one is able to pluck us out of his father's hand.

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He is going to protect those who are his. We can take comfort in that. He really is that powerful and able to keep what he said.

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Algebra builds on the principles of arithmetic. A lot of people get lost in algebra because they really didn't understand something earlier on in arithmetic, such as fractions.

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If you don't understand fractions early on, then all of a sudden you have fractions with letters, you're lost. Because all we're really doing is we're generalizing about what was learned back in arithmetic and the ways of writing are just conventions.

50:43

So here, writing an X and then a superscript two for an exponent to mean

50:50

X times X, that's just a convention. It's a language system. Again, there were many other ways people have written different aspects of math, including exponents throughout history.

51:02

This is just one language system to help us describe creation. Just to kind of show you that here is some ways that algebra has been done.

51:12

So for a long time, it was just rhetorical. Words were used instead of symbols. So you'd have three multiplied by the cube of the unknown number from which six multiplied by the square of the unknown number is subtracted is equal to the sum of five and the product of four and the unknown number.

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Aren't you glad you don't have algebra books like that today? That's a lot. And as people began really seeing the complexities of God's creation, they needed a simpler way.

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So syncopated algebra started to emerge as people used syncopated words or smaller words.

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So instead of writing cube, we might have CU and it makes it a little bit more concise, right?

51:48

Today, we use what's called symbolic algebra, where we're using symbols. Once you know this language, it's a whole lot easier to solve problems related to it than it is to go through and do it in words.

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It's really a language system and a tool to help us describe those consistencies we find around us.

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Oops, there we go. And again, it's pointing to God. We already looked at that one earlier.

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So I'm going to skip through that. Just wanted to briefly mention a couple of resources that I have.

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If any of you need more information on any of this, this is the timeline I mentioned. I went through and wrote,

52:29

I did a timeline looking at math history. This is a short guide on where's

52:35

God in math. This is for arithmetic, kind of taking it down concept by concept and giving teachers ideas of what, how each concept can be viewed biblically.

52:43

Some of the history of those different concepts right there at your fingertips. I did a junior high math curriculum where students are learning the history, learning the tools, learning how, what they're,

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I want everything they learn, I want them to see how it points to the Lord and how it really is a real life tool.

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And so all that's put together into the curriculum. There's a video course that can go with it optionally.

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I did video courses for algebra one and geometry. I wrote a curriculum and did an e -course for algebra two.

53:15

I'm working on consumer math right now. I have some other resources on my website as well.

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It's christianperspective .net. So feel free to check out any of those. I do a free math blog where I send out information as I'm able.

53:29

So all of that is there to help you because I know it can feel a little overwhelming, but it doesn't have to be.

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It can be an amazing discovery journey as you're teaching your child. It's math is really not a neutral thing.

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And the with which we approach it really does matter. And I just want to encourage you.

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I don't know how many of you on the call are teachers or parents that are trying to show your child math.

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And I get that math can feel a little intimidating, especially if you were not taught it as a tool, but God understands it and he makes an amazing teacher and you can seek him for his strength and his wisdom in showing that to your students or to your child.

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Psalm 1054 says, seek the Lord and his strength, seek his presence continually. And that's my prayer as a mom, that as I'm teaching my child,

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I will seek the Lord, not just seek getting through it for the day, but really seek his presence and seek him and seek showing my child him in what we're learning.

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And it would be my prayer for each one of you that as you go through your days, whatever that looks like for you right now, that you would seek the

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Lord first, even if it's in math, there is nothing in our life. That's neutral. There's no area in our life that God is not over and that we don't have this opportunity to really seek his presence.

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And so I hope that that excites you to do that. And, and God makes a wonderful teacher.

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You know, when my mom started homeschooling me, she was scared to death and it was English that scared her because she was taught to read the look, say method.

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And so when she came to a word she hadn't seen before, she did not know how to sound it out. And she's like, how in the world am I going to teach my child how to read when

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I don't even know how to read myself. And God gave her Isaiah 54, 13, which says all your sons should be taught by the

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Lord. Great. She'll be your children's piece. I might be mixing up versions there, but something along those lines.

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And I watched God teach me, um, you know, English became my strength. I, I was a writer and, but that was not because my mom, that was my mom's strength, but she stopped in English class.

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I remember one time we, we didn't, we couldn't figure out why I had gotten something wrong. And she said, let's just stop and pray.

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And so we did, we stopped and we prayed. And I understood when we opened her eyes, she was still clueless, probably still is to this day, but I watched

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God teach me what I needed to know. And so I would just encourage you that God makes a wonderful teacher and it's okay to let your students and children see you seeking him for that.

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I learned so much more watching my mom, bow her head and pray because she didn't know the answer than I would have had she known it forward and backward because in real life, we don't always know the answer, right?

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But if we know the one who does, and we know to run to him, that is priceless.

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And so if you're studying math and you're overwhelmed by it, seek him. He knows the answer.

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He can help you, but above all, see him in it. And in all that you are doing.

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And I want to end with a video. I went on ahead and went to a college campus and used math to share the gospel.

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And so I want to share that here just to kind of reiterate how really ultimately mass message is that we need to put our faith in Christ.

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How would you define math? I would define math as a logical subject that I had to take back in high school.

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I guess math is a way to try to quantify how the world works and what's happening around us.

57:12

Well, math is a universal language. Never thought about how to define it. I just knew it was.

57:19

Math is hard. Do you think it applies outside of a textbook? And if so, can you think of an example?

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As far as like the literal application of it, like adding groceries, like that total, doing percent off, like when you're shopping and stuff.

57:35

That's the only time I really ever think about it. Like if I'm trying to find out the probability of something, it's, you know, was this a good idea for me?

57:45

Is this something, you know, just in my daily life? When I think of math, I can't say math, but I love to count money.

57:51

That's what I always say. Yeah, sure. Definitely apply outside of textbook. Why is the universe that consistent that we could rely on addition to work and subtraction to work and multiplication to work?

58:04

I mean, we build a plane knowing that the law of gravity will work. Well, that's a mathematical law.

58:09

You know, they describe that mathematically. Why is it that gravity always works the same way? Why can we use math to describe creation at whatever level we do it and rely on it to work?

58:19

Right. I am not sure because I've never thought about it as deeply as you did.

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That's what modern science and everything is based on, is that things are observable and predictable and repeatable.

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So like, why do you think that is? I don't know. That's really interesting.

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I'm not sure, but I guess I'm glad it is. Why is it that it exists?

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I don't know. I mean, it just does.

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Why would one plus one consistently equal two? Why would gravity be the same if it just happened randomly?

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It doesn't make sense if we were just the result of random chance or we got here accidentally.

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But if you start from the Bible, you have an explanation for why those consistencies actually exist.

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If God, a consistent, faithful God, holds all things together, then we would expect for the universe to be consistent and predictable and that we could use math to describe it.

59:15

So I have another question for you. How good of a person do you think you are? I think I'm a pretty good person. Do you think you're a good person?

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That's really subjective, but I go about my days thinking yes. So do you think you're good enough to go to heaven when you die?

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I should hope so. Are you familiar with the Ten Commandments at all? Yes. Can you name a couple?

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That's I'll not commit adultery. Jesus said that if you even look at somebody with lust, you've committed adultery in your heart.

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Have you ever looked at someone with lust? Yes. We're all guilty. Have you ever stolen anything, even something small from a sibling?

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Yes. Okay. What do you call someone who steals? Thief. How about he now shall not lie?

59:58

Have you ever told a lie? Even a small little lie? Oh, yeah. Okay. What do you call someone who tells a lie? Liar.

01:00:03

Liar. Yes, I have told a lie. What do you call someone who tells a lie? A liar. Okay. Have you ever told a lie?

01:00:10

Well, I mean, everyone's told a lie. God judges you based on the Ten Commandments, which is his standard for holiness.

01:00:16

Do you think you'd be guilty or innocent? Yeah, I guess guilty. Imagine if someone murdered somebody you love, okay?

01:00:22

And they stood before a judge, and the judge said, well, you've tried to be a good person, even though you've murdered this other person, so I'll let you off the hook.

01:00:32

Would that be a good judge? No. God is a good judge. He can't just shut his eyes to the evil that we've done.

01:00:39

He did something, though, so that we would not have to go to hell. Do you know what he did? Yeah, he died on the cross.

01:00:46

He sent his son, Jesus, so that if we placed our trust and our confidence in him, and what he did on the cross, he would accept that as punishment for us.

01:00:53

We have to choose to trust him and turn from our sin in order to end up in heaven.

01:01:00

It's not just a matter of showing up one day, because if we show up there on ourselves, we will be judged by the law, and we will be found guilty.

01:01:08

Verse in Jeremiah that says, If I have not established my covenant with the fixed laws of heaven and earth, that would include the laws like addition and subtraction, then

01:01:15

I will reject the descendants of Jacob and David, my servant. In other words, God was saying, Look, I'm governing all these things so consistently and so reliably.

01:01:22

As a faithful God, I will do everything I say in my word, which is why it's really important that we come to him his way, because he will honor what he says in his word.

01:01:35

Well, that is what I had to share, so I will stop my screen here. Well, that was great.

01:01:42

I really enjoyed that. You said that your mom was not able to sound out a word.

01:01:48

What method did she use for reading? You said it. So she had done,

01:01:55

I mean, she knew how to sight read, but she had not been taught phonics. So she used victory drill book with me when

01:02:02

I was little. And so she got super excited as we were going through it, because she's like, Oh, this is that this always makes the sound.

01:02:08

This is so cool. And we kind of would race to figure out who could read the page faster.

01:02:14

And it was a joy because I got to learn alongside with her. That's cool, because when

01:02:21

I was in school, we had phonics. And my children are in their 30s. And my son initially struggled to learn to read.

01:02:30

So we bought this thing called hooked on phonics. And my son is an awesome reader now.

01:02:37

But now my grandkids, they are learning to read by sight and not by sounding out.

01:02:45

And that was to me weird. But that goes back a long time, right?

01:02:50

I guess it was something they tried back when she was young in the 60s and 70s.

01:02:56

I didn't realize they were doing it again. Yeah, they're doing it again. Okay, Terry. So we've got a lot of questions.

01:03:05

That was a really that video at the end was where most of us are familiar with Ray Comfort.

01:03:11

So we liked how you started with math and eased right into the Ray Comfort approach.

01:03:17

So that was cool. So earlier, you refer to abstract math.

01:03:23

What is abstract math? So abstract math is math that you don't see where it applies.

01:03:32

Like it's so if you're teaching math abstractly, you're just kind of learning the skills, like how to solve this, but you're not really applying it outside of the textbook.

01:03:43

So abstract is like disconnected from real life. Thank you. Makes sense. Steve has a question.

01:03:51

Are you familiar with Leonard Euler's equations and contributions to electrical engineering?

01:03:59

I have studied some of Euler. I'm not sure I would say I'm super familiar with it.

01:04:04

It was something I put some things on Euler in my timeline and stuff, but I wouldn't call myself an expert on it.

01:04:12

Okay. So just as a reminder, during this time, we're still recording.

01:04:20

So we're having everybody keep their cameras and microphones off. So our next question is, what is your favorite branch of math?

01:04:32

Personally, I love geometry, which is so funny, because when I first started writing about math and researching,

01:04:39

I had like this notebook and I left each area or each concept, like its own little section.

01:04:44

And I thought, oh, geometry, I only need a small section for it, because it's not going to apply very much at all. It's all these meaningless because that's how

01:04:51

I was taught it in high school. And I ended up meeting its own notebook for geometry and I explored it. I guess it was when

01:04:58

I saw the change in it so much that I loved it. I can relate to that because I've taught homeschoolers, geometry and also algebra too, and I love them both.

01:05:10

Okay. So the next question, which homeschool math curriculum do you like or recommend for elementary students?

01:05:20

It really depends on the student's level and learning style.

01:05:25

I feel like in the elementary school and the parents' teaching style, because a lot in elementary is up to the teacher to actually teach it as opposed to just the student read it in a book.

01:05:37

So it's going to be, you want to find something that has science and history and real life examples in it, because the more it has that, the easier it's going to be to teach from a biblical worldview.

01:05:48

But then within that, you want to find one that works for your style and your child's style.

01:05:55

So like math lessons for living education is the one that my publisher does for the elementary.

01:06:05

And it's good for more like a Charlotte Mason approach. You read a story and then you have simple things to work throughout the week.

01:06:12

So if your child would connect with that, then that would be, they do try to show the math in a story.

01:06:18

So that would be an easy way to adapt to teaching it biblically. There's also ones,

01:06:24

I'm trying to remember what the name of it is. Math, what's it called? Making math meaningful.

01:06:32

He tries really hard to connect it, show why or how each of those rules actually do apply.

01:06:42

There's quite a few different ones off the top of my head. I'm not thinking of all of the names just right.

01:06:49

But look for those things in it and then look at, okay, is the way this is structured one that works for me?

01:06:55

Because like making math meaningful, for example, gives you a script of exactly what to say every day to your child.

01:07:01

Some parents would love that. Some parents would hate that. Whereas the math lessons for living education is much more, we're just reading a story and then

01:07:08

I hand out worksheets. Some parents would love that. Some would hate that. Same with the children. Yeah, and I will say revealing arithmetic is designed to go with whatever one you pick.

01:07:18

It's arranged by concept. So if you're teaching multiplication, you just look there and it'll give you the biblical worldview and some bulleted out ideas to use with it.

01:07:26

So that again, as you're teaching elementary, you're doing a lot of the teaching so you can easily modify what you're using.

01:07:33

And so that will help you. Okay, next question.

01:07:39

Do you find mastery learning and so learn it until you know it to be more helpful for learning math versus spiral learning, which is introducing a concept, moving to a new concept and circling back to the previous concept?

01:07:57

Again, some of it depends on the student. I mean, I love mastering, but you can get super frustrated if you're stuck on something and they're just not getting that.

01:08:05

So you can move on. You kind of have to see what works for your child. I will say there's like a point if you're struggling later on, like say you get to algebra and the child's falling apart, they probably didn't get something earlier.

01:08:19

And so you have to rewind. So I would just encourage you, don't be afraid to rewind when you need to rewind.

01:08:25

And if you're really stuck on something, don't be afraid to try to work in a different way, but try not to work on something that builds on what you're struggling with, because then you're just going to struggle further and further.

01:08:36

That makes sense. Okay, this is kind of a long one. James is asking, just curious if you've read the book,

01:08:44

Animal Algorithms. He's pretty sure that's the name of it. It's about how animals appear to use math, including apparently spherical geometry.

01:08:54

He says appear because we can't apparently see what they're thinking. Also, bees adjust their hexagons to go around curves, sometimes shrinking the number of sides, et cetera.

01:09:06

And bees do incredible calculations like the traveling salesperson. So he's just curious to know if you've had a chance to study some of these examples of animals using math.

01:09:19

I have not studied that particular book. I have seen things like spiders and how amazingly they design their webs.

01:09:28

And there's things like the archerfish, and it adjusts the angle that it spits for to be able to hit the fly, which would require very advanced math calculations for us to do something like that.

01:09:40

So obviously God gave animals incredible wisdom to do what he designed them to do. And we see lots of examples of that.

01:09:47

Well, and even if you have pets like dogs, you know that they can understand basic math.

01:09:54

If you have two treats and you only give them one, they're still waiting for the other one. I will say they're not doing math in the same way we are, designing and learning.

01:10:06

But God gave them the ability to do what he designed them to do and wisdom he put in them.

01:10:14

Okay, Rob is asking, why do you think that the public schools fail to teach math in ways that students can grasp it?

01:10:22

Well, I think that our nation has rejected God as a whole, and we've ended up, that affects everything.

01:10:30

So like when I got to go down to the Department of Education, we lived near DC when I was writing my first book and looked at how math was taught back at our nation's foundation.

01:10:41

And it was taught in an incredibly practical way. You learned a concept and then you learned how to apply it.

01:10:47

So the geometry book of the time was called Geodesia. It was a surveying manual so that they could go survey land.

01:10:53

And they learned it, they applied it. They learned it, they applied it. That switched as our nation kind of switched world views.

01:10:59

And so I think a lot of that comes out of the world view. It's the natural consequence of it. Now people operate contradictory to the world view.

01:11:06

I'm not saying that no one with a non -biblical worldview applies math. That's absolutely not true. But I'm saying it's the natural, it's where you would naturally go.

01:11:15

If you view math as a source of truth and you don't have an explanation for why it works, you're going to, if you're consistent with that, you'll separate it out.

01:11:23

Yeah, that makes sense. What do you think of math as a useful fiction?

01:11:30

So James says, some see math this way, including those who see math as evidence for God.

01:11:38

As a useful fiction? I'm not familiar with that terminology. I'd have to research it more. Yeah, and then, oh, maybe that's, okay.

01:11:51

Yeah, I've not heard of that. I can't add any value to that. So, all right,

01:11:57

I think that's the last question and we're pretty much against the hour. So if you want to go ahead and remind everybody how they can find you and your resources that you have available, then please do that.

01:12:11

Sure, so it's at christianperspective .net and I have resources to go with every age level really and to help build that biblical worldview.

01:12:22

And I also do a free math blog. So it's christianperspective .net. I'm also on Facebook and YouTube.

01:12:28

You can find the links there at the website. Perfect, and we put that in the comments plus on Facebook, it is in the comments there as well.

01:12:37

So, and once again, we are Creation Fellowship C &T and you can find links to our upcoming speakers by visiting tinyurl .com.

01:12:49

You know what, I totally just spaced and forgot it, but you can go to our archives. I remember that one.

01:12:55

It's tinyurl .com forward slash CFS archives. And you can click on the list of our upcoming speakers as well.

01:13:03

We are going to be off the next couple of weeks but we'll be back on September 12th with JJ Gutierrez.

01:13:08

She's an author who likes to help people memorize the Bible. So her books are called

01:13:15

Know by Heart and we're looking forward to having her then. So with that, we're going to sign off our recording and live stream.