The Mysteries of Math with Kate Loop-cannon

Introducing Creation Fellowship and the Ministry of Christian Perspective

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. 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.

We met for 10 years at the Creation and Earth History Museum in Santee, California. Then, and online, our goal is to equip believers to defend their faith. You can find over four years worth of our Virtually There archives by visiting tinyurl .com forward slash cfsarchives.

C for Creation, F for Fellowship, S for Santee, and the word archives. Christian Perspective is the ministry of Adam and Kate Hannon in which they share encouragement and resources from a biblical worldview.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

And that really all of math is shouting out that God is faithful and that we can trust him. And I was blown away. I was like, okay, how did I miss this all those years growing up? And all of a sudden now 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. And so the Lord ended up calling me to start writing materials and speaking on math from a biblical worldview. 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 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.

And so you might find yourself liking it more than you thought at first. So let's just start with where is God in math? Because when most of us think of math, we think of numbers and symbols on a piece of paper, right?

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

So we know that God created all things, right? 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.

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 God's praises or is it just the result of random chance?

Your worldview affects your view of that flower. 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. 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. 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?

There's a real life consistency and order in creation. And that's why math actually works. You would not bother to learn math or teach your children math if it didn't actually apply outside of a textbook, right?

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

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. 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. These are different ways of representing a single quantity or what we would say one today. 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. There are also different methods for working with those quantities and consistencies.

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

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

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

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. Math's message is really that God is faithful.

Jeremiah 33, 25 through 26 says, thus says the 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.

Then I will reject the offspring of Jacob and David, my servant, and will not choose one of his offspring to rule over the offspring of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In other words, God is saying, look around you, you can tell I'm a covenant-keeping God.

I'm keeping these consistencies of creation together. And I'm going to be just as faithful to my covenant with you. He is a covenant-keeping 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.

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

And if God created and sustains math, then math isn't disconnected from science, not disconnected from creation. We tend to think of as like these separate subjects, but really they go together. And as we use math to explore creation, we see 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. 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.

And it turns out that that precise ratio enables the most number of seeds to fit in a sunflower head. 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. He's wise and caring. He's infinite. You know, infinite numbers are pretty hard to get our mind around, right? And yet they exist because God is an infinite God and he has created a universe that we can't reach the end to.

He's beyond our understanding. You know, some of upper level math can make your head hurt, right? 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 God spoke into existence and what he is sustaining day after day after day.

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.

He is powerful. He's unchanging. You know, aren't you glad math operates consistently? If it didn't, you know, we record the law of gravity mathematically. We build airplanes based on that knowledge. 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.

All of modern technology is based on the fact that math works consistently. Why does math work consistently? It works consistently because God consistently holds all things together and he is unchanging.

We can trust him. 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 to, right?

Because God is still there and he's still in charge. He's orderly, precise, just, and more. As we look at math, it's a part of God's creation. It's pointing us to our creator. We have this opportunity to behold God in math.

In second Corinthians 318, it says, but we all with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror, the glory of the Lord are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the spirit.

So if we want to be transformed into God's image, we want to live how 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 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, it changes us. It humbles us. It takes away our pride. It takes away our fears. It changes us from the inside out.

And so we have this opportunity and Larry Zimmerman puts it this way. 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.

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. 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. Math is a part of what we use to do that and to, to rule over creation. We see an example of that same process right there in the garden as well, with Adam naming the animals, you know, God brought the animals, his creation to Adam and Adam assigned a name to them.

In math, we are looking at the order and the consistencies that are around us and we're assigning names and symbols to describe them. It's the same naming process. It's part of this exercising of dominion.

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.

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

Notice it does not say do everything except math in the name of the Lord Jesus, right? It says do everything that includes math. And so within math, we have this opportunity to praise God, to depend on him, to grow in him.

Walter W. Sawyer says, mathematics is like a chest of tools. And I really like that imagery because tools come in different shapes and different sizes, right? 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.

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

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. 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. And then there's other tools like calculus that take more time to learn. And yet they're very powerful tools as well. And they do important things in helping us describe God's creation.

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.

Math as a Tool for Describing God's Creation

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

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

Right. And then the question is, well, what is, and I want you to put yourself in a third grader's shoes for a minute. 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? Well, I know my conclusion as a child was just that math was pretty amazing. I mean, I would ask my mom why it worked and her answer was just, it does go do it. And so I was left being odd at math.

And I want you to think like, what worldview is that really? 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.

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. 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. 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.

And so how did that, 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.

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 Christ at a young age, but I went through a period of questioning as a teenager. And one of my big hurdles was like, 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. And so I need to, and I can trust mathematicians and some people are saying something different that there's not a 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 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 God created our minds as created creation and gave us that ability to explore it and record it. And unless there's a God who's consistent holding all things together, why would we expect to see these consistencies everywhere?

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 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. And it's because they're really not these separate entities. Math is the tool that scientists use to explore God's creation. And there is a philosophy behind the facts.

It's not neutral. We have to glory for math somewhere. I mean, it is amazing how math describes things like gravity and, and creation around us. And that is going to leave us odd at something, either at math, at man or at our great creator.

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

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.

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

Mathematicians are architects of complex systems. Who's he giving that glory to? He's giving it to man. Here's a quote from a high school math course. The property describes the way something is. We can't change properties.

We are stuck with properties because they are what they are. Where's the glory going there? A property where you're left thinking about properties as something wonderful, right? I'm going to reword this so that you can see the glory instead of going to properties, going to God.

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

Do you see how a student would leave with a totally different perspective just based on that little reword? One, they're left viewing properties themselves as some sort of self-existent truth. And the other they're left viewing our God as the source of all truth.

And it's a huge, huge difference. Math is not a neutral zone. You know, we have an enemy who wants to get us to trust ourselves and not God. And he does not take a break when math class comes up. You know, 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.

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. 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. And it can, 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, right?

And our heart affects everything. And when we approach math, we're either approaching it with a heart that's dependent on God, that it recognizes God created this, math is dependent on God, or an independent heart.

God did not create math. Math is not dependent on God. And which heart we have is going to affect how we see every aspect of math. And we'll explore that more in a few minutes here. If we, I'll give you a big picture overview, and then we're going to break it apart for some specific concepts.

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

We're going to want to learn how it really does describe God's creation, right? And we see that through history. 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, because they were able to use math to explore creation and view it as that meaningful tool.

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

So the Greek philosophers are an example of that. They just saw math as truth in itself. So they didn't really focus on trying to use math to help the common man. They were more focused on just learning more intellectual knowledge because they were viewing math as this pursuit of truth.

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

Some of the most abstruse concepts of mathematics have an uncanny way of becoming essential tools in physics. Many physicists have been so impressed by the usefulness of mathematics that they have attributed to it almost mystical power.

So here's a man who's like baffled. Why does math actually work in real life? Why are we able to use what we come up with on paper in real life? And they don't have an explanation. 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. The vast majority of working scientists, myself included, find comfort in the words of the French mathematician.

I'm going to mess up his name. I'm not really good with French, but you see it up there on the screen. In my opinion, a mathematician, insofar as he is a mathematician, need not preoccupy himself with philosophy.

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. 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 Christian, we don't have to. We have an explanation for why we're able to use math. Norman Campbell, a British physicist and philosopher, said, why do they predict?

He was talking about numbers. We return once again to the questions which we cannot avoid. The final answer that I must give is that I do not know, that nobody knows, and that probably nobody ever will know.

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

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.

I know there's a lot of big words in there, but basically what he's saying is, it doesn't make sense. There's this miracle of why what we discover on paper, because a lot of math concepts were just discovered by figuring things out intellectually, and then it ends up applying in creation.

He doesn't have an explanation for it. He calls it miraculous. Biblically, the explanation is the same God created our minds, has created creation, and he gave us the ability to, as Johannes Kepler said, think his thoughts after him.

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

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.

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

They're in the midst of where they were explaining their great discoveries. You would read about their discovery. 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 God's praises. So like Johannes Kepler crying out with the Royal Psalm, as great as our Lord and great is his virtue and of his wisdom, there is no number. So like they saw and their worldviews were faulty.

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 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.

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, 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.

And so there is a current movement to move back to being more practical with math. Those are some quotes on that, but just a word of caution with that. Just being practical is not being biblical. Just because you wear a police uniform doesn't make you a policeman, right?

You could wear one and still not be a policeman. 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 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 God's creation. And just before we go on from there, one more thought about the scientific revolution.

For years, the church was blamed for teaching that the sun circled the earth, right? But really, that teaching came from the Greek mathematicians, and they had mathematically proven it. And their proof was solid.

It just started with a faulty assumption, and nobody questioned it because of the view that math was the source of truth. It wasn't until people started returning back to the Bible and returning to seeing math as a tool to describe God's creation that they were able to question the Greek teaching and were able to say, oh no, it doesn't tie with what we actually see.

So again, just to encourage you, that biblical heart really does make sense. So how can math be taught biblically then? So within math, there is like this bomb of naturalistic and humanistic thinking.

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 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, does it fix the bomb to add a Bible verse? No, it does not. You would need to diffuse that bomb. So within math, we want to totally change our approach. We want to diffuse the bomb and we want to show the truth.

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

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

If you did, they would never really learn to drive. It's the same way with math. It's one thing to just say, Hey, God's in math. Now go learn it. That's not really showing. We want to really show students how every concept they're learning truly is a way of describing his creation that does point us to the Lord, because that's letting them in the kitchen, getting their hands dirty.

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

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

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

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. 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. 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.

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, 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?

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

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

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

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? 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.