Linking to God - Mathematically

The Templeton Foundation is an organization dedicated to religious research and to the hope of discovering a link between religion and science. Since 1973, the Templeton Foundation has given a prize for "Progress toward Research of Discoveries about Spiritual Realities."

The title of the prize should tell you what this is really all about. Interesting, too, is the fact that the Templeton Foundation adjusts its prize money annually so that is exceeds that of the Nobel Prize.

This year's prize of 820,000 pounds went to a Polish mathematician and "metaphysician" by name of Michael Heller. Heller, 72 years old, is also a priest, and was a good friend of the late Pope John Paul II.

It is claimed by the Templeton Foundation that Professor Heller has shows "how maths can offer circumstantial evidence of God's existence."

Well, sorry, but circumstantial evidence ain't gonna cut it. Evidence that is circumstantial rests on the bias of the believer. Circumstantial evidence of God's existence is no evidence whatsoever.

You can get a flavor of who Heller really is and what he is about in the comments made by the man who nominated him for the prize, Karol Musiol, Rector of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. Musiol claims that Heller has "brought to science a sense of transcendent mystery and to religion a view of the universe through the broadly open eyes of science."

But science is not concerned with "transcendent mystery;" that belong to the sphere of religion. So, to claim that he's brought transcendent mystery to science is merely to say he's done nothing whatsoever.

Musiol went on to proclaim that Heller "has introduced a significant notion of theology of science. He has succeeded in showing that religion isolating itself from scientific insights is lame, and science failing to acknowledge other ways of understanding is blind."

Heller, who is a professor in the philosophy department of the Pontifical Academy of Theology, made a statement which is not only old hat but absolutely redundant. He tried to relate the cause of the universe to the cause of mathematical laws. "By doing so we are back in the great blueprint of God's thinking about the universe, the question on ultimate causality: why is there something rather than nothing?"

That's a theologian speaking, not a scientist. He is operating not in a scientific mode, but a theological mode.

Again, from Heller: "Science is but a collective effort of the human mind to read the mind of God from question marks out of which we and the world around us seem to be made."

I don't think so!

And again: "So long as the Universe had a beginning, we can suppose it had a creator."

No, we can't! And then you'd have to suppose a creator of the creator, etc., ad infinitum.

Finally, although his work is obtuse and difficult for a non-mathematician, it is summed up this way: Heller's theories "do not prove the existence of God, they may provide circumstantial evidence that He exists."

In other words, they prove nothing and this Templeton Award is much ado about nothing.