Blogtrek

Blogtrek

2003/05/05

Is God a Definite Integral?

I received the book What Number is God? by Rev. Sara Voss, a UU minister and former mathematics professor in the mail from Amazon.com, and read through parts of it. I have not found which number is God, but I did find out why she thinks of God as a definite integral. It's an interesting analogy. First, a brief explanation (with no symbols) of the definite integral. Go to the site

http://fym.la.asu.edu/~fym/mat210_web/lessons/Ch5/5_4/5_4ol.htm

Ignore the symbols and equations on the page, and look at the diagrams. They show a curve, and the question is how to find the area under the curve. You could break the interval down into subintervals, and then construct rectangles to the curve from the intervals. To find the area, add the areas of all these rectangles. That is not the real area, but only an approximation. If you change the intervals or the method of constructing the rectangles, you are going to get a different approximation. The more intervals you take, the closer you get to the curve so what if you keep taking more and more intervals, going indefinitely more and more intervals? You approach the exact area under the curve. This exact area is called the definite integral of the curve. And there are many ways of breaking down the interval to approximate the definite integral.

Rev. Voss sees religion as the same type of phenomenon. There are many ways of approximate God, and we call these religions. Think of each way of breaking the line into intervals and constructing the rectangles as a religion. Each religion has its own way of approximating the area under the curve, which is God. Each religion approximates the Ultimate Truth in its own way, and there are many different ways of dividing the interval to get to the true area under the curve, the Ultimate Truth. In this view, contradictory religions such as Christianity and Islam are merely ways of dividing the interval in ways that don't mesh with each other. One can improve on these methods by subdividing further; for example, one could go from Christ as God to everyone as God - with a little bit of divinity in each of us. But you still would not be at the ultimate curve, the Ultimate Area. There would always be some parts that don't match. This way of thinking about contradictory religions had not occurred to me before. Eventually in approaching the Ultimate, the contradictions fall away and consistency results.

Anyway, this is the way Rev. Sarah Voss thinks of the definite integral as like God. There is one big difference, in my opinion. The Fourth Principle of my religion, Unitarian Universalism, says that we will never be able to get at The Ultimate. But in integral calculus there is a short cut, an end run, if you will, to get at the ultimate area via another concept: the antiderivative, and this is summed up in the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus: the derivative of a definite integral of a function is the original function. So is there a Fundamental Theorem of Religion? Such, I would suppose, would be The Answer, so I don't think it exists. I also find the set of all transfinite ordinal numbers a better model of God than the definite integral. But I still think the concept of God as definite integral as interesting and illuminating, and the book, in my view, is a good read.

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