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It was upon Thom’s recommendation, that I spent the year in the
Mathematics Institute in Warwick, England. Using the Math House #2 s home base,
I made many trips to Oxford University and a few to Cambridge. It was in these
places that I learned first hand that belief in the Resurrection was not simply a
matter of socioeconomic class. I tried to schedule my trips to Oxford or Cambridge
to coincide with the weekend so I could hear the remarkably literate sermons at the
Universities college chapels. In these places, for hundreds of years, just because
one was a top-notch practitioner of mathematics or linguistics did not mean that the
Don did not have within him the full panoply of beliefs attendant to the Christian
God.
Maybe this easy combination of logic and Spirit derives from the character of
English mathematics. There are graduates with professorially enfranchising Masters
of Art Degrees in Mathematics from Cambridge University where the subject is
considered by many to be part of the culture of the humanities, closely akin to
philosophy and linguistics.. In the universities of United States, for example the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an academic degree of Ph.D. in
mathematics is seen by most faculty as an indication of the intellectual equipment
required for a life of scientific work in which disconfirmable experiments are the
ultimate criteria for knowledge. The field of pure mathematics (not ostensibly
relevant to the real world outside the mind) has itself evolved in this direction.
Recently, a physical scientist, a theoretical physicist, Edward Witten, was given the
mathematician’s ultimate award, the Field’s Medal. In American universities in
general, very few mathematics departments are in schools of the humanities. Most
are in the schools of science. This variation in bureaucratic, metaphysical, sorting
reflects our continuing struggle with the true nature of reality and the role of
mathematics in its knowing. The now emergent field of computer science removes
mathematics even further from intuition and Spirit. Difficult problems such as proofs
of theorems can be systematically examined for all possibilities quickly by trying
them out in what is now known as a computational proof. On the other hand,
pointing at this computation’s graphics, the theorem and proof, real mathematicians
can ask, is this really there?

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