Opinion | Math Is the Answer to More Than One Question
There is also the observation by the Canadian mathematician Robert Langlands that mathematics is not complete, and because of its nature may never be. Mathematics, which attempts to define infinity, may itself be infinite.
For theologians in antiquity, infinity was a property of God. Being finite, humans were believed to be incapable of conceiving of infinity on their own. God gave us the ability, they thought, as a means of understanding his nature. Theologians were even a little touchy about his sole possession of it. In “Leaders of the Reformation,” published in London in 1859, John Tulloch quotes Martin Luther, sounding a little piqued in a dispute at a conference in 1529, saying: “I will have nothing to do with your mathematics! God is above mathematics!”
Toward the end of the 19th century, the mathematician Georg Cantor, the creator of set theory, discovered that infinity is not a static description. Some infinities, he said, are larger than others. For each infinity there is a larger one, an infinity to which something has been added. There are in fact a multitude of infinities, and infinities themselves can be added to one another.
Eventually, one arrives at the infinity that contains all other infinities. What surpasses all, Cantor wrote to a friend, was “the Absolute, incomprehensible to the human understanding. This is the Actus Purissimus, which by many is called God.”
When I was a small child, I did not think about God so much as I felt him or her or them, however you care to frame it. Not infrequently, and especially when I was in the woods, I had a sense of there being an accompanying presence, of there being, that is, something immaterial behind everything. I know now but I didn’t then that this feeling is sufficiently common that it has a name: immanence. I never talked about it with anyone; I simply assumed that everyone felt the way that I did.
