After millennia of silence, God is now speaking to us

The survival of human life 10,000 years ago was as precarious as that of any animal - even more so, as one could be victim of inter-group conflict, which did not occur in any other animal species. Nevertheless, humans were on another level as they had language and tools and could make fire.

Humans were as frightened of thunder and lightning as the animals were, but the frightened were told by their elders that the cause had been identified as being supernatural and that charms must be worn and ceremonies of appeasement be engaged in.

Life was still precarious 2,300 years ago, but now there is ownership of domesticated animals and patches of land, and there are crafts and trade. These activities require measurement. Mathematics was a tool that you did not hold in your hands - but held in your head. About this time in Alexandria there was a school like no other school. The students in this school were absorbed in the deductive reasoning of geometry. They arrived at conclusions by a stepwise rigorous method from first principles.

The students were excited as they felt that they were tapping into some unvarying truth hidden in the normally unfathomable natural world - and that only a privileged few had exclusive access to. But which god was favouring them?

Now imagine you are an educated person in late 18th century in Christianity-dominated Europe. Great minds have described in precise mathematics the motion of moving objects on Earth and even the motion of planets. When Isaac Newton published his Principia Mathematica, an admirer gushed: "No closer to the gods can any mortal rise." But, in 1687, there was no hint of Newton actually being able to communicate with the Creator through his stupendous mathematics.

Then James Clerk Maxwell published the four equations, which described electromagnetism. These are the energy fields that allow us to see, hear, smell, taste and feel by touch - in other words, interact with the world at a higher level than what a tree does. One of his colleagues remarked: "I see God in these beautiful equations." So now, in 1873, the mind of the Creator is beginning to arrive in some men's perceptions in the form of mathematics.

Because of our ability to describe the physical world mathematically, you can take an object from your pocket and speak to your daughter in London as if she was next to you. A resurrected Maxwell would be shocked - but he would know that this was not magic because men, even in his day, were already learning to read the language of God.

Without mathematics there can be no technology beyond simple craft. No bottled Coca Cola, no music on disk, no antibiotics and no human genome sequencing by computer. Almost nothing! Mathematics has also allowed mankind to reach out. Once it enabled a ship to sail when out of sight of land. Now it enables a space probe to transmit images back from a place one hundred million kilometers from Earth. We have this ever-increasing power because, in the reading of the language of God, we are expanding our vocabulary.

The mathematician's God

Most mathematicians have rejected the notion of God as a supernatural being who loves us and wishes to be loved in return. Rather, the intelligence of God is viewed as being the actual equations the mathematician works with. Euclid's geometry is as spot-on today as it was in 300BC because mathematics is the one and only real grip we have on anything.

You could say that every mathematical equation discovered was always waiting in the mind of God to be discovered. One of the best examples is when Albert Einstein was solving a problem with the peculiar speed of light. The little equation E=mc² popped out of his mathematics to give birth to the nuclear age.

But you might also say that it was the physical law relating energy to matter through the speed of light which was in the mind of God - and that man simply put the symbols E=mc² down on paper to describe the relationship. However, a theorem in Euclid's geometry is not describing anything about changes in energy states - and yet it is describing a truth about the nature of reality.

Much mathematics describes relationships that are not physical phenomenon. But always, mathematics describes absolute truth. So, it's mathematics that seems to be basic 'stuff' of the mind of God. As the 20th century unfolded, mathematics began to describe the seemingly impossible.

For example:

In a cathode ray tube (your old TV set) there is an electron gun at the rear and a phosphorescent screen about 20 centremeters in front of that. An electron vanishes at the gun and a flash appears on the screen. In the world of our understanding, there must be a trajectory across the 20 centremeters to the screen. There is no such path. The electron simply disappears from the world of matter into what is called the wave equation.

This is somewhat analogous to you physically vanishing into your name written on a piece of paper where, in the writing itself, the potential you awaits being returned to the physical world. From the instant of vanishing at the gun, the electron is held entirely in an equation. Its arrival back into the physical world from the mind of God is recorded as a flash on the screen.

Why you don't see the mind of God in mathematics

Notice how a three-year old delights in counting steps as she descends them. Notice how the five- year old wants to know: How wide is it? How heavy is it? How high is it? How old is it? How many are there?

Quantification appeals to the very young, as it seems to give them a better conceptual grip on the world as it unfolds for them. The concept of number becomes our first abstract thought.

However, once at school, mathematics is not the game of exploration and discovery of the mind of God as it should be - but a job to be done. Our natural potential to put a philosophical quality to mathematics is squashed in the young minds parents are forced by law to hand over to 'the system.'

Long after I had escaped from school, and with the conviction that I was a maths dummy, I read the book Mathematics for the Million. This book was not written for students preparing to be examined. It was written for those ready to have a new window into the world opened for them.

The author, Lancelot Hogben, was one of his time's greatest biologists. He was imprisoned as a conscientious objector in the First World War. So, it comes as no surprise that he was the type of compassionate person who was thinking of the victims of formal schooling when he wrote the book.

I realised from my reading of this book that a 16 year-old leaving school, while knowing little of mathematical method, should still have an appreciation of the unique absolute truth of mathematics and its almost mystical existence deep in the motion of objects and in the design of man's technology.

At the age of 30, I decided that I need not go to my grave as a maths dummy - and I went on to gain a degree in pure mathematics. The dog-eared 1943 edition of Mathematics for the Million is there in front of me as I write this.

If you cannot accept formal religion or the delusionary world of New Age, but still feel that 'there is something out there,' then the more of a mathematician you become, the more you will know what that something is.