Earlier this year, we got some chickens. We had talked about getting them but hadn’t super planned about when. I thought later in the year. But suddenly, Becca found them at the Co-Op. The kids got excited. I saw dollar signs. I often think about what kind of life I want my kids to grow up in, so I resolved that we would make it happen.
Down to the Co-Op, we went as a family. They had a terrible selection. So, we went down the street to Coastal and they had tons to pick from. Before long, we were headed home with a box full of chicks and some very excited children. We threw them in a Rubbermaid bin and watched them poop everywhere. Their little cheeps were quite cute. The kids just wanted to hold them. I just prayed they wouldn’t squish them like my mother killing her big brother’s little duck. No chickens were harmed in the making of this story.
Before long, the chicks started to grow. I had plans to make a chicken coop during spring break. I realized that these birds were not going to make it in the Rubbermaid for that long. I watched some videos, got some ideas, bought some hardware from the store, and away I went. This was in March, probably, so the rains were thick outside. I was stuck working in the garage. Things progressed fine, but I got to a point where my plans were not working out. Something had to change with my design, and it was not going to work out the way that I had hoped. I was stuck. It was not going to look right. I stood there. Thinking. For probably a solid 45 minutes. Going through all the possibilities in my mind, knowing that there was no right answer. I was just going to have to live with my unsymmetrical creation. I remember that it was getting late, and I just had to get to work. The chicks needed a new home. So, I acted.
Fast forward to today. I ended up having to redo the top of the coop anyway because I made it too tall. My conundrum in the earlier stages is now moot.
Now, what does any of this have to do with Mathematics? When I was considering how to make my coop, I stood there considering all the options. Eventually, I had to make a decision. I had to get practical. Mathematics, of all the subjects taught in good schools, is one of the most practical. Sadly, the practicality of the practice of this principle is what has led it to be labeled as merely pragmatic, even by those who wish it to be more. Ironically, those who wish it to be more miss that math is divine in its practicality because it is divinely practical.
People can easily see the usefulness of math in things like science, business, housekeeping, and shopping. They have mastered their arithmetic, abusing it with their meager means of accounting and architecture. And while I may sound negative towards these disciplines, that is not my intent at all. Tools are meant to be used and enjoyed by man. We are to love our toil here on earth. Mathematics is an extremely powerful tool that man has wielded for centuries. The thing that saddens me is that I see and hear so many people who struggle to use and understand the tool that they stop using it before they know its main purpose. If your mathematical chops only get you as far as not being audited by the IRS, you are missing out on all the beauty. You see the science without the art. While this is not the place to actually show the beauty, because formulas, I hope to share with you some about mathematics’s main purpose.
Within the classical model, we break things down into the grammar, logic, and rhetoric of each subject. The grammar in math is sadly the majority of math education through high school. The Arithmetic of elementary, the plug-and-play of Algebra, and the rote memory of proofs in Geometry are all the basic skills of mathematics. A good Geometry course will focus on the building of proofs to get into the logic stage, but I have yet to find a curriculum built for that beyond Euclid’s Elements. Most Geometry books have to be used and abused to make them useful for this skill. Even most Calculus books that I have read are only looking at the basic formulas without the reason “why” behind them. Calculus is the place where the rhetoric of math is shown if the book is written correctly. This is something that I greatly appreciate about Dr. Mitch Stokes from NSA. I listened to a lecture series from him on the book of Genesis that started my thinking in this way. His book Calculus for Everyone is the best math book that I have read because it is accessible to read and it gets to the point of mathematics. It looks at math wholistically, as a tool to be wielded and why. In the book, he shows through history that Calculus was developed in order to solve problems such as instantaneous change. He even includes a proof of good old Zeno’s Paradox at the end for fun.
This is all fun for a math nerd, but it makes it difficult for those who struggle. Most people rarely get to the point of math because of the educational hurdles that must be passed to see it in the world. In general, only seniors in high school will see this when they are taking Physics and Calculus together. It is really the first place that the purpose behind Mathematics will show up in our modern education. This is a shame really though understandable. There is a measure of groundwork that needs to be laid in order to understand what is going on behind the scenes. So, how can we help this?
One thing we could do is to completely tear down the mathematical education system and rebuild it with the subject in mind rather than passing a test. My views on this would be rather radical though, so I’m not going through that wormhole right now.
Something that we could do right now is to light the beacon. Throughout history, mathematic texts were written as books to be read and are decently accessible to people who are trying to understand. So go explore. Pick up books by Aristotle, Archimedes, Ptolemy, Galileo, and Newton. See how these men blend together their religion, philosophies, and mathematical discoveries. Through them, you’ll start to see some things. They didn’t have elaborate testing apparatuses to test their theories. They had their eyes. They saw relations and ratios between everything. They saw connections between sound and light, between color and harmony. They didn’t know it at the time but how these two things act while being fundamentally different is amazing. Later on, the similar, yet inverse relations between magnetism and gravity cause great thinkers to still scratch their heads when they try to place the universe into a neat and tidy equation.
All these things that have been discovered, rediscovered, proved, and disproved through history lead to one truth: that the world that we live in is ordered. It was designed. In Genesis, we see that God created everything in six days and that He called it good. He cares about it all. There is a universal language that He used to make this world. A language that man has been discovering since the time he no longer had to worry about his next meal. That language is mathematics. The only way to say that 2+2=4 is because someone made it that way. If things were left to random chance, we would have no basis for our certainty. What is “2” would have to be the first argument, let alone the rest of the equation. There is a beauty and a grounding of the world that can only be seen through the uniting lens of mathematics. For those who like music, why do harmonies sound good together? Or why only 8 notes in an octave? (It does depend on if you are using just or true tuning. The math is all there! It has just been forgotten because we don’t use it every day!) Who is the say that “C” is always the same in the repeat of the octave? To those who like biology, why does the golden ratio show up through all different animals and plants in their “basic” formation? Or how about how Brownian motion is used to move food into contact with enzymes that are chemically specialized to take apart sugar, proteins, and fats to be used to create life? The big three, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics, are all heavily related and should be taught in a unifying manner. The Pythagoreans had answers for all these things 2500 years ago.
We are working at our school to have the kind of mathematical education that will show this progression to all of our students. We want them to truly see the world that God has created. Mathematics is a very real lens, aspect, or paradigm of the world that God has put into place. Just as God is sovereign over all of creation. He cares about the physical and the spiritual. He made the physical world to be discoverable to us in true and meaningful ways. Mathematics is the language that it is all written in. There is a theology to math that is lost on many. I think it needs to be shown and discovered by all. Here is to those who want to go further up and further in to the world that God has created.