Refuting The Mathematics Applicability Argument For God

If one sees through the shallow stupidity of many contemporary and historical arguments for God's existence, sometimes desperate theists, instead of demonstrating the logical necessity of an uncaused cause given that contingent things exist, resort to conjuring up the most asinine arguments in order to persuade.  One such argument is the mathematics applicability argument for God, which claims that either the best explanation for or the reason why mathematical truths apply to the physical world is the existence of God.  Unsurprisingly, apologist William Lane Craig regards this argument as sound, when it is not!  He continues to appeal to fallacious nonsense in order to attract other people to his worldview.

Mathematical truths are nothing but numeric manifestations of logic, and logic itself is omnipresent and inviolable, existing by necessity without dependence on anything else--not on human consciousness, matter, or God.  God could cease to exist, and all of creation would cease to exist with him.  But logic is uncreated because it is a necessary existent: it cannot not exist.  The laws of logic, from the most basic axioms ("truth exists," "a thing is what it is," "contradictions are impossible") to the laws of deductive reasoning, exist because they cannot fail to do so.  The only way for them to be false is if they are true.

Thus, mathematics has to govern the physical world because contradictions are not possible.  One rock is one rock.  Two rocks is two rocks.  Three rocks is three rocks, and so on.  No alternatives are even possible, whether or not God exists!  Mathematics, being numeric logic, governs all things because logic governs all things.  There only needs to be an uncaused cause because there are created things and because infinite regress, self-creation, and beginning to exist without a cause are logically impossible.  Even here, it is logic, not God, that is supremely necessary.

As I previously clarified, God himself does not have to exist.  The uncaused cause could vanish from existence at any time, rendering all things contingent upon it nonexistent as well.  There is no such thing as a "greatest conceivable being" that must exist in the absence of created things (the ontological argument, which claims the opposite and which I hope to eventually post about, is an asinine argument full of assumptions and non sequiturs).  And the existence of God has nothing to do with the fact that logic and its subcategory of mathematics cannot not govern matter.

As with a multitude of other arguments for God's existence, like the design [1], transcendental[ [2], desire [3], and consciousness [4] arguments, the mathematics applicability argument fails spectacularly due to its many logical errors.  I'm quite glad that the defensibility of Christianity does not depend upon the fallacies of William Lane Craig and his evangelical apologist cohorts.  If someone honestly thinks that the relationship between mathematical truths and the external world has anything to do with God's existence, either metaphysically or epistemologically, they are either desperate to persuade others that God exists or their worldviews are based in a misunderstanding of the laws of logic.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/11/why-design-argument-fails.html

[2].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/12/refuting-transcendental-argument-for-god.html

[3].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/02/refuting-desire-argument-for-god.html

[4].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/05/refuting-consciousness-argument-for-god.html