>>13853041This is a philosophy discussion about the nature of knowledge, so it's probably more appropriate for /his/.
Mathematics on its own can't prove anything about the physical world (such as the existence of a god) because it's abstraction. It can however be used as a tool in support of physical studies. Physics is mostly an exercise in building increasing elaborate abstractions to explain and model observed phenomena, sometimes with the goal of making usefully accurate predictions based on those models/explanations. The simplest example of this would be Newtonian mechanics - they don't tell us anything about how the universe works in a fundamental way because they're just heuristics formed from repeated observation, and while they're probably sufficient for working out the optimal firing angle of an artillery piece, when you move on to other questions eventually you get to a point where those heuristics break down and no longer reflect things as-they-are (e.g. modeling things moving very near to the speed of light) so you have to move away from classical mechanics and use (or sometimes even create) other heuristics to try to model what's happening. Which is a very long way of saying that short of direct observation, there's nothing physics can do to prove the existence of God, because short of direct observation physics can't prove anything, it can just make estimates based on current accumulated knowledge and (hopefully accurate) heuristics.
That said, I think the very act of worrying about the existence of God is misuse of time, and to a certain extent blasphemous. Having certainty about the existence of God undermines the value of faith. The moment a divine reward/punishment system is certain, genuine love for God becomes muddled with instinctual self-preservation.
That said, I don't believe in God myself. But I'll still put a horseshoe above my door.
