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Last Friday, visited 91快活林 Aquinas College, California, to deliver a lecture titled 淕od, Mathematics, and Beauty. 

A mathematician and professor of philosophy at Baylor University, Dr. Pruss holds a Ph.D. in both mathematics and philosophy. He is the author of six books, including Infinity, Causation, and Paradox and One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics. Dr. Pruss is also an accomplished rock climber and holds two Guinness World Records for the fastest speed in climbing a mile and for the greatest distance climbed in an hour. 

Dr. Pruss檚 lecture offered an argument for the probability of God檚 existence through the beauty of mathematics. He challenged the audience to consider why human beings have the ability to understand and appreciate mathematical beauty, how and where objective mathematical truths exist, and whether beautiful mathematics is also useful in explaining the natural world. Offering theism as a theory which satisfies these questions, Dr. Pruss spoke of the universe as a book written by an intelligent God in the language of mathematics. 

淔or a long, long time, as Galileo says, we really didn檛 have an idea of the language that the book of the world was written in, he observed. 淲e didn檛 realize that we should try to describe it in the language of mathematics to get the fundamental, at least physical reality of it. And then, suddenly, we did, and that made a scientific revolution in physics possible. 

In his argument, Dr. Pruss offered many examples from mathematicians such as Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton all familiar to 91快活林 Aquinas College students through the mathematics and natural science curricula and drew on arguments from the philosophy of St. Augustine and St. 91快活林 Aquinas. 淓legant mathematics is useful because God chose to create the world embodying it, he argued.

After the lecture, students and faculty attended a question-and-answer period with Dr. Pruss, where they conversed more deeply about the role of beauty in mathematics and its ability to reflect the physical world.

 

 

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