Unfortunately, because Math/Maths is not a existing topic, I’ve chosen History-of-Science.
My wife has been amusing herself watching Prime Video’s Ancient Aliens streaming TV series. The series plays in front of me and my wife watches while I am either on my computer or asleep. As a consequence, when I don’t have my own headphones on, I can hear what she is watching and–as a rule–am able to tune out.
Ergo, I happened to have my headphones off and overheard a portion of the show which briefly covered the history of Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar FRS (22 December 1887 – 26 April 1920) an Indian mathematician who lived during the British Indian Empire.
The TV series purpose was to point out that Ramanujan believed that a Hindu deity gave him “his” mathematical equations. Stunned, I researched the claim and here’s a little of what I found out about Ramanujan.
Ramanujan told several people, including his wife Janaki and colleagues, that:
He received mathematical formulas in dreams,
The goddess Namagiri “wrote” equations on his tongue, or
She appeared to him and revealed results that he later verified.
These statements are well-documented in:
Janaki Ammal’s interviews
G. H. Hardy’s reflections (though Hardy emphasized Ramanujan’s intuition rather than literal divine revelation)
S. R. Ranganathan (Ramanujan’s biographer)
Robert Kanigel’s biography The Man Who Knew Infinity, which relied on primary accounts from contemporaries.
Aliens or Angel’s? Dancing Lights were seen on July 14, 2001 in Carteret NJ weeks before the WTC Event. We’re they UFO’s or Angels? Moses saw a Burning Bush! This is the Everlasting Question of Angels or Aliens of Intelligent beings.
Despite having almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, including solutions to mathematical problems then considered unsolvable.
This is of course very much the exception among people that have made contributions to the sciences. He was also a savant in ability to do mental calculations. The British mathematician G.H. Hardy brought him to England in 1914 to collaborate, but he likely wasn’t prepared physically or emotionally for life in England, and he became ill, and sadly died in 1920 after returning to India, at 32.
If you are interested, you might try watching the 2015 film “The Man Who Knew Infinity”.
I guess, if we tried to fathom where human thought or creativity comes from it would boil down to Spiritual guidance or Natural processes. Now where have we chewed that one before.
But not in such a way that religion fills the gaps. Not without changing the very meaning of “explanation” itself. But it is certainly all about doing something which science cannot do. Science is objective observation, but life requires subjective participation. Religion addresses the latter and in that way it fills a gap, not a gap in explanation but a gap in dealing with the necessities of life.
That is not a bad characterization if you want to focus on bad religion. Like many things, like fire and drugs, religion is dangerous. And when I see religion doing what you point out, that looks to me like religion misused for something unhelpful. But this goes overboard when it equates meaning and choice with enchantment. That is an example of how philosophy can be just as dangerous and destructive of life as religion.
Nope. Looking to religion is looking to enchantment. Any religion will do. It’s only bad where it promotes social injustice, as Christianity does. By emphasizing everything else but. An opportunity cost.
Perhaps I exaggerate a little because as a scientist, I see science as something good and this magification of reality does look to me like a good description of when religion it is used to prop up an opposition to science.
