The Stem of Spirituality
“I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.”
- Albert Einstein
Today, I've stationed myself in my apartment in Cyberjaya, which also serves as my library, store-room and occasional home office. It is here, that I now begin my weekly ramble.
I read that there's been a general trend of declining interest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education in Malaysia. It led me to wonder as to why that would be the case, as we all live in a technology-driven world, and aren't the young addicted to their gadgets and the internet? If a high-tech lifestyle is considered so cool these days, why wouldn't more people be interested in making it their career?
When I think back of my secondary schooldays, my education really began when I first joined the science stream in form 4. I've always had an interest in science, but I hated maths ("Ilmu Hisab", as it was known then) during my primary school days, because it merely involved the memorisation of the multiplication tables and doing various calculations involving the prices of apples and oranges. Being good meant that you knew how to juggle numbers and make mental calculations fast. At least that was how it appeared to me then.
Mathematics is often considered difficult, and for many students, perhaps even the dullest subject in school. Things changed for me when I entered the science stream. I started learning about functions, quadratic equations, calculus, analytic geometry and linear algebra. Suddenly a whole new world opened up for me. When I saw how mathematics was applied in physics to describe motion and predict the trajectories of objects subjected to forces, I was completely enthralled. The world revealed its inner beauty to me: there were laws of nature which I could grasp with my puny mind. I caught a glimpse of God.
I think I've written about this somewhere before: it was science and mathematics that triggered my interest in spirituality. It was an 'awakening' of sorts. To me the path to know God was to understand nature. I understood what Einstein meant when he said that he believed in the God of Spinoza, which is a kind of pantheism, where God is the universe.
If God is the universe, what couldn't be more noble than studying the laws of nature, which reveals itself in the language of mathematics? That sense of spiritual awe was what drove my interest in science and maths, which ultimately led to a career in engineering, which I considered to be simply, applied science.
I've never understood why people would pit science against religion. If religion is the word of God, then ultimately it will pass the test of science because science is the most reliable method for the pursuit of truth. Religious people would say: no, faith is the basis of religion, not the scepticism of science. Well, if the claims of religion are really true, they should have faith that they will pass the scrutiny of science.
The scientific method is one which everything is subject to enquiry and you always proceed with the barest assumptions. In mathematics, you start with axioms, which in a way are self-evident articles of faith because you are assuming that they are true, as a starting point. And then you proceed to build new statements of truth, based on your axioms. These truths then become theorems. Theorems become convenient building blocks for building much larger structures of truths. This ultimate 'large structure' could be the proverbial God itself, which is Spinoza's God. If I were a theist, that's how I would prefer to see God.
Mathematicians are always aware that axioms can be reexamined. One of the axioms of Euclidean geometry states that given a line and a point outside it, there can only be 1 line that passes through the point which does not intersect the first line. This is the famous parallel postulate. The geometry defined by these Euclidean axioms work well on flat 2-D surfaces. But what if there can be more than 1 line that passes through this point, would it still lead to any useful results? That's how non-Eucliean geometry arose--the geometry of curved surfaces.
It was the geometry of curved surfaces developed by Bernhard Riemann that gave Einstein the mathematical formulation for his General Theory of Relativity. His theory ingeniously describes gravity simply as the manifestation of a curved space-time. That is an astounding application of a branch of seemingly abstract and 'useless' mathematics to a real physical phenomena which we all experience--the force of gravity.
I started this post by wondering why our young students would not be interested in STEM subjects. I'm not suggesting that somehow by vaguely associating God with maths and science, it would inspire more interest. But if one values beauty, awe and reverence, and feels a pull towards spirituality, do not dismiss the paths of maths and science. You will be surprised how, they too, in some surprisingly mysterious way, could bring you closer to God.
