It’s a rare thing to be able to say that an online conversation bears watching multiple times, but I will say that about the latest Uncommon Knowledge episode with host Peter Robinson, of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, interviewing Stephen Meyer, David Berlinski, and a new friend, Princeton mathematician Sergiu Klainerman. The discussion takes place against a stunning Alpine background, which is appropriate since the mysterious beauty of mathematics, as well as the mystery of its very existence, is a theme.
In a meeting with Meyer, Klainerman took the philosopher of science aside and offered an addendum of sorts to Dr. Meyer’s argument for intelligent design in Return of the God Hypothesis. Whereas Meyer says in the book that three recent scientific discoveries or developments (the Big Bang, cosmic fine-tuning, the biological information instantiated in DNA) point to the existence of an immaterial realm and an intelligent agent behind the universe, Dr. Klainerman said the thesis is incomplete as it leaves out a fourth development, though not a new one: the discovery of the mathematical structure underlying the universe.
Robinson aptly summarizes: Plato in The Republic argued that such ideas as we discover in mathematics must exist outside our material reality, in an unnamed place beyond time and space. Later, Aquinas countered that ideas exist only in minds, which in this case must be the mind of God, a proposition with which Robinson and Meyer agree. Says Berlinski, “Maybe.” Says Klainerman, “Sure, why not?”
I’m vastly oversimplifying a fascinating and very entertaining conversation. It’s a must watch. And for more on Platonic intelligent design, see my recent book, Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome.