Driving to work this morning I was dividing my listening time between NPR and a local news station. A commercial break came on the local station, so it was back to NPR—and a story about why packing tape, old wallpaper, and that annoying seal on the edge of a new CD case can be so frustrating.

 It turns out it’s all explained by this formula: “Sin theta equals the square root of B tau over 2 eta gamma.” MIT Professor Pedro Reis says so; hence, it must be true.

Which got me thinking about the nature of the universe—specifically, why it is that the universe is mathematical. Really, why is that? Why could this MIT guy come up with that formula to explain tearing tape? Or, to take another example, why could Sir Isaac Newton accurately describe the gravitational force between two objects by the formula:

Fg=Gm_Am_B
            r²

Understanding the formula is not the point. What I am curious about is why physicists agree that these formulae are accurate descriptions of stuff that actually happens. Why is it that math underlies the universe?

 My son, Joel, is an architect. When he works on a project, he often collaborates with engineers to verify that stresses and loads fall within established structural guidelines. The engineers figure this out by means of mathematics. As a result, when the design is completed, architect and client are able to have a high degree of confidence that the building will be safe.

 So math underlies an architect’s work. Is that what’s going on with the universe? Does the mathematical nature of the universe imply the existence of a Master Architect? I don’t mean to suggest that God sat at a drawing board or computer in some megamillennial past, painstakingly crunching numbers to figure out the details of the universe before He actually created it. If He is infinite, omniscient, and omnipotent, He doesn’t have to figure stuff out. It simply is because it has been generated in His mind. It is left to others to figure it out. Newton figured out his laws by studying the original—the universe itself.

Newton, Pasteur, Linnaeus, Faraday, Pascal, Kelvin, Maxwell, Kepler, and other eminent scientists of an earlier era believed that, as they worked out their theories, they were thinking God’s thoughts after Him. It is only relatively recently that many scientists have decided belief gets in the way of their work.

 But if a person assumes there is no Designer, then what was it that Newton was figuring out as he considered gravity, the laws of motion, and other basic building blocks of physical science? If we live in a universe that is just a come-by-chance affair, why do all those mathematical formulae make sense? Why is math apparently at the foundation of everything? Where does that come from? Tough question. Or perhaps it makes more sense to go with what appears to me to be the obvious answer.

I do wish, though, that the Designer had worked things out a little better when it came to the matter of tape and wallpaper. Or maybe it’s just that the 3M scientists need to work harder on their product development.

B.W.