The Light of Humankind
Haydn’s The Creation begins with a dramatic instrumental rendition of chaos, followed by a soloist reading from the beginning of the book of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the Heaven, and the earth; and the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” The chorus stands, backed by strings: “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” The orchestra falls silent, and the chorus sings, alone except for quiet instrumental echoes between the phrases: “And God said: Let there be light.”
“And there was Light.”
The orchestra goes bananas.
Haydn understood that God’s speech, in and of itself, is not the climax of the narrative. Nobody is impressive just because of the commands they make. I can say “Let there be light.” What is impressive is the result: that God said that there should be light and light there was. Haydn’s God says that the universe ought to be some way, and it immediately is that way, with no fuss or difficulty. That is omnipotence. That is impressive.
As a mathematician, I often characterize my work as shining light into formerly dark places. As a computational mathematician, I can take this even more literally than most. At my command, sparks light up within my laptop, or within a supercomputer. Status LEDs blink, and each of the two million pixels on my screen beams its choice of sixteen million colors directly into my eyes. I screenshot what I see and embed it into a presentation, thousands of lumens of projector lamp power throwing my result in front of my colleagues, all so that they can praise me for “shedding some light” on a difficult problem.
If we think about this scenario, though, we will realize that I might well be the proximal cause of most of the light involved but I create next to none of it. The electricity behind my computer, its screen, and the projector all comes, not from my holy word, but from a power station, which gets its energy from fossil fuels, or wind, or tide, and, eventually, from the sun (which The Creation, and Genesis, have God making in the first place). The only light left that might have come from me is the metaphorical kind, and here, too, I cannot give myself all of the credit. I find mathematics to be grueling work, in which a long time might pass without any kind of insight. Even when a good idea does come around, it can take a long time to work up into something rigorous enough for publication. It’s a far cry from the simplicity of picking a problem and saying “Let there be light.”
I have heard it said that, while religion used to be a useful explanation for natural phenomena, modern science can often explain such things as lightning and twin primes purely rationally. This strikes me as, more than anything else, depressing. Rationalism puts the highest power to create and comprehend, to cast light, in the hands of those for whom it is a struggle at best and a burden at worst, reliant on an otherwise unremarkable yellow sun and decades, centuries, or millennia of back-breaking effort. Compared to a God whose speeches illuminate a universe, this is, in my view, just cheap.
Mathematics is sadly replete with stories of nice-looking theories that turned out to be false, and ugly ones that we have to accept, so this is not a great argument for the truth of any faith in general or of Christianity in particular. There are theologians far smarter than I who have made better arguments of this sort, and anything I could write in a post this short along those lines would be a tired rehash of their ideas, so I’ll just say that if you’re curious about rational arguments for God then C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity is excellent. Here, instead, I am making a conscious appeal to emotion. As mathematicians, we believe that the world is fundamentally, modulo a few nasty bits around the edges, elegant. All our work is designed to get to the point where we can finally look back and see the beauty of the landscape we just picked our way across – and it rarely, if ever, disappoints. Consider whether, when the rest of your universe is set up in this way, you can stand the total lack of interest, order, and promise inherent in rationalism.
Since I am arguing for God, I will have to deal with my analog of the problem of evil. I call it the problem of Riemann. Why would an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good, in short, an all-light, God allow us to live without a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis? In fact, this is a mercy. Imagine you tried to learn mathematics just by reading books and papers, without ever working out examples, filling in details left to the reader, or taking notes. It would be absurd. You might pick up some neat ideas, but the only way to truly understand a field, and therefore the only way to go from “this is cool” to “this is beautiful,” is to work in it. If God gave us a textbook containing all of mathematics, we would lose out on the understanding of why any of it is significant in the first place, since that understanding comes from intimately knowing which problems are easy and which are hard. We would be unable to develop a conception of mathematical beauty or order, because we would never have struggled with their opposites. God wants to illuminate our paths, not blind us, and to do that He has to dole out His light in very small doses.
We are left wondering what a God of light means for us in our daily lives. This is the perfect time of year to answer. At Christmas, we celebrate the time when the light of God was closest to us. The Gospel of John says of Jesus Christ that “The Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and a few verses later that “In him was life, and the life was the light of men… the true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.” The Christmas story is the story of the essence of God’s creative power, of the force behind creation, coming to walk the earth with us for a few decades. Until the new heaven and the new earth are created at the end of days, with “no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light,” there will never be a more spiritually significant event than the life of Jesus. (All Bible quotations are ESV.)
So, whether as mathematicians seeking truths or humans seeking truth, let us gratefully accept this gift, and speak God’s words back to Him, not as a demand, but as a prayer:
Heavenly father, let there be light.