For many of our readers, mathematics is something we might leave behind after graduating from school or uni. But here, Lucas Zhu, a 2025 graduate of The Scots College in Sydney, explains his experience with mathematics and how its beauty, value, and relevance to the created world helped him in his Christian faith.
Considering most of my family are Buddhists, my high school classmates often ask me why I’m a Christian. In their minds, they were probably expecting a story about some profound and unexpected spiritual experience, or for me (as an ancient history enthusiast) to point towards the breadth of historical evidence underpinning my worldview. So, when I tell them it was a mathematics camp and a physics class that really strengthened my faith, there’s usually a pause and a puzzled look.
“Really?”
Yes, really. In fact, it led me to, in my opinion, one of the most convincing arguments for God.
At the camp, I gave a presentation on knot theory. It’s a niche, abstract subfield of mathematics first developed in 1771 by Alexandre-Théophile Vandermonde to study the geometry of loops and twists, with no practical application in mind. Yet, this field that bears seemingly no relevance to the physical world, turns out, centuries later, to be crucial in modelling the DNA replication process. In other words, something invented to amuse mathematicians was later discovered to describe the fundamental mechanics of life with uncanny precision.
I experienced the same shock a few weeks later in an HSC Year 12 physics class. We were studying the Standard Model of Matter when our teacher mentioned the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle discovered in 2012. Decades earlier, Peter Higgs had predicted its existence using mathematical equations alone without any experiments or data. Almost fifty years later, having spent billions of dollars and tens of thousands of hours building the Large Hadron Collider, we finally found it.
In fact, I realised this was the case in almost all fields of pure mathematics. Renowned mathematician G. H. Hardy had once proudly claimed in his book A Mathematician’s Apology that his work in number theory is “useless” and could never be applied to real-world phenomena, defending the pursuit of mathematics for its intrinsic beauty. Little did he know that his work now underpins the systems that secure online banking and protect digital communication, and that the Hardy–Weinberg principle in genetics is fundamental to modern biology.
How is it that mathematical concepts, once developed for purely abstract pursuits, map the physical world with such astonishing accuracy?
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics
Physicist and Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner famously discussed this phenomenon in his essay “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” describing this extraordinary applicability of mathematics as a “miracle.” Importantly, he wasn’t talking about elementary mathematics like basic geometry, which was designed to describe the real world, but about advanced concepts no one expected to be useful and yet are known now to play fundamental roles in physics.
One such example is complex numbers. When I first encountered this seemingly unreal, intangible realm of entities involving the square root of –1, which I, and I’m sure many others, were skeptical about studying, to quote my friend, these “things that don’t exist.” However, complex numbers are indispensable in fields like electromagnetism and quantum mechanics and are vital to calculations when designing aeroplane wings or mobile-phone towers.
Wigner, in his essay, describes this extraordinary applicability of abstract mathematics as “bordering the mysterious” with “no rational explanation.” Atheists like Wigner have a hard time explaining this phenomenon. What I find fascinating is that this perception of inexplicability is largely a result of increasing secularism. The great sixteenth-century astronomer Galileo Galilei wrote that “the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics,” while his contemporary Johannes Kepler described scientific discovery as “thinking God’s thoughts after him.”
Mathematics, Logos, and Christian theology
From a Christian perspective, the applicability of mathematics to the natural world is not surprising. When I discussed the meaning of the opening of John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1), with my Christian Studies teacher, I was surprised to learn that “Word” is the translation of the Greek word logos. Logos means not only “word,” but also reason, logic, and order: the very qualities mathematics makes precise through symbolic language. This aligns naturally with the Bible’s account of God’s nature. Logos is not an abstract principle, but a person: Jesus Christ, through whom all things came to be. Thus, the deep rationality of the universe, including the mathematical structures that govern it, reflects the rationality of its Creator. We are able to discover and utilise mathematics because we are made in the image of a rational God.
Mathematics and our Word-based Universe
Furthermore, what intrigues me is the motif of speech throughout the Bible, which is perhaps most apparent in Genesis 1 through the repeated phrase “and God said.” However, the notion of God’s word is seen elsewhere:
“He upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1:3).
“By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host” (Psalm 33:6).
I find this motif fascinating because the way the “Word” is described in Scripture resonates so strongly with the language of mathematics. I still remember the chain of Google searches I made during a physics class. What is this chair made of? Atoms. What are atoms made of? Nuclei and electrons. What are nuclei made of? Protons and neutrons. What are those made of? Quarks. And what makes quarks and electrons? At that point, the answers stop being tangible. Instead, physicists point to mathematical descriptions and equations that don’t picture what matter looks like, but precisely describe how it behaves. One of the most famous is the Dirac equation, which describes quarks and electrons.
When you press the material world far enough, you don’t find smaller bits of stuff so much as deeper layers of mathematics. To me, this suggests that reality is predicated upon the language of mathematics and is thus fundamentally word-based. It’s no wonder that Paul Dirac himself once remarked that “God is a mathematician.”
An Important Liminal Space
Mathematics made me realise the vast beauty, complexity, and order in the world around us. That attentiveness eventually led to my strongest reason for believing in God. What concerns me now is how rarely students feel permitted to ask these deeper questions. I’ve seen it in the discussion groups and seminars I helped organise at school: once space is created, the questions are already there. Does science explain everything? Do faith and reason really belong in separate rooms? I once assumed science offered a more credible account of reality than Christianity. Now, I find it curious that the two are treated as rivals. Studying mathematics and physics didn’t pull me away from my faith, just as asking theological questions never pushed me away from science. Instead, their intersection became the place where I could examine the deepest, most mysterious foundations of both. And for me, that liminal space led me not away from reason, but deeper into it and, somewhat unexpectedly, towards God.
More Opinion
