Comments on: Mathematics and religion?

By: Peter Cameron

Peter Cameron — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 15:41:49 +0000

Yes, I completely agree. The debate about science and religion is in my view badly distorted because people take “religion” to mean one of the “religions of the book” and fail to notice that there are more open and accepting ways to relate to the transcendent.

By: Narayanan

Narayanan — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 06:35:50 +0000

What you have said about Buddhism is also /even more true for Hinduism if one can consider it as a religion. For example in Bhagavad gita, Krihsna after telling him about his views on Dharma and Karma, finishes with the statement
that you should carefully and critically think about what I told you and do what seems right to you. Similar is the views that one can see in Upanishads and the like texts of Hinduism. In fact if you look at the development of Indian philosophy itself, you can see that this view is present in Vedic period itself as nyaya (logic), sankya (observation, enumeration and deduction), mimamsa (investigation) tries to analyse critically the vedic/later knowledge in different ways. Unlike in most other religions, these were accepted to be part of Hinduism itself.

In fact in Buddhism after the time of Buddha, there is not as much freedom as in Hinduism to decide for yourself what is right and what is wrong.

Of course Hinduism is not a religion in the sense of western religions. In fact most of Indian origin religions are not comparable to western religions.

By: Manjil P. Saikia

Manjil P. Saikia — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 08:18:42 +0000

Sometimes it just seems that math can be a religion of sorts for a certain class of people, but as you have mentioned, we don’t deal with faith, we have concrete facts. For example many people say that the digits of $latex\pi $ execute a kind of mystical aura, but for me personally its just something which is part of the exquisite beauty of the world of mathematics.