God and Other Necessary Beings

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Veritas6

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“Would the necessary existence of numbers refute the idea that God created all reality that exists outside Himself?” Do numbers exist necessarily? What does this all mean? I read this argument and it’s kinda hard to understand. Wouldn’t abstract objects all be created by God?
 
Logically necessary truths are not created but rather are an expression of an underlying principle of existence. In other words these truths are an eternal expression of God’s essential nature. This is to say that they are true because of God’s nature, and without God there would be no such thing.
 
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IWantGod said:
Logically necessary truths are not created but rather are an expression of an underlying principle of existence.
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What would be some examples of “logically necessary truths” (besides numbers)?
 
Well, i am no expert, but i would say that the impossibility of a square-circle is one, that you cannot have something that is both a square and a triangle at the same time.

I’m too tired to think of others right now.
 
Given that numbers are not beings how do scientists use maths to support scientific theories? I ask merely out of curiosity. Maths was never my strong point.
 
Would this come down to if God is above logic? I believe He is (because He created it!) but chooses to act in a logical manner (He chooses not to create a “married bachelor” or a “square-circle”)
 
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Numbers are concepts. That doesn’t mean they aren’t “real”, just that they aren’t things.
 
Because God is simple, it is impossible for Him to act against Himself, which is what acting contrary to logic would mean.
 
‘Number’ is a way of detecting differences within and between states of the universe. The universe is not ‘necessary’. God could exist without one. ‘Godness’ is undifferentiable, so without a universe, ‘number’ would have no meaning, and is therefore, not ‘necessary’.

On the other hand, we may assert that God did, in fact, create a universe, and that the creation of such a universe is therefore part of the essence of Godness. If the essence of Godness includes variability, and therefore difference, then number can be considered part of the ‘necessary’ attributes of God, and thus necessary in itself.

I think on the whole I vote for the second one…
 
Philosophy of math was one of my favorite subjects.

The short answer is that math seems to work, so scientists just use it. They aren’t really concerned with the foundational models that philosophers and mathematicians argue about. It’s one of those “it works… But we don’t know why it works” things. The ontology, epistemology, and language used for math create a lot of paradoxes.
 
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