The Joy of Learning
In A Meaningful World, Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt, take a look at the arts and sciences and find in them evidence that our universe is full of meaning rather than pointless as the modern materialists and atheists would have us to believe. In Chapter 5, they examine the mathematical enterprise of geometry and Euclid, the “Shakespeare” of math. The following anecdote is offered:
After having learned the first geometrical theorem, a pupil inquired of Euclid, “But what shall I get by learning these things?” Euclid called one of his slaves. “Give him a coin,” Euclid ordered, “since he must make a gain out of what he learns.” Unfortunately, we do not have recorded what effect Euclid’s stinging words had upon the student, so we do not know whether the student blushed from embarrassment or was simply stunned by incomprehension. Either way, the point of Euclid’s remark is that the study of geometry is intrisically good and needs no further justification. While it may have practical uses, these are accidental to its true merit, the peculiarly human joy of gaining knowledge about mathematical things.”
As the authors point out, the utilitarian approach to knowledge is not confined to the past. Often we hear young, short-sighted, students complain that they will never use a particular bit of learning, or that it will never help them get a good-paying job. There is, however, a great capacity in humanity to joy in learning and knowing for its own sake. It is this excitement of knowing and learning that has driven man’s great accomplishments and achievements in the arts and sciences.
The authors argue that this phenomenon cannot adequately be accounted for on a Darwinian basis:
The Darwinian account of the development of human intelligence does not explain the extraordinary intellectual gap between the capacity to reason geometrically in regard to mere survival, the far more extraordinary capacity entailed in purely theoretical geometry such as that taught in Euclid’s Elements, or even more, in the kind of mathematics used in contemporary physics. To image that Darwinian selection mechanisms could have seized upon a series of small but immediately beneficial genetic variations to produce a species capable of producing a Newton or an Einstein works no better than explaining Shakespeare by such means. “We have certain skills - for example, we can jump streams and catch falling apples - which are necessary for getting by in the world,” notes physicist Paul Davies, “but, why is it that we also have the ability to discern, for example, what’s going on inside atoms or inside black holes? These are completely outside the domain of everyday experience…not at all necessary for good Darwinian survival.”
A Meaningful World argues that mathematics, as well as other areas of learning and knowlege, provides powerful evidence for a universe full of meaning and purpose. A universe which seems to be strangely designed, not only full of meaning, but also strangely made in such a way that we can comprehend and understand it. Not only that, but we seem to be strangely designed to desire and take great joy in discovering the truths of nature. Wiker and Witt state:
The more we uncover, the more it looks like there is a conspiracy of order, an idea that allows us to see the genius of Euclid in a different light. He becomes not the founder of geometry, the great master, but an apprentice hurrying after the true Master, the first Geometer, whose work is bright with clarity - rich and strange and elegant, surprising and delighting us with its unexpected harmonies - and all of it oddly fitted to the human mind and imagination.