Ever since Adam and Eve rejected God’s authority, humankind has searched for a source of ultimate truth apart from Him. <...>

The effort reached its first pinnacle at the time of the ancient Greeks, but it raised its head again in the last few centuries. At one point, some of the world’s leading minds seemed to be close to reaching their goal. Ironically, another mathematician stepped in to prove that they would never reach it! This mathematician proved that there must be true statements in any given mathematical system that cannot be proved within that system. Thus, math cannot be the ultimate foundation for truth; it must appeal to something beyond itself.

The lesson for Christians is exciting. No matter how hard people try to disprove or sideline God as the foundation for all truth and life, His eternal power and nature shine forth even more brightly. The very effort to destroy Him merely reminds fallible humans, by their own efforts, that God gets the ultimate glory . . . even in the mental world of mathematics and logic.

Throughout history, mathematics has offered glimpses of infinity that point man’s attention to God. However, humans in their rebellious state do not want even a glimpse of God because they suppress the truth in unrighteousness (Romans 1:18).

In ancient Greece, Pythagoras (572–492 BC) chose to worship the infinity of natural (counting) numbers instead of God.
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Yet Pythagoras and Plato both stumbled over the limits of their god. Using the Pythagorean Theorem, they recognized that when a = 1 and b = 1, then c (the square root of 2) isn’t a natural number and can’t even be written as a fraction (a ratio of two natural numbers). Natural numbers aren’t the ultimate truth.
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The Christian philosophy of math, in contrast, begins with God, who numbered the days of creation as recorded in Genesis 1. The founder of the true philosophy of math is Jesus Christ, the source of math is the Bible, and the purpose of math is the glory of God.