Christianity and Math as Religions

Mathematics originally started as a religion. Pythagoras founded the Pythagorean Brotherhood, a secretive, cult-like society where mathematics, music, and philosophy were treated as sacred religious doctrines aimed at purifying the soul.

When we remember this, we can see that mathematics is the only religion that is experimentally demonstrated to be true. But the standard of "experimentalism" is itself a standard that is curiously bifurcated:

1. Experimental science finds its roots in Christianity.
2. Math is not an experimental science, it is a formal science.

So, the formal science of math, whose precepts are not demonstrated or determined by experiment, are the foundation for all the experimental sciences.

Now, add this in: Medieval Catholic Europe strongly promoted the study of the trivium and the quadrivium. The trivium is grammar, logic and rhetoric, the quadrivium is arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. Every one of these seven disciplines are just different forms of math. AI chatbots have demonstrated that every human language can be reduced to a mathematical construct or model.

For the trivium, logic is just binary math. Grammar and rhetoric are both also math: all the words and word classifications can be reduced to numbers, the numbers sent through statistical algorithms to produce a different string of numbers, which are then converted back into words. All the English and history teachers thought they were teaching humanities, but they were actually just teaching math formulas dressed up as words, sentences, paragraphs and essays.

That's why AI chatbots are so good at writing. They never create ungrammatical sentences, they never mis-spell, because all of it is mathematically derived.

In the same way, all four elements of the quadrivium are just expressions of math. Arithmetic and geometry are obvious, while astronomy and music are the plotting astronomical bodies moving through space and auditory mathematics.

Thus, medieval Christianity's emphasis on trivium and quadrivium is really just the original religion of math dressed up pretty. For a millennia at least, Christianity was really just teaching seven versions of applied math, while laying the claim that these seven maths constituted the sum of all human knowledge. Perhaps not coincidentally, Christianity has a better understanding of persons and interpersonal relationships than any other worldview, and Christianity served as the foundation for building experimental science. (1, 2, 3) It should be noted that theology is, like math, considered a formal science. It does not rely on experiments for proof, instead, it starts with accepted propositions, then uses logic to derive additional truths that are consequent to the original propositions. The only civilization on earth that built experimental science was ancient and medieval Catholic Western Europe. No other worldview managed to produce this particular practice.

It is certainly no coincidence that the religion of math, undergirds Catholic teaching, thus grounding the formal science of theology into the formal science of math, which is, itself, the language of the universe. This makes Christianity more firmly grounded in reality than any other theology, at least in the sense that it is more grounded in mathematics, then any other prior or contemporaneous worldview.