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 also 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. Math is not an experimental science, it is a formal science.
2. The truth of mathematics is demonstrated via experiment.
3. Christian theology is not an experimental science, it is a formal science.
4. Experimental science was created by Christian theologians, priests and bishops.

So, the (formerly religious) formal science of math, whose precepts are not demonstrated or determined by experiment, are the foundation for all the experimental sciences. The Christian religion, whose precepts are not demonstrated or determined by experiment, laid the foundations for all the experimental sciences. (1, 2, 3)

Huh.

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.

For grammar and rhetoric, AI chatbots have demonstrated that every human language can be reduced to a mathematical construct or model. 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.

That's why AI chat bots are so good at writing. They never create ungrammatical sentences, they never misspell, because every language can be reduced to math, each word becomes a number, all the numbers are sequenced according to mathematical rules, one sequence of numbers can be answered by another sequence of numbers which can be turned back into words to form the answer. Every question you give a chat bot, every response it produces, all of it is fundamentally just numbers, algorithms, math.

For all of history, all the English and history teachers thought they were teaching humanities, but they were actually teaching math, formulas dressed up as words, sentences, paragraphs, poems and essays.

Logic, of course, is modal math: modal in subject, mathematical in method.

In the same way, all four elements of the quadrivium are nothing but math. Arithmetic and geometry are obviously so, while astronomy plots heavenly bodies moving through space and music is auditory mathematics.

Thus, medieval Christianity's emphasis on trivium and quadrivium is substantially just the original religion of math dressed up pretty. For a millennia at least, Christianity was really 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. Theology, like math, does not rely on experiments for proof, instead, like math, it starts with accepted propositions, then uses logic to derive additional truths that are consequent to the original propositions. Math was originally a religion, the core foundation of medieval Catholic instruction was math, and the medieval Catholic Church was the only civilization on earth to build experimental science. No other worldview managed to produce this particular practice.

The religion of math undergirds Catholic teaching, grounding the formal science of theology into the formal science of math, which is, itself, experimentally demonstrated to be the language of the universe. This makes Catholic 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.