If you are over forty and you were also tuned into American television on the morning of January 28, 1986, odds are you were watching the launch of the ill-fated Challenger space shuttle. At least, that’s what I was doing that day and I can’t, for the life of me, remember why. It wasn’t my habit to watch space shuttle launches and, being a Tuesday, I should have been at work. I do recall, though, that the launch had been postponed a few times already and that may have piqued my interest. But, regardless of the reason, along with millions of others watching that morning, I witnessed a terrible tragedy. And it certainly was a distressing spectacle to behold. We’ve all seen the video footage hundreds of times now of all the vapor trails from the fragments of the shuttle and its booster rockets going off in various directions. It is a scene that has become permanently etched into many of our psyches. As bad as it was, however, in seeing that infamous explosion firsthand on live TV, I also found something very odd about it; in that, the loss of life and the catastrophe itself did not register with me immediately.

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I remember at the time not being sure what had happened. Surely, I rationalized, this ship had not just blown apart in front of my eyes. Certainly, what I’d seen was supposed to happen. I couldn’t conceive of any other possibility even though the evidence in favor of disaster was obvious and overwhelming. And to make matters even more confusing, the TV announcers who were covering the launch suddenly stopped talking. It was as if they too had been caught off guard and couldn’t believe what their eyes were telling them, either. This silence seemed to go on for about a minute as I watched in disbelief the ship’s wreckage flying all over the sky. And it wasn’t until the announcers finally came back on the air to put into words my worst fears, that the denial my mind was going through, ended. Then, and only then, did I give myself permission to accept what my eyes (and logic) had been telling me. Even though it had been right there in front of me, it was so dreadful and so far removed from my everyday expectations I had to hear it first from someone of authority before I would allow myself to believe it.

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Since that day, I’ve pondered this curious human tendency to sometimes reject what our senses and logic are telling us. And I’ve also come to realize this skepticism for new things is not uncommon. It is a consequence, I think, of our growing up. Most adults have learned through experience that it is wise to be cautious about wild and unprecedented claims. And the same holds doubly true of the modern scientific community, where such claims are being made every day.

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To cite one of science’s most famous examples, Albert Einstein was not, as one might think today, an overnight sensation in 1905, after he published his first papers on relativity and the equivalency of mass and energy. Upon submitting his seminal work (in what historians commonly call his miracle year), he silently went back to his patent office job where he and his theories remained in semi-obscurity for nearly half a decade while the world contemplated on what to make of him. Oh, he definitely aroused the enthusiasm of many lower-tiered scientists, but with those of authority, it was quite the opposite. And this sounds so crazy it needs to be repeated for clarity. Albert Einstein informed the finest minds of his day of what many say are two of the most profound scientific discoveries of all time, and for four years all he heard back from them was crickets! Why? Did he not explain himself well enough? Was it his lack of adequate credentials? Was it his hair?

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Some of that might have been true. But I think, for many, the main problem was fear. His ideas were so out of the ordinary it scared people. His reviewers recognized that what he was saying was logical, but his conclusions were not at all in sync with their traditional understanding of things. The resultant conflict this caused between the rational and emotional sides of their brains made it very difficult, I think, for many to say anything out of fear of appearing foolish if they chose the wrong side. And so, they said nothing, which was fine for them, but it left poor Einstein hanging in the wind. And he might have stayed in that limbo for a much longer time had it not been for the courage of another great scientist of that era, Max Plank.

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Plank seems to have been a man devoted to the truth. And it didn’t matter to him who or where it was coming from or how strange it sounded. If he thought it had value, he was going to comment on it. And it apparently didn’t matter to him one whit, either, if anyone thought him foolish for doing it. So on reviewing Einstein’s work, and finding it plausible, he made his approval known. And that was the signal. That was the moment the ice jam broke, allowing the rest of the scientific world to start weighing in. There were still many who disagreed with his theories, and that situation would continue for several more years. But from that point on, Einstein was no longer just a failed academic working as a patent clerk. He’d been accepted into the established scientific community, and was now officially one of them, simply because his work was validated by one of their prestigious members. [1] Pretty much every great innovation in science has met with this sort of initial friction. But not all have concluded with as happy an ending.

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In the mid-nineteenth century, there was another extraordinary man making claims that were way outside of the box. But in his case, the authorities who would one day validate him were still in, or barely out of college. [2] This man’s name is not as recognizable as Einstein’s, but it should be, for all the lives he tried to save. His name was Ignaz Semmelweis. He was an administrating physician at the hospital of Vienna, and he was among the first to recognize the need for good hygiene in the operating room. [3]

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He made this discovery in 1847 while investigating a strange malady that was killing many of his hospital’s female patients. Even more strange was that it was primarily affecting those who were admitted to one of the hospital’s two maternity clinics, the one run by doctors. The other clinic, the one with the good record, was run by midwives-in-training and that made no sense to anyone.

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The disease was known as child bed (or puerperal) fever and the clinic was so scandalized by it that the expectant mothers of Vienna often went to great lengths to have their babies by any means other than by the hands of the hospital’s surgeons. And they felt this way for good reason. The mortality rate for even the street births was lower than that of the doctor’s clinic. So Semmelweis was duty-bound to find out why.

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And after studying every detail of child-birthing practices in his two clinics, he eventually focused in on one crucial difference. The doctor’s clinic also had a teaching morgue and the doctors who were performing the deliveries were often coming straight out of that morgue to do them. Semmelweis also noticed that the symptoms these women were coming down with were similar to the symptoms of the diseases the people in the morgue had died from. It wasn’t much of a leap from there for Semmelweis to instruct the hospital’s surgeons to start washing their hands before entering the delivery room. And lo and behold, in taking that one simple precaution, puerperal fever was largely eradicated from the clinics and the hospital.

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But, where you’d think this should have been a resounding success story, for Semmelweis it actually ended as a classic tragedy. It was, after all, the 1840s, and it would not be for another thirty years that Louis Pasteur would propose his germ theory of disease. So Semmelweis could offer no reasonable explanation why washing one’s hands should have made any difference. All he knew was that it worked, but he didn’t know why.

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More problematic than that was the attitude of the surgeons of that time regarding their hospital attire. They wore their unwashed gowns with honor, and the more stench they contained, the greater the feeling of pride. Washing themselves and their garments was a major breech in tradition. So Semmelweis and his findings were summarily dismissed by the scientific community. And to add injury to insult, this ultimately led to his losing his position at the hospital, which went immediately back to its former unhygienic practices despite the sharp rise in the mortality rate that came with it.

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This would have discouraged anyone, but it didn’t stop Semmelweis. Armed with the truth and haunted by the number of lives being lost, he never quit publishing papers and making a general nuisance of himself. But his opponents, who represented the scientific community at the time, were equally stubborn. To them, Semmelweis was bucking everything they had ever been taught about medicine, everything that they believed, and they were not about to throw it all away and start afresh on the word of a mere hospital administrator. So it didn’t matter to them how logical Semmelweis’s argument was, and they weren’t even willing to test his theory in their own practices. Semmelweis simply couldn’t be right. Their egos would allow no other possibility. So they met all his evidence with belligerence and ridicule. And they would have been content with just ignoring him had it not been for Semmelweis’s persistence.

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And that is where this story takes one final tragic turn, for after years of this back and forth, his former friends and colleagues somehow managed to get Semmelweis committed to a mental asylum. And whether or not it was justified, it’s probably also not too far from the truth to suggest they did so just to shut him up. He didn’t go without a fight, however, and two weeks into his incarceration he died from the injuries he received on admittance. It wasn’t the brutality, however, that killed him. The exact cause of death was, ironically, infection (the very thing he’d been fighting most of his career). The year was 1865. Semmelweis had been raging against the machine, unsuccessfully, for nearly twenty years, but it was not entirely in vain.

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There were some surgeons here and there who heeded his advice, which must have given him some solace. Had he survived but a few more years, however, he would have lived to see a series of articles posted in the prestigious medical publication, The Lancet, written by the renowned surgeon, Joseph Lister, advocating the use of sterile methods in surgery. And in very little time the rest of the Western world followed suit. They had finally been given sufficient reason to reject the old ways and accept what logic had already been telling them for decades through Semmelweis.

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These stories (and many others) suggest there is a kind of sheep/shepherd dynamic going on with us. We all like to think of ourselves as shepherds. But fundamentally, when it comes to accepting new ideas, we are mainly sheep looking to the people we’ve raised up as our shepherds to tell us what to do. And we don’t like taking our lead from people we think of as our equals (or less). It is the rare individual who is not influenced by the movers and shakers of this world, who can discern the truth regardless of who is saying it, without emotion getting involved. For the rest of us, however, the fear of change is an overpowering force.

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But this phenomenon, this cognitive dissonance as science refers to it, is not something to necessarily view as a bad trait. It is just the way we were made. And it does seem to have its place. Having a scientific name, though, doesn’t make it any less odd, this proclivity we have that prevents us from accepting what our senses and logic are telling us until something finally clicks (the result ofttimes of someone we respect giving us the green light). And it can be very formidable obstacle to anyone of minor world stature who’s made a major discovery.

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This book offers another prime example. It too claims to have uncovered a great truth, a truth so profound that it has the potential to change forever our perception of God, His Creation, and the universe in general. Understandably, it too should be met initially with disbelief, and with all the ridicule and scorn that commonly comes with it. And it has.

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Those identifying as hardline atheists and rigid fundamentalists, for instance, have been very critical. But it was known from the start that those factions would be a tough sell. Much more perplexing is the reaction (or rather lack of reaction) of those who represent the established faith community. They have also refused to have anything to do with it. And you would think that a claim of such importance might evoke in them a little curiosity. You might also think, given their greater capacity for understanding the theological nuances of such discoveries, and because they’ve supposedly been commissioned by God to tell the rest of us whether or not something is heretical, that some feeling of responsibility would be aroused.

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But thus far, their reactions are peculiarly similar to those cited in the first example. They won’t condemn it, but they won’t endorse it either. In fact, they won’t say anything. And if I were to venture to guess why, it is again fear that seems to be at the heart of their silence; the subject matter of this book being presumably so disruptive to the status quo that they find it best to simply pretend it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t matter how well framed or logical or orthodox the argument is (nor even how much potential it has for saving souls). A formal review would require years of study that in the end could result in the destruction of many of their most beloved sacred cows. And they are loath to partake in any of that, until forced. [4]

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If that was all there was to go by, however, the prospects for this book would be rather dismal. But there is another category of individuals to report on, amongst the laity anyway, who are not threatened by new ideas and are open-minded enough that they can entertain them from unexpected sources. These are people who’ve been raised in the Scriptures and schooled in mainstream science and intuitively know the two must be compatible. But they are also people whose schooling is not so great in either area that their minds have been poisoned to solutions at odds with “conventional wisdom.”

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Being governed, therefore, not merely by faith, but also by reason, they've grown weary of the pap (the babyfood) the Church has been feeding them of science’s role in Creation and are hungering to sink their teeth into the steak that was promised. [5] And from that corner, some very positive reactions have been seen.

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But with a few (even in that category), once they’ve become fully acquainted with how far reaching the discovery is, there is a kind of “deer in the headlights” response. And it’s very reminiscent of the way I felt on witnessing the Challenger disaster. They continue to maintain their fascination. And their outward behavior suggests they want to accept it, but they are still in need of a little push from an external source, an endorsement perhaps by some authority figure (greater than me anyway), to assure them that they will not be ridiculed or ostracized for doing so.

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And therein lies the second great challenge for this book, for it purports (among other things) to unite mainstream science and Scripture on the subject of Creation without doing damage to either. And these days, there just aren’t many scholars specializing in that area of study (let alone authorities). It’s not due to any sort of lacking in intelligence in our present age. Science and theology both still have their Planks and their Pasteurs. The problem, at present, lies in there being no real communication going on between the two fields.

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It is a rift that many trace back to the time of Galileo. That’s when science seems to have first realized the need to free itself of the tyranny of theological subjectivity. And they were right. The great medieval doctor of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas, recognized three centuries earlier, that to be effective, the two disciplines needed to work in autonomy. But he saw it mostly in terms of an amicable separation with a mutual appreciation by each for the role the other discipline plays. [6]

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So the Church’s harsh and unenlightened treatment of Galileo was probably not the best way to bring this about. It planted, instead, seeds of enmity and distrust in science. And over time, they’ve sprouted and grown to the point where today to be a scientist of any repute requires first that you espouse atheism. And those scientists out there that do have faith know better than to be outspoken about it. God forbid that it might seep into their work. It could signal the end of any hope of advancement in their careers if they even hinted at the possibility of purpose or design in nature.

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And theologians, who should be more open to bridging the divide, have fallen into a similar trap. Their attitude seems to be: “Let science go its own way. We can get along just fine without it.” And it’s led to the deplorable situation where the vast majority of theologians (and clerics in general) are being trained in institutions that place little or no value in any potential theological insights attainable through empirical science and/or math. Having a prior college background in the sciences is not detrimental for gaining admittance to the religious life, but it is certainly not a prerequisite. And so, given how much easier it is to excel in the field without the extra baggage, it is rare to find a theologian with a truly balanced outlook.

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But this adversarial separation has been going on for so long that it is really now only fear that maintains it. And it’s the same sort of fear that was seen in the Galileo case, but this time it pervades both sides. For scientists, it is the fear of losing their precious objectivity if they even admit to the possibility of the existence of God. And believers are in similar dread that if they stray too far from their beloved Scriptures in their study of God’s Creation, they’ll lose their faith.

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Borne of fear, this has resulted in the emergence of some very strange one-sided ideas whose sole purpose seems to be to do away altogether with the other side. And these ideas range from science’s wacky Multiverse Hypothesis to theology’s equally inane Young Earth Creationism. As bad as this has gotten, though, it still wouldn’t be disastrous, if the lines they each drew in the sand were in the same location. But as this book will show, they’re not, and it’s created a kind of a demilitarized zone, a place where neither will go and many, because of it, don’t even realize exists.

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To be fair, there are those on both sides who recognize that the study of the natural world is the subject matter of both disciplines and have tried to find this middle ground by becoming expert in both. But the aforementioned lack of continuity between science and theology today has made this a kind of exercise in schizophrenia, where you are forced to shut off one side of your brain when thinking or speaking of the other. And that is not conducive to making advances in this area either.

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It shouldn’t be that way. Understanding God, after all, is ultimately the goal of both the scientist and the theologian. But it is. And because of it, to find an authority of the caliber needed to validate this book, one with a completely holistic appreciation for both science and religion, you have to go back at least eight hundred years, to the time of the Scholastics. And, although I cannot prove it, given his interest in philosophical arguments for the existence of God, I suspect that St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the finest minds of that era, would have had a lot of positive things to say about this book since it corroborates (and is very much in keeping with) his own Fifth Proof (aka his “argument from design”). [7]

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This book’s emphasis on numbers, however, suggests we go back even further. And it is in the Patristic Age where we’d expect to find its most ardent advocates. Having been schooled in the science of Plato and Aristotle, and the mathematics of Euclid and Pythagoras, the numbers inherent to nature played a huge role in the teachings of many of the early Church Fathers. And it is understandable. The Sacred Scriptures abound with evidence that God made use of specific numbers throughout His involvement with Creation and Salvation History.

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Consider, for instance, the many examples to be found in Scripture of the number 40; the 12 tribes of Israel and their relation to the 12 Apostles of the New Testament; the 7 Days of Creation, the 7 Gifts of the Holy Spirit, the 7 Churches, Seals, Trumpets, Thunders and Bowls of the Book of Revelation all associated with what the ancients came to see as the number of perfection; not to mention the number that symbolized supreme imperfection: 666. And there is also the number 3, which was seen by the early Christians, wherever it appeared (in the Bible, or in nature) as symbolic of the Trinity (or God).

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Their writings on sacred numbers should not be construed, however, as a fascination with numerology. That is an occult practice those same early Church Fathers adamantly condemned. [8] It is rather simply recognition from Scripture, that certain numbers have played a recurrent role in Creation. And in examining their writings, they seem to see these numbers as the key to understanding the full meaning of Scripture and Creation in general. Reading the Bible or studying nature, therefore, without that recognition, they would further liken to trying to discern God’s intent through a heavy veil or mist. And the Bible apparently concurs, asserting that God, has arranged all things by measure and number and weight. [9]

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The Church Fathers read a lot into that Scripture, as did the greatest sage of that period, St. Augustine of Hippo. And it is clear throughout his many writings that he was absolutely fascinated, not only by God’s use of recurrent numbers (in Scripture and in nature), but also their mathematical relationship with each other. The study of numbers (according to one scholar) helped Augustine understand how divine providence orders man and the world. [10] And in his own words, St. Augustine affirms this.

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Ignorance of numbers, [he said] … prevents us from understanding things that are set down in Scripture in a figurative and mystical way. … in the same way, many other numbers and combinations of numbers are used in the sacred writings, to convey instruction under a figurative guise, and ignorance of numbers often shuts out the reader from this instruction, [11] 

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But I think his thoughts on (and love of) numbers are nowhere expressed better than in his discourse on the Free Choice of the Will.

 

Wherever you turn [he declared], Wisdom speaks to you through the imprint it has stamped upon its works. ... Look at the sky, the earth, and the sea, and at whatever in them shines from above or crawls, flies, or swims below. These have form because they have number. [12]

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“Augustine describes Wisdom and number as ‘somehow one and the same thing,’ even ‘identical,’ and asserts that ‘both are true, and immutably true.’" [13] From all of this, and from all my personal studies of this great theologian, I have no doubt that if he’d lived today and had access to today’s scientific discoveries, St. Augustine would not merely have advocated for this book, he would have written it!

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The discoveries described in this book were not that difficult to find. You might even call it low hanging fruit. And I find it kind of amazing that some modern scientist or theologian didn’t stumble onto them a long time ago (despite their current biases). All it required was a healthy appreciation for the role of both science and Scripture in Creation, a desire to see how mathematics may have been involved, and the courage to enter a garden no one has visited for a very long time. And there’s no question (in my mind anyway) that St. Augustine, a man of both God and science, and a man with a passion for sacred numbers, would have eaten this stuff up.

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So there are your validating authorities, if you can accept them: St. Augustine, and to a lesser degree St. Thomas Aquinas. (And how could there be two better endorsements?) Both were renowned for reconciling the popular science of their times with Christian theology (Augustine with Platonic idealism and Thomas Aquinas with Aristotelian rationalism). And this book accomplishes nothing less with the science of our time (empiricism), an accomplishment that many would agree was long overdue.

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But it must also be acknowledged that despite his unequalled brilliance in all matters theological, St. Augustine’s number theories and their reliance on Classical Greek science have been soundly ridiculed and discounted by modern science. And even those theologians who recognize his genius in other areas are somewhat embarrassed to bring up what they consider a lapse in his reasoning.

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“Nobody’s perfect,” they’ll say. “Even the brightest of our stars is known to have a dark day.” And to support it, some might even cite Einstein’s infamous cosmological constant incident. For those not familiar, this is in reference to a supposed miscalculation Einstein made early in his career. Shortly after publishing his main papers on relativity he introduced an antigravity fudge factor, he called the cosmological constant, into his equations to account for what he felt had to exist to keep our static universe from collapsing in on itself. But when it was later discovered our universe is expanding, not static, that constant was seen as a mistake. Einstein, himself, called it the biggest blunder of his life.

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Today, however, with the discovery in 1999 that the universe is not merely expanding, it is accelerating in its expansion, the cosmological constant has made a rather stunning comeback. It allows science once again to make sense of a cosmos that has within it a seemingly endless series of surprises. [14] So these things have a way of coming around. And time will tell (as may your response to this book) if St. Augustine’s number theory will come back into vogue.

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In summary, three examples have been presented here of ground-breaking ideas that have not been met with overwhelming support by the scientific world. Two eventually broke through the ice to become mainstays. The third was once a mainstay but has since fallen out of favor. Think about all of them and the people who first proposed them as you read this book.

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Think about how you might have reacted to Einstein’s papers claiming matter and energy are interchangeable when he first published them. Would you have frozen up (as most did) out of fear of appearing foolish? Or would you have been able to rise above it (as Plank did) and evaluate this new theory on its own merit (not his)?

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Think also of Semmelweis’s notions on surgical hygiene and his struggles to get that message out. In consideration of the lives at stake, would you have had the courage to stand with him and demand that he and his beliefs be given a fair trial at a time when much of the Western world was calling him (and anyone who sided with him) a crackpot? And, while reading this book, think especially of St. Augustine and his claim that a knowledge of sacred numbers is essential for a complete understanding of God’s Creation. Are the scientific and theological communities correct in labeling him delusional for this belief? Or was he, and all those early Christians who understood and agreed with him, simply people whose insights were way ahead of their time? Or maybe the better question is this. Is it really valid to say that, just because we have been thinking about it for two thousand years, we have a better handle on Christianity than those who were there when it started?

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As might have been expected, God has a more effective way of determining the validity of a spiritual belief. And St. Paul alluded to it in his first letter to the Corinthians.

 

The message of the cross is foolishness [he noted] to those who are perishing. [15]

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But the same can be said of the Trinity and every other religious Truth that is difficult to understand. Their common link is they all require of us faith before we can begin to comprehend and appreciate their meaning. It is God, therefore, that furnishes this understanding, provided we let Him in to do it. The early Church Fathers had an expression that described this supernatural phenomenon. Their Latin term for it was credo ut intelligam, which trannslates to  I believe, that I may understand. And St. Augustine put it this way.

 

Understanding is the reward of faith.

Therefore, seek not to understand that you may believe,

but believe that you may understand. [16]

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So ultimately, that really is what is required here for anyone to fully understand and appreciate the discoveries described in this book. That’s what the early Christians apparently did, which got them so fired up about sacred numbers. And if you really want to get what they were talking about and what this book is talking about you’re going to have to do the same. You’re going to have to just open your heart to it and let it in.

 

And I know that is not an easy thing to do. I, myself, had a difficult time with it, at first. Oh, I sort of got it after I’d made the foundational discoveries described in the second chapter of this book. But it was not until I got to crunching the numbers to see how it applied to the life of Christ, and I saw how elegantly the math came together to bring about the results found in chapter 1, that I had my proverbial “eureka moment.” That was where all the remaining scales fell from my eyes and I accepted without further reservation that I had stumbled onto something holy, something that demanded the world’s attention. The proofs being presented had simply become overwhelming. And from then on, all the later startling discoveries were just icing on the cake for me, more corroboration that my faith had not been misplaced. Perhaps those chapters will have a similar effect on you.

 

But this book is loaded with potential eureka moments. Each chapter is devoted to highlighting several. And to those who may recognize the Hand of God in one or more of them, as I have, and are thus tempted to accept the claims being made in this book, let me assure you if you do, you won't be disappointed. You will find out, that credo ut intelligam really does apply here – that, just as it may have been the first time you accepted, solely by faith, the existence of God, the message of the Cross, or the reality of the Trinity, in taking this leap your understanding of (and appreciation for) God’s Creation is going to increase, as mine did, a thousand-fold.

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