Opus 2025-504: Negative, Negative

I think somewhere in the past year I wrote about the possibilities of God making a round square or a square circle.  Since I’m not sure, let me repeat briefly.  One of the arguments that people like to throw out about the existence or nonexistence of God is to ask if God can do anything, can he make a square circle?  Now the conflict here is obvious because in the definition of the two terms they are mutually exclusive.  In our world, such a thing is impossible on the basis of logic.  Therefore theists will tend to say that “No, God could not logically do that.”  My point was that outside of our reality, outside of the universe that was created for us, it’s very possible that God could do something, but we could not understand it.

I was thinking of another question that comes up having to do with a mathematical term, the square root of a negative one.  Based on the laws of mathematics, such a thing cannot exist.  Yet, in spite of that you can write it out and use it in mathematical formula.  How can something which cannot exist be useful in a world where things do exist?  It’s one of those things that puzzles me.  I thought that this idea of the square root of a negative one is another one of those concepts that is impossible in our universe, but could very well exist outside of our reality.  God existed before our universe, therefore there must have been a reality outside of what we know.  Not only do we not know it, but it would be impossible for us to know it because of the structure of our minds and our ability to think.

That doesn’t mean that there is not such a thing.  It could be perhaps a whole new range of numbers or mathematical concepts.  We know positive numbers and negative numbers. We have categories of real numbers and unreal numbers.  Why not a whole new category of the square root of negative numbers?  I don’t know what you would call it.  Possibly negative negative.  Or we could call them zombie numbers.

Either way it’s an interesting thought when I’m sitting on a dark porch on a cold windy morning.  My thought goes to science fiction where they have to come up with ways in which spaceships can travel faster than light.  I think someday there will be a scientific breakthrough in that area.  We may not know how it works, but we will know that it does work.

Welcome to the world of theology for the crazy.

homo unius libri