Amir Alexander: On the Materiality of Mathematics 5
And if mathematics is itself material? Then the world is turned upside-down. If even this most trusted guarantor of necessity and hierarchy turns out to be based on lowly chaotic matter, then what hope is there for an ordered universe? Matter will rule reason, the body will rule the soul, and all hope for salvation, in this world or the next, vanishes. To those who, like the Jesuit fathers, champion an ordered world and a hierarchical social order, in which everything and everyone have their God-given place, nothing could be more sinister than a material mathematics.