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A video is doing the rounds which purports to show an Oxford mathematician destroying atheism by the power of rational argument.

But does he really? His strength is pondering that the universe exists at all. The very fact that anything exists rather than nothing, let alone the fine balance capable of enabling, supporting and sustaining life, is the mathematician’s gift.

The fact that lifeforms like our own — having come into existence where once nothing existed — are now capable of complex intellectual endeavours to attempt to explain the universe and everything in it is of course an awesome conundrum.

Personally I find his explanation more convincing than the notion that our capacity to think, perceive, sense and make moral choices is merely a byproduct of chemical and biological mechanisms, as simple peptides gained ever more complexity in response to the need to survive in their environment.

Like the mathematician, my explanation for such complexity — consider the functionality of a single human cell, let alone your eyes — is belief in the Creator. But if I were the mathematician, I would have left the argument there.

For it only takes a moment to realise that his approach isn’t entirely rational, nor is it based on vast historical awareness, or profound reflection on human realities.

For example, he speaks of seventeenth century Christian thought being the wellspring of the scientific endeavor, seemingly oblivious to the vast contributions of Mesopotamia, India, Persia, China and Greece over millennia.

As a mathematician, he ought to know that the concept of “zero” first emerged amongst the Sumerians 5,000 years ago. Indian philosophers and astronomers concerned with the idea of nothingness began to use the concept in the 5th century CE, whereupon it spread into Cambodia, China and the Arab world over the centuries that followed.

Elsewhere in his argument, he speaks of the death and destruction brought to the world when men sought to remove God from society, citing the genocides of atheist communism. But this simply betrays a woeful ignorance of religious history. Representatives of religion, Christianity included, have been just as capable of immense violence as the so-called Godless.

In the end, this turns out not to be a scientist’s rational argument for the existence of God, but a convinced believer’s appeal to believe in Christianity. For the rational argument in favour of a cause for everything proves nothing he goes on to say about the Son of God, God dying on a cross, the suffering of God, the resurrection and redemption.

For if this were the rational argument of a man steeped in numbers, he might be forced to ponder why such an intervention occurred so late in human history, some 200,000 years after modern humans first emerged, or some 4,000 years on from the first real civilisations. Were the multitudinous generations that preceded those events not worthy of redemption?

Surely a truly rational approach would see the mathematician using his intellect to determine which parts of his religious inheritance are true and which are without foundation. A rational approach would result in a rational faith.

All of us are called to ponder deeply on the creation of the heavens and the earth with our God-given intellect. But this approach is much like the scientific endeavor. Not to start with a hypothesis and then work backwards to prove it true, but to truly engage with whatever data we have at our disposal in pursuit of the truth.