Leap year, pi, and God
Richness and irregularity make God's world a much more interesting place.
“I think the significance of the leap year,” scientist Alexander Boxer, speaking on the U.S.’s National Public Radio, said, “is that it’s a great reminder that the universe is really good at defying our attempts to devise nice and pretty and aesthetically pleasing systems to fit it in.” When I heard this, I immediately substituted the word “God” for “the universe” and realized that God has a sense of humour we would do well to acknowledge.
Thirteen years ago, I wrote a column about pi and other irrational numbers (February 2011) and commented that our Lord did not need to have an irrational number to define the relationship between the diameter and circumference of a circle. If space were not flat but had an intrinsic curvature, then pi could be equal to 3 instead of 3.14159 . . . God permitted his creation to have this very strange number as an essential part of its structure.
Now we have once again had a February with 29 days. This is due to the same strangeness of God’s creation. It takes the Earth 365.24219 days to circle the sun. Thus, to make our calendar work, we must add a day every now and then. Every year that can be divided by four has an extra day in February. But to make the years come out right, when the year is divisible by 100, we don’t add the extra day, unless it’s also divisible by 400, in which case we do. That is because the earth’s course around the sun does not take an even 365.25 days, but just a little less.
It would have been easy for God to give our planet a bit more speed, only 0.0663 percent faster, and get us around the sun in exactly 365 days. Or he could have made the earth go even a little faster so that it took only 360 days to circle the sun. We could have had 12 months of 30 days each, saving us the trouble of memorizing which months have 31, 30, and 28/29 days.
Irrational numbers
Looking more broadly at the universe, we see these irregularities everywhere. In mathematics, irrational numbers are essential to our general understanding of numbers. (This is true even without considering imaginary numbers like the square root of negative one.) When we look around at trees, their branches are hardly precise mathematically. And when we look at the stars in the night sky, they appear to be scattered apparently at random.
The only way I can understand this non-simple way the creation is structured is to believe that God wants this richness, and perhaps to say the Creator has a sense of humour. When I look at scripture, I see the same complexity. Theologians have always struggled to systematically understand God and our place in the creation. This richness and irregularity make God’s world a much more interesting place.
