Superstition

A few weeks ago I watched a TV programme where a group of people were put inside a closed room with a set of apparently unrelated objects such as toys, pieces of furniture, bells, etc. The people were told that it was a game and the end was, as in any other game, to score as many points as possible. However, the rules to make this happen were not given: they had to find out these rules by themselves. The participants started moving the objects randomly always observing the score displayed on a wall, and every time the score went up they tried to repeat the action they performed immediately before. What they didn't know was that the score was not linked to their actions but to those of a fish in a fishbowl. Each time the fish crossed to the other side of the bowl the score went up. Still, the participants in the room had developed a series of rules that seemed to work, a series of rules that, knowing what the audience knew about the whole situation, can be paralleled to superstition.

Superstition is generally accepted as the opposite to science. Superstition is belief; science is corroborated fact. To what extent is this true? Nature laws appear to be always valid and we are taught that if they fail just once then they must be rejected and replaced. This has made science a pretty robust body of knowledge, and mathematics, being the favourite language of scientists, appears to be also the language of God. However, how can we make sure that this is true? How do we know with absolute certainty that God used maths to design and create the Universe and its governing laws? Mathematics is, after all, just another invention of our mind and it might be that, despite the amazing correspondence between analytical formulas and Nature's behaviour, this was not conceived in mathematical form. It might be that, instead, it depends of what a holy fish does in a holy fishbowl in God's living room.