In this episode of Wanderings with Ashaley Koblah, the Cartesian plane becomes more than mathematics. Ashaley traces its beauty from calculus and spacetime to sacred scripture, pondering whether Descartes was not only a thinker of reason but a man moved by divine purpose. Between geometry and eternity, the heavens stretch out like gauze, and every star becomes a point in the divine equation. Transcript Wanderings with Ashaley Koblah Episode 10: Of Descartes and God To those who can relate. In the quiet chaos of my embattled mind, free, for a moment, from the distractions of this ending world, a revelation came to me. We so often overlook just how revolutionary and ingenious the Cartesian coordinate system is, or what some might simply call the Cartesian plane. It allows us, intelligent sentient beings, to express the complexities of our universe in simpler, more manageable forms, whether we’re dealing with differentiable or non-differentiable functions, integrable or non-integrable ones, or even the abstract realms of number theory, probability, and the time dimension in spacetime geometry, which so often find surprising clarity when visualised this way. Many foundational ideas in calculus, like limits, find natural expression on the Cartesian plane. And from this perspective, I begin to understand, even if only in part, why mathematics makes such perfect sense and why it works so well in helping us interpret the structure of our natural world. Perhaps it’s because our reality, in some abstract sense, resembles a plane, a vast, conceptual space stretching from infinity to infinity. It strikes our wonder, like that of the precocious child who once wondered aloud and asked her teacher one of the most beautiful and profound questions: “What is bigger – our imagination or the universe?” I find myself imagining Descartes inspired not just by logic, but by the sacred, perhaps even by words like those in Isaiah 40:22: “He is stretching out the heavens like a fine gauze.” And everything in those heavens? Just vector points in space. Reflective interlude As I read these thoughts aloud. I found myself pondering a quote I once came across. It struck me like a mathematical bell in the dark. For if each star is little more a mathematical point... ...It’s the idea that the stars, countless, shining, distant, are each just mathematical points. But taken together, they hint at something vast. Something whole. Something divine. To God, it may be one simple, singular equation. What Einstein would later capture as the field equations, governing spacetime, curvature, and the very motion of galaxies. It made me pause. Rene Descartes must have believed in God. And the more I searched, the more certain I became. He was not only a mathematician. But a devout Christian. And I could not be more convinced that he, too, was inspired by the sacred. By the simple yet staggering verse from Isaiah 40:22, He is stretching out ... Perhaps, in that moment, the Cartesian plane was not just a breakthrough but an act of worship. Outro In the next episode... ... Join me for Episode 11: A Beautiful Goodbye.
