4

Religion is the crux of the problem. I had a girl tell me once that she believed math in all its elegance and glory was proof that there was a higher being watching over all of creation. She didn't need to observe the incredible unlikelihood of a species evolving to a point where the creation of new languages was almost a forgone conclusion. She didn't need to see the splendor of an asteroid's tail, or study the water cycle, or understand the underpinnings of electromagnetism, or really be aware of any number of truly beautiful coincidences. All she needed to keep the faith was a Fibonacci sequence.
"Do you know what a Mersenne prime is?" she asked me, before explaining why she believed it to be the ultimate proof that people are here for a reason. "A Mersenne prime is a prime number in the form of 2 to the nth minus 1. It so happens that in every Mersenne prime the term that 2 is raised to is also prime. How beautiful is that?"
I didn't have the heart to tell her that I thought it was about as beautiful as a car crash. That it sounds to me like a Mersenne prime serves even less of a purpose than an ordinary prime number, and the only reason we know anything about them at all is because some rubber-necker decided to stop the flow of society just to observe the wreckage.
"It sounds magical. It really puts things in perspective," interrupted my terrible habit of being polite. "Maybe you could parlay that into a theology dissertation."