Should number or figure take precedence? Far from being merely a technical debate among mathematicians, this question has major implications for the relationship with God cultivated by the mystical mathematician Blaise Pascal.

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) is best known for his Principia Mathematica, a major work published in three volumes between 1910 and 1913. Co-written with Bertrand Russell, this monumental undertaking laid the foundations of logical formalism by synthesizing the various forms of algebra inherited from the 19th^{th} century.
Whitehead's development of a metaphysics of the cosmos, an unprecedented speculative undertaking pursued during the latter part of his life, is less well known. Whitehead places mathematics at the heart of this enterprise, while remaining convinced that "the universe could not exist without God, even if God does not create it ex nihilo ." Without God, existing reality is unintelligible, so an atheistic metaphysics would be self-contradictory. Although mathematics does not allow Whitehead to prove God's existence, it gives him an argument for making the possibility that God does not exist philosophically inexplicable—which is already no small thing: mathematics reveals a real abstract order that presupposes a selection and a coherence among possibilities. The laws of logic would therefore be opaque without God. Whitehead thus invites us to move the question of God out of the traditional realm of proof and into that of reality's intelligibility. Moreover, Whitehead's God cannot admit any separation between mind and matter, and it is the role of mathematics to forge this connection between the two.
In Process and Reality (1935), written in an already deeply disenchanted age when religion had been relegated to the margins, the philosopher proposed an original theory of Creation intended to reconcile God and nature. He introduced a separate entity, independent of the flux of things, that guides the "process" from outside (the French translation uses procès for the English process, which should therefore be understood in the sense of "processus"). The principle underlying the order of nature is thus inexplicable, placing an ultimate limit on rationality.