“There is an old debate,” Erdos liked to say, “about whether you create mathematics or just discover it. In other words, are the truths already there, even if we don’t yet know them?”
Erdos had a clear answer to this question: Mathematical truths are there among the list of absolute truths, and we just rediscover them. Random graph theory, so elegant and simple, seemed to him to belong to the eternal truths. Yet today we know that random networks played little role in assembling our universe. […]
Not privy to nature’s laws in creating the brain and society, Erdos hazarded his best guess in assuming that God enjoys playing dice. His friend Albert Einstein, at Princeton, was convinced of the opposite: “God does not play dice with the universe.”
— Albert-László Barabási in Linked