The complexity of the real world is unfathomably vast to us. We have just fabricated some formulas, trying to approximate a working theoretical model based on the inaccurate data we have - because you need to start somewhere. Sometimes the formulas we use even require constants that do not seem to make sense when placed in context of the real situation they are supposed to describe. And they might not make sense because they are just not true. These formulas are tools that we use though, because they have practical applications. The accuracy of the data they predict, coincides to the precision of the data we have measured, and that's good enough for the real world, more often than not. Math itself is a tool which we invented. At first it was barely arithmetic, but we evolved it to contain zero, negatives, fractions, imaginary, complex, formulas, algorithms... We even invented several incompatible systems, who all have to rely on some rules we created and called axioms. These axioms are arbitrary, they are not created by the universe. WE created them, in hopes of understanding the universe. I think that "neither understand nor deserve" is only an exaggeration to describe his awe for what humanity has achieved so far, relying on theories grounded in estimations of reality, that neither always align to what's true, nor always make complete sense. In this aspect I believe that "understand" and "deserve", put together, are a spectrum that covers everything from "we know nothing" to "we have the true unified theory of everything" and I would have to agree with him in my interpretation of his statement: We are not even halfway there (the unified theory of everything) - and that's a target for some people. Still we can reap the benefits, of all we have been gifted with by our collective scientific intellect thus far - and that was always the target for most people.