[sweetjazz]

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I see what you're saying, but the one thing that steers me away from this view is that math would still exist whether man had been around to invent it or not. If both math and religion were never invented, math would still exist. The earth would still have 1 moon and not 2. Can the same be said for religion? If religion had never been discovered would it's very nature lend itself to existence? I say no. But I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts if you could argue that religion could exist without discovery or invention.

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I don't think what you are saying is that math would exist without people, but rather that objective facts that math describes would still hold. (So 1 moon plus 1 moon would still be 2 moons. But this is not a mathematical fact, anymore than 2 + 1 = 1 is a mathematical fact because 2 hydrogren atoms plus 1 oxygen atom produces 1 water molecule. Of course, the laws of addition don't apply in the real world unless we are adding "likes", which is why your first example is fine. It's a physical law that we can add "likes" and what we get satisfies the axioms of addition.)

Without people, religion would not exist, but it's entirely possible for God to exist objectively without people. Presumably if God does exist and humans become extinct, God will continue to exist.

So I don't see the distinction you are trying to get at. Math depends on human choices (what axiomatic systems we study), but physical laws presumably hold without human existence. Religion depends on human choices (what people believe about God), but the existence of an entity having the properties commonly used to define God is presumably possible without human existence.