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Old 12-13-2005, 01:18 AM
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Default Re: For (kind-of) Atheists

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Math is simply a way to describe our world.

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No it isn't, not solely. A portion of mathematics can be used to describe the world, but most of it has no application.

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It most certainly is invented. I could reinvent the entire mathematical system but instead of 1+1=2, 1+1=4.

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Exercise: work out what the implications of asserting that 1+1=4 are. With standard interpretations, this is a contradiction and you can use it to prove anything. It is possible to make sense of this (addition modulo 2), but you have changed the meanings of the terms (you must involve equivalence classes).

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I feel that religious types see their religion as the only way it could ever work, and such it is easy to view as bogus. Mathematicians accept that their science is relative.

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On the contrary, mathematicians usually think they are discovering unchangable, necessary truths, either because they believe that mathematics has a timeless existence of its own (Platonism), that mathematics consists essentially only of formal derivations from axioms (formalism), or because mathematics is ultimately grounded by conceptual mechanisms that are universal for all humans.
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