TheGeckomancer

I think that in the case of hard atheists this is true. I am what I call an Effective Atheist. I acknowledge that there may or may not be a god, but it is totally irrelevant to my life. Even scientifically proving god's existence doesn't mean anything to me besides another fact. The problem is it's close minded and unscientific to exclude anything that hasn't been entirely ruled out. But that's about as far as it goes, embracing the idea of a god is just as close minded. Neutrality is the only open minded stance.

No. All of it. In the cases where Mathematical predictions CANNOT be perfectly accurate, that amount of uncertainty is inherent in that mathematical system and a fundamental part of it's structure. But this does force me to reword what I previously said. "Whenever a prediction is not correct it's human error, not a flaw in math." Whenever a prediction is not as accurate as it can be (up to and including perfectly) it is human error not mathematical. I looked into Reification fallacy and found it to be slightly confusing there seems to be 2 separate fallacies tied into one argument here. Reification is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete, real event, or physical entity. [1][2] In other words, it is the error of treating something which is not concrete, such as an idea, as a concrete thing. A common case of reification is the confusion of a model with reality: "the map is not the territory". Let's say I lived in apartment complex. Inside apartment with the stupid halls you have to exit before you leave the building. Every single day before I go to work I see a newspaper in front of my neighbor's door and when I get home it's gone. I have never seen this neighbor, but I have indirect evidence supporting his existence, so now I establish an idea, I have a neighbor I have never seen. If I hear banging next door and yell for them to keep it quiet am I treating an idea as a concrete thing? I have said it before. I don't think there will ever be a way to directly observe or verify math, only indirectly through countless tests that conclude it's accuracy. Likewise, I can never see my neighbor but constantly work to construct evidence of his existence by using information I am able to gather. The second part of the reification fallacy states Reification takes place when natural or social processes are misunderstood and/or simplified; for example, when human creations are described as "facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will".[3] Reification can also occur when a word with a normal usage is given an invalid usage, with mental constructs or concepts referred to as live beings. My argument from the beginning has been that math is NOT a man made creation. Inventors get to decide how to put their inventions together and how the end result works. No one got to do that with math. It only works one way period. All we could do was figure out the already existing rules. It wasn't invented it was discovered. And discoveries are objective parts of reality. Physical or not.

I can't resist nitpicking the nitpick..... I was never arguing that I thought those things were irreducibly complex. It really doesn't matter if fire and wind are events or things if the people of ancient times thought they were the bedrock elements that made all things.

I can think of situations where mathematical predictions CANNOT be perfectly accurate. I can also think of mathematical predictions I can make that are perfectly accurate. The ability to be perfectly accurate is.......Well kind of insane. But sorry, going to look up the fallacy thing now.

It is not useful for predicting phenomena. Useful implies that it's accuracy has limits, knowing card counting and statistic is useful for cheating at poker but it doesn't guarantee wins. Whenever a prediction is not correct it's human error, not a flaw in math. I do not know about reification fallacy, I will look into this and get back to you. I may be. Not sure.

Not going to argue that.

This is a fair point. But what happens to my question if we add the word "nearly" before "perfectly accurate"? Does the validity drop to 0? I don't think so.

Language does not define science. I do not have to be able to even use language to perform science, I can still observe the world, form hypotheses about the universe, establish tests, verify my results and reach my conclusions without language. It would be harder but I can. And I would not be able to share that information with anyone but it wouldn't be less true.

I don't know a single tool that can't be used creatively or destructively. So you may want to rephrase your question. But I lean towards money brings out the worst in people.

I wasn't disagreeing with you. I am simply saying there is nothing to tie in between saying "Is god needed to explain the universe? and "Is religion true?" they are totally different questions. I was trying to make that point earlier by saying even if we scientifically proved god's existence tomorrow nothing in my life would change.

Again. You have used WAY more words than necessary. Stop with the fluff man. I can sum up your entire post in the following sentences. "I am tired of arguing, in what I feel are circles, and I am not an elitist. (I apologize for this part but I don't know a nice way to say it.) And since I could not establish myself as the clear winner of this conversation that means there is an equal likelihood you are as wrong as me." I asked a straight forward question. Give me an answer to it that doesn't require wittgenstein himself to decypher and I will admit you have made a huge step toward debunking my argument.

According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, between 2006 and 2010 a total of 303 children under age 5 years old drown in just bathtubs (see page 8). If you include bathtubs used in conjunction with other products (infant bath seats placed in bathtubs), there is a total of 346 children under age 5 years old who drown. Since these deaths wouldn’t have occurred without a full-size bathtub, it seems as if they should also be included in the total. By contrast, over that same period, the Centers for Disease Control finds that there were 291 children under age 15 and 94 children under 5 who died from accidental gun shots. Unfortunately, the CPSC doesn’t break down deaths by age for those 5 and above. Since both of these mortality rates are negligible you would have to convince me gun mortality was something like 20 times that to even merit worth looking at. Chldren get intentionally murdered through non gun means all the time. Suffocation being most common. Also. I know my figures only showed accidental shootings. But there is not a lot of logic for the argument to take away guns to prevent intentional shootings. Firstly, this is a darwinian process, people lacking impulse control remove themselves from the gene pool. Taking away guns does not fix the problem it hides it, and in the future this becomes a HUGE problem. See technology empowers, what do we do when everyone has 3d printers and we develop more lethal more compact weapons? Make laws against it? What good does that do? Secondly, limiting a method of violence does NOTHING to treat the underlying desire for violence. If no one wanted to hurt someone else intentionally there would be no intentional shootings. Frankly guns are not even a symptom of the disease.

I am genuinely not sure about this question. I would say most if not all things in objective reality are defined by math. Our perceptions though, are not rooted in objective reality and has lots of non quantifiable elements to it.

This is the problem most scientists have with religion. I don't care about your testimony, give me facts, hard testable data that can be corroborated and duplicated. God is actually a totally separate question from religion though. One most people don't know how to separate.

It wasn't a conclusion it was a question. One I genuinely want the answer to. If you are using a socratic style here thats cool but I don't fully understand your question. Are the operators + and -? And why would I have to conclude that is the entire universe? Maybe I am missing it but this makes a lot of leaps.

So maybe I should have said swimming pool accidents. Even more mundane than fire. Should we also take away containers that can hold enough water to immerse yourself in? But I can also inhale water from a cup......

Lets try this. Answer my question. If math is not a fundamental part of nature, how can we make predictions of a mathematical nature in a vacuum about the real world and have them be perfectly accurate?

My point this whole time has been to say numbers are real nonphysical objects. You are asking me to counter my own argument to provide you evidence of something I don't think is there. We cannot directly observe everything. We use indirect observation for a LOT of science. Dark matter is a perfect example. If I asked you to bring me a cup of dark matter you would not really be able to. That doesn't mean it isn't there.

I am not confusing any phenomenon. Non mathematical language is NOT used to predict phenomenon, unless you mean "I reckon the sun will rise tomorrow" that is not even a prediction that is a prediction of a basic absolutely repeating pattern, that is the most sophisticated predictions standard language can make. I mean the universe is constant as in we can wake up today and expect everything to still be behaving the same way it was yesterday. Actually a better way of saying this is. Standard language cannot predict things we haven't observed. Math can, and perfectly accurately. That is a HUGE problem to resolve before saying math is something we made up. We also made up english but it does NOT allow us to do that.

I think this whole topic implies a false choice. I actually do not like guns, do not own a gun, and do not care about guns. But saying guns are dangerous so people shouldn't have them is upsetting on a lot of levels. Fire is dangerous should we remove stoves from people's houses? I would wager more children die every year in house fires than shootings. And if you then say it's a weapon okay so? Knives are too, and again, more children injured with those then guns. And finally, why does it always come down to "the children"? This is a massive twisting of society that has allowed for some pretty horrible repercussions. Or as George Carlin described it "The fetishizing of children". The implication that every single aspect of society exists for them. And if your argument then becomes "what if it was your child"? If it was my child and you so much as look at him/her wrong (I have no kids) and this causes him/her to cry I would want to kill you. But should society be governed by the wants of a person when talking about their most irrational topic?

I am not sure I understand how this would work. A point is hypothetical in the first place. It kind of IS nothing. If you put a point IN nothing then you cannot mathematically relate it to anything. I think in that context is doesn't exist. I think you can say a 0d point can exist as long as we describe it relation-ally to the things around it.

Then how come math has been used to accurately predict the existence of real things decades before we were able to test it, such as particles? That seems to be a direct violation, that is not building on knowledge, that was something entirely hypothetical and mathematical in nature applied to reality and turned out to be true. To me there is not logical stance to take that says math is not a part of the natural world. Some try the argument that math is a language we use to describe the world and we refine that language to make more and more accurate statements. That actually makes sense except for the predictions problem. Which is a huge one. If math not a part of the natural world then we could not use it for predictions about unknowns. If we observed any system long enough we would be able to describe it perfectly mathematically and make perfect mathematical predictions about it because the universe is constant. But that would be the end. There would be no reason for one mathematical system to be applicable anywhere else. In fact it's illogical for it to do so. That's one of the things that gives real credence to the "universe is a computer simulation" theory. It explains why math is a fundamental part of the nature of the universe.

.... Are you trolling me right now? Would you prefer me to say things humans create? We did not make the sun, we discovered the sun. It is an objective part of reality. Granted we did not have to work hard to discover the sun. We discover these underlying principles to the universe through indirect observation and mathematics. We then create (something that can be subjective or objective) mathematical predictions based on our observations. Also, would it be clearer to you if I said that we are still discovering reality day by day?

It won't let me edit my post again. I realized I didn't strictly answer your question. We won't know until we have officially answered every question science can answer,

^There is no non mathematical way to describe relationships of size, position, orientation, velocity, or mass accurately. It doesn't matter if you explicitly use numbers. In fact a lot of equations ARE sentences, just written with symbols because mathematicians and logicians LOVE simplest possible expressions.