Beyond the universe and gods

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Non Sequitur + Slippery Slope = Nonsense

Religion has no foundation in empiricism, while mathematics does; thus, they are unrelated. In fact, the process of mathematical proofs is so rigorous that Bertram Russel -- arguable one of the history's greatest mathematicians -- needed 360 pages of his book "Principia Mathematica" to irrefutably prove that 1 + 1 = 2.

In all of the pages of all of history's religious writings, there is not one empirical proof that favors the existence of even one supernatural "god".

So you are saying that having faith entails believing there is a " bearded sky-daddy"?

To me it is totally irrational to apply mathemathical rules to something as subjective as language. But then you would want me to prove the whys of that statement. I have no need and obvious your need for proof is greater than mine.
It could be argued that this need of the scientific world for 'proof' is just a form of mass culturally induced OCD... inherited from some Ancient Greek dudes.

Language is ultimatelly no more than an output of neurochemical variables.
And how do you calculate something not knowing the variables?

A reductionist dismissal translating approximately to "I arbitrarily restrict the range of 'valid semantic references' to isomorphisms defined on semantic-phonetic, semantic-symbolic, and/or semantic-phonetic-symbolic spaces, while excluding all homeomorphisms of the semantic topology not members of the aforementioned vector-space subsets thereof, because reasons."



You have that backwards. An empiricist discipline* implements the greatest subset of the set of all mathematical knowledge available at the time of the discipline's creation** which is compatible with the cognitive structures of those performing said implementation.

I conceptualize Empiricism as "A set or sets of procedures for: (a) recursively iterating over finite sets of physical phenomena, over finite intervals of time, resulting in the extraction of finite sets of data; (b) recursively iterating over finite sets of data, over finite intervals of time, resulting in the extraction of finite sets of information; (c) recursively iterating over finite sets of information, over finite intervals of time, resulting in the extraction of finite sets of knowledge. I appreciate assistance in debugging definitions, so if you can provide a refutation or counterexample I would sincerely welcome that.

Otherwise, you may have noticed my repetition of 'finite sets' and 'finite intervals'. I bring it up because it highlights a major problem with your position, the same problem that (or more specifically, a problem semantically-homeomorphic to that which) Kurt Gödel pointed out with the program of the Principia Mathematica : a model of an nth-order theory embedded within an nth-order theory is necessarily either inconsistent and/or incomplete.

Logicism tries to get around this by instantiating an (n + 1)-th order theory in which to embed their nth-order model. This approach is obviously valid, but violates a primary premise of logicism - that mathematics can be reduced to logic. If logic must grow in complexity to accomplish that, then what occurs is not reduction but translation.

With respect to empiricism, the incompleteness theorems presents a greater challenge: if the universe is comprised solely of information in different formats, some of these formats being the rules by which the interactions of other formats are defined - and this seems to be the current best-fit model of the data sets empiricism has produced to date - and if nothing beyond the universe can be accessed from within the universe, then there is no theorem of order (U + 1) [where U is the cardinality of the universe] within which a consistent & complete empirical model of the universe can be embedded. Thus, there is an asymptotic limit to the resolution achievable by any empirically derived model of reality.

tl;dr empiricism cannot capture truth, it can only generate approximations of truth with captured data. That is the opposite of mathematics, which generates approximations of the data with captured truth.



I assume you meant Bertrand Russell, who co-wrote the Principia Mathematica with Alfred North Whitehead, whose name you might recognize from the quote in my signature. Guess whose name is listed on the cover first? (Hint: it isn't the one you dropped.)

Gödel definitively proved the futility of that endeavor. Whitehead understood and embraced that, and churned out Process Philosophy as a result. Russell kept weaving new arguments to patch over the holes in his necessarily-incomplete prior arguments, apparently never catching on that just because you're an atheist, doesn't mean you can't fall victim to incessant questing for a god-of-the-gaps.

I don't want you to get the idea that I don't respect Russell and/or his work. I truly do. His later work was incomparably more accessible than Whitehead's later work, and that's extremely important. But that's also why I suspect you'll find that a significant majority of those in the "Russell was one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century" (let alone all of history) work in the applications of mathematics rather than the development of mathematics. Which, again, is extremely important but doesn't at all support your claim that mathematics is developed empirically.



There is no such thing as an empirical proof. Empirical inquiry yields evidence, which can never prove but only disprove.

The a priori is not the mere construction of the a posteriori, just as the a posteriori is not the mere division of the a priori. Reality is the union of both. Set and function, state and process, space and structure.

Positivists who haven't gotten on board with critical rationalism are to empiricism; as Young Earth Creationists are to Christianity.

* Substitute department, field of research, school of thought, etc. to taste.

** Or reformation, reorganization, etc.