When is a Religious Belief Delusional?

[polymath257]

What do you mean by a mathematical object?  That's a term of art, and it's not clear what your question is.

I say that triangularity would exist in potential even if the physical universe had never come into being to manifest objects that sentient organisms would recognize as triangular.  Is my belief in triangularity wrong or delusional?

Well, it is clearly wrong. It could also be delusional depending on the meaning of the phrase 'exist in potential'. Do you believe in the actual existence of possible worlds?

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While how triangularity works is indeed a mystery, we have little doubt that triangularity in general exists, even if we don't understand it.  It's an interesting question, but rather beside the point here.  If by a mathematical "object" then you're referring to things like triangularity, or mathematical notions such as number, or mathematical objects like the Mandelbrot set, then you haven't aquitted your analogy.  We don't think that any of these things "exist" in the same sense that we think God exists.

I appreciate your well thought-out post and wonder, to what extent we are now debating a matter of degrees rather than of kind.

My primary concern of this thread is what I believe to be a mischaracterization of religious beliefs, most specifically the existence of God, as delusional albeit in a weak sense. IMHO using terms like delusional is overly inflammatory because of the connotations with mental illness and/or deficiency. From your previous statements I take it that you are not opposed to using delusion to denote beliefs you consider more than simply mistaken, perhaps indicative of shirking some intellectual duty.

I agree that the remarkable correspondence between mathematics, which is wholly conceptual, and material reality is a deep mystery. No analogy is perfect. I was merely trying to set a minimum baseline example. It is not uncommon to believe that mathematical truths are discovered rather than invented. As such there is at a minimum a tacit acknowledgment of a metaphysical component to mathematics that cannot be reduced to the properties of physical objects and the interior physical reactions of particularly complex walking and squawking electrochemical reactions.

My basic position is that even a severely limited notion of Platonic Ideas is not different in kind from the notion of Divinity. Clearly, the Classical concept of God has be developed to a much greater degree, and perhaps in some sense is more speculative because it depends more on premises derived from personal experience than it does on self-evident axioms. The Christian conception of God further relies on the acceptance of the NT documents as historically grounded. It seems to me being less axiomatic does not itself indicate of a flawed application of anyone’s rational faculties or moral deficiency on the part of those holding religious views.

Let me give an example. Was the game of chess invented or discovered? I think we would agree it was invented. Now that it has been invented, do we invent or discover the best chess move for a given position? I would say we discover it.

The situation is very similar in mathematics. We invent the mathematical system and then discover the consequences of our assumptions.

I see you still think that math is based on 'self-evident axioms'. Perhaps you want to get up to date and study some of the math in the last 2 centuries.