When is a Religious Belief Delusional?

[Angrboda]

B would need significant correction, still (imo).  The apparent order of the physical universe may, in fact, have no rational foundation.  It may be a brute fact.  

Though, I wouldn't take the possibility above as an endorsement, and it still needs to be parsed even further for relevance to the discussion..because, yes, with rigorous application math -could- describe the order in the universe, even if there's no underlying explanation for that order...but the fact that it can describe the order in the physical universe is explicable, that does have a rational explanation.

I think rather than addressing the question of the source of that order, Neo is here asking whether Poly's view implies that our perception of order in the universe is not rationally founded and justified. That the appearance of order is just an artifact of the arbitrary assignment of symbols, that there may be order, and it may have no reason for being or not, but that we can't infer order from perception because that perception is just a description which is arbitrary, a mere assigning symbols happenstance to things regardless of the true nature of things. Maybe Neo can say it better than I can. I haven't described it very well.

My question would be to doubt the whole concept of arbitrariness here. When we assign the word 'tree' to refer to a certain thing existing in the world, the relationship between the word and the world is no longer purely arbitrary. The language refers to real things, but the property of 'treeness' itself is simply arbitrary. Or something. I'm not sure I understand Poly's entire line of thought. I think, like many deep issues in philosophy, neither view is on target. There neither is any necessary truth existing in the universe which is simply described by math, nor is math purely constitutive of the apparent order of reality. Ultimately, I think math exists independent of reality and what we are examining through math is merely the concept of order in its various manifestations. Order itself needs no ultimate explanation in terms of Platonic forms or what have you, it simply is or it isn't. The variety of categories of order is something of an artifact of language, but it is not arbitrary. We evolved the concepts which we use to describe various aspects of order because they worked, we were able to make predictions based upon our correctly categorizing different aspects of that order. That there is a reality in which the relations and mathematical regularities of order as a phenomena exists does not imply that the "order of order itself" is something that exists in the world apart from our sorting the world into ordered and disordered phenomena. So that the world can be parsed into this group of four objects over here and the rest of the universe is an example of order existing in the universe to the extent that such a figure-ground conception of reality can be made, but that figure ground distinction is purely constructive. In that, I am a mereological nihilist. Distinctions such as those that math is based upon do not exist in the world. They only exist as mental behaviors or constructs. The four apples in front of me aren't in any essential sense different from the rest of the universe.