When is a Religious Belief Delusional?

[Angrboda]

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.

I see math as a very complex game with well defined rules. We assume the axioms and rules of deduction, which correspond to the initial position in a board game and the rules of movement. We can then use those axioms and rules of deduction, after a great deal of work, as a language that allows us to model patterns we see in our observations.

But, in no way are the assumed axioms and rules of deduction *forced* by any aspect of the real world. They are convenient assumptions we make that allow for a very expressive language. We can then use that language to help us understand the world around us.

Another aspect: a great deal of modern mathematics does *not* help us model things in the real world. That aspect that does is fairly small, in fact. And that aspect was, mostly, *designed* by us to be able to make such models.

Still struggling. But as an aside, if only a part of mathematics corresponds with reality, I'm not sure that isn't guaranteed to be true as a consequence of Ramsey theory. What would seem to be needed is for all of mathematical truths to have a corresponding real world representation, and that doesn't appear to be the case. There appear to be whole questions whose resolution appeals to pragmatic concerns about the correspondance itself rather than reading the appropriate mathematical assumptions off the reality, as it were. In that case, the math is chosen because it corresponds to reality, rather than the math being driven by the reality.

Regardless, as noted, I don't think these questions are really relevant to the original question of religious delusion. We don't think of mathematical truths the same as theists perceive of God, with the possible exception of extreme Platonists like Neo, who, arguably, don't believe in God at all. Moreover, our thoughts about mathematics are epistemologically qualified differently than the existential claims of theists are. So bringing up math, universals, and forms really misses the mark.