(October 8, 2018 at 12:39 am)Rahn127 Wrote: Numbers are labels we put on a defined quantity of existing items.It seems likely that this is how people started thinking about numbers. As math progressed, we now have irrational numbers, imaginary numbers, negative numbers, and other things that go beyond simply labeling quantities of existing things.
Based on simple evidence of how we think about things, we end up with a world we know through logic and not through sense experience.
Probably there's a very large prime number that no human has ever thought or written down. Does it exist, even though no one has ever thought it? Or does it exist somewhere, waiting for us to find it? A lot of people think that such numbers are real things, despite being non-tangible, or even not being directly mappable onto physical reality.
I'm not saying God is a number, of course. And I'm aware that lots of people in history have said different things about their religions, which aren't compatible with the Platonic or Aristotelian traditions.
Still, I think it's misguided to demand direct sense experience of a thing which educated believers have said from the beginning is not something you can sense.