RE: Religion and Science are 1000% Opposite
September 13, 2017 at 3:36 pm
(This post was last modified: September 13, 2017 at 3:38 pm by Neo-Scholastic.)
(September 13, 2017 at 1:51 pm)Mathilda Wrote:(September 13, 2017 at 11:09 am)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: Matilda, you are so ignorant and misguided I don't even know where to begin. So I guess if I had to to choose just one example of your idiocy it would be mathematics as a human invention. Are you saying that the value of pi is not an objective fact that is independent of any sentient being's knowledge of it? That strains credulity.
Your credulity perhaps, but yes I am saying that.
Pi is a concept. It does not exist in reality. It cannot because there is no such thing as a perfect circle in existence, so how can pi exist? You cannot have a perfect circle because if you look at what you thought was one at a small enough scale you will find imperfections, even if you drew a circle with pixels of the planck length. If you could go smaller than this, you can't, then you'd be chasing infinity.
But let's look at the value of pi 3.14159 ...
A value that needs to be calculated to infinite precision otherwise it's not actually pi. But let's just take the most significant digit 3.
3 is also a concept, like all other integers. It is humans that are deciding that there can be one of something. I could show you an apple, but it would be you deciding that it's one apple. I could just as easily argue that it's not an apple at all but a small part of a tree or an even smaller part of an ecosystem. This is because nothing in this universe exists in isolation. Everything is part of a larger environment. But it's more convenient to ask for an apple than a small part of a tree so we use labels.
The concept of zero hasn't always existed and zero is considered a number. Like all Maths it was invented because there was a need for it. Like imaginary numbers for example, or Einstein tensors. There are different branches of Mathematics and new Maths is still being invented today. And sometimes arbitrary decisions have needed to be made to get the system to work. For example, what is the value of zero to the power of zero?
Theists talk about logic existing without the presence of humans but they don't say which form of logic. Do they mean first order predicate calculus? Propositional logic? Syllogistic logic? Modal logic? Computational logic?
It may be difficult for theists to understand because they tend to suffer from binary religious thinking, but true and false are also concepts. Not all forms of logic even use these concepts, e.g. fuzzy logic. If something being singular and integer values are only human concepts then there cannot be an absolute true or false value. Show me something that is absolutely true or false and I will point out where human made concepts relying on those values are being used.
The word "Apple" wouldn't exist were it not for humans. It's part of a greater language. Maths and logic are also languages used to describe things and to reason about them.
You do realize, don't you, that you are arguing against the intelligibility of reality and the efficacy of reason? Would the principle of noncontradiction be true even if no sentient being existed to express it symbolically?