God As Grounding Cause

[robvalue]

Khem has responded well so I don't need to add much to that, thanks

It's one thing to say, "These are my assumptions based on my observations, which may or may not be correct, and here's a conclusion that follows based on the probability that they are". It's another to say, "These assumptions are correct, and here's the conclusion that follows and is definitely true."

In the latter case, you are building your whole argument on statements that cannot be false. That means you must know everything about reality in order to say it can't be false. (If it literally can't ever be false, just because of the way it is worded/defined, then it's just a tautology which actually tells us nothing.)

I covered the mathematics side earlier. You have to be careful not to conflate abstract, theoretical maths / set theory with applied maths. In the former, 2 + 2 = whatever you want, according to whatever rules you set up. The results of your system may or may not have any practical use, or even be internally consistent. That doesn't stop you though. In the latter case, we are trying to model reality with mathematical models. The symbols take on more meaning than just their abstract set theory counterparts. There's no guarantee that any rules from the latter hold up in the former uniformly, even if they do so for many observations. Again, it would require knowledge of the whole of reality.

How do we address all these issues? We use the scientific method. We produce provisional models that make testable predictions. Applying basic arithmetic to "counting" objects in reality is about the most basic example of this; so basic that people frequently conflate the abstract and real because of it.

Blah, blah, blah.... wow. I'm a real boring bastard. Maths is my background.