God, Santa, and The Tooth Fairy

[The Grand Nudger]

Now if all the numbers we use in daily life are symbols or referents, to what exactly are they referring? 

You ask this question as though you've never done any math in your daily life?  Commonly, they refer to quantities and distances.  The value of defining your variables.  Not a standard 2 in a vault in zurich..though, just for reference..we do actually keep standard units of this or that in vaults sometimes.

If I asked you to double a recipe then I've asked you to do math.  2x.  2x one cup and 2x one teaspoon will give you different solutions, though.  2x can refer to different things, we can write it in different fonts (or express it in different languages), construct the recipe out of steel and make it 500 feet high, or..yes, even put it in a vault somewhere. Does this suggest that there are immaterial volumes? An immaterial cup? An immaterial teaspoon? When I ask you for two cups of flour and two teaspoons of sugar...at what point do you think I'm referring to anything immaterial? You may think a thing is ludicrous, but it isn't for any of the comments above that you've decided so, in mere reality.

You might be thinking of ideals, certainly not math in our daily lives, but since we've already decided that ideas are, despite long confusion to that effect, physical things that do have materiality, extension, location......the realm of ideas is no longer interchangeable with the realm of the immaterial. This notion misinformed alot of people, especially people who very much wanted there to be an ideal world with an ideal maker. They noticed that the ideal tree was not the same as a tree..it was different, distinct. Just as the elephant in your head is different from an elephant. The trouble..is that for all the difference between things in ideal spaces and things in what we otherwise call real spaces..materiality wasn't one of them. The idea of the thing is not the thing..but its just as material as the thing. The idea of two cups is not two cups..but both have material volume. This letter A is not a cow...but both the a and the cow are physical objects. We could go on and on and on with symbolic language this way.

In the end, if you're holding out hope for some immaterial anything..it's probably not a great look to list off a bunch of unremarkably true things, and then declare them to be ridiculous as pretext for insisting on what you believe in for entirely different and completely unspoken reasons. This is what frustrates me about so many convos on this board or anywhere else about our religious beliefs. People, apparently, would rather try and fail at some doomed apologetic claptrap than simply share what they do believe and why they believe it.

You aren't convinced in the immaterial because of numbers. You aren't completely stumped by what numbers refer to in our daily lives..and you don't..really..think any of those unremarkably true things you listed off are ridiculous. You just realize that they don't get you to the place you want to go.