MikeL
Go Fish
Andre Weil- "God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it." I think he said this after Godel's work.
MikeL
Go Fish
As for the environment, my dad always said,"Don't sh_t where you eat". Or maybe where other generations eat, if you care about that.
Gabriel M.A.
My Red Dot Glows For You
Elegant, if crude, synthesis. Small wonder most animals abide by that.MikeL said:
M
Magus
Guest
Post deleted by posters request
fgianni
Trainee Amateur
Gabriel M.A. said:
True Gabriel, but if you read my post carefully you will notice that I did not say that mathemathics can prove everything, Goedel actually proved that any (non trivial) formal system is incomplete, and that within every formal system there are true statement that can't be proved to be true, and false statements that can't be proved to be false.
My point was that once a statement has been proved to be true (and becomes a theorem) within the framework of the axioms used to form the basis of the formal system, that statement can be considered irrefutably proven, and this is not true for any other discipline.
About the proof of the existence of God, it may seem blunt but I think it s a job for idiots, if God existence could be proved, that would automatically cancel any need for faith (since believing in something that has been proven does not require any faith at all), thus negating the very reason for religion to exist.
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aizan
Veteran
who says god likes religion? 
fgianni
Trainee Amateur
aizan said:who says god likes religion?
Very wise point, a lot of people think that believing in God and being religious are the same thing, others believe that religion does not come from God, it comes from men.
It is a distinction worth making, there is no proof that, if there is a God, religion has anything to do with it.
Pherdinand
the snow must go on
fgianni is completely right, belief does not need proof. It makes no sense to mix the two and start proving something one believes in.
Gabriel M.A.
My Red Dot Glows For You
I didn't say you did; sorry, I went on my own tangent there. We're doing a lot of that here.fgianni said:
Mathematics can prove at least that I am not the best when it comes to numbers, though.
Somehow I've been able to do some pretty far-out math in my head, but normal, uncomplicated math, I'm dumb as a doorknob. What were we talking about? Oh, yeah. Go, Gophers!
rxmd
May contain traces of nut
It's the same thing, however, that makes mathematics really fall short a bit in comparison with the natural sciences; if you think about science in a very strict way (as in formulation of hypotheses and testing them against observable evidence), then mathematics isn't really a science, as there is no observable evidence to test it against and mathematical reasoning has no way of "testing" things beyond consistency checks against its own axioms. It's really more like a thought exercise in finding out what weird things you can derive starting from a few simple axioms; in this respect it is not unlike philosophy, technically not a science either under a narrow definition. Maths is considered a science largely by convention, because it's taught in universities and because it's such a useful tool for many sciences.fgianni said:
Philipp
ywenz
Veteran
fgianni said:
The need for religion has nothing to do with faith. Organized religion has always been a method to control people and leave the power to rule in the hands of the few.
Gabriel M.A.
My Red Dot Glows For You
Well, Mathematics is the science of numbers, wouldn't you agree? Everything about the study of numbers can be solidly verified by its laws, most theorems and axioms. Quantities in the real world are real. Let's not confuse one nonapplication of a study as a complete fallacy of the whole, if it is not founded on it.rxmd said:
The study of numbers in Mathematics is more rigid and verifiable than, say, Numerology and Philosophy. Nature is also rigid, but many things are yet to be verified; on wouldn't think that by this the studies related to it could not be sciences.
It's dangerous to assert that something is a science mainly because it's a useful tool for many sciences and it's taught in universities. In that case, Rhetoric would be a science by these criteria alone. It is not.
rxmd
May contain traces of nut
One method, yes.ywenz said:
IMHO that doesn't discount the legitimacy of religion and faith as such, though. A lot of other good things have been abused in such a way; and by now we've seen enough societies that control people and leave the power to rule in the hands of the few, and some of them managed to do so quite well without the banner of religion, so I think religion isn't really the heart of all evil here. (Some of them even managed to give us nice cameras in the process, just to come around full circle to the topic of this forum
)Philipp
rxmd
May contain traces of nut
If I remember my mathematical logic lectures properly, it was precisely the point of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem that not every derivation from a system of axioms can necessarily be verified by these axioms.Gabriel M.A. said:
That's why it was such a devastating blow to the earlier positivist school of mathematics of Hilbert etc., whose stance on mathematics was not unlike what you describe here.Actually I think you are not doing the philosophers credit here, at least some of them; most analytical philosophers and logicians I met, for example, would have every right to be offended if you told them that their approaches were less rigid and verifiable than a mathematician's. (And "verification" really does not mean the same thing as in any natual science; it makes a difference whether you verify a system against observable facts or against itself.)Gabriel M.A. said:
Hm, mathematics is far more important nowadays than rhetoric (and incidentally the classical Greeks considered rhetoric a science, but then we've come a long way since then...). I think a more interesting candidate for an analogy would be semiotics.Gabriel M.A. said:
Philipp
traveller
Learning how to print
ywenz said:
True enough
Gabriel M.A.
My Red Dot Glows For You
Faith may have nothing to do with religion, but religion has everything to do with faith. Either you have faith in a set of beliefs, or you don't; this is one of the things that defines "religion": a common faith. That there are bureaucratic and complex OCD/lithurgical aspects to many of them, specially western religions, that's another matter.ywenz said:
Organized religion is a way to control people, but not all organized religions are a "method" to control people. Agnostics and Buddhists, for example, are an exception; they do not believe in the enforcement of their beliefs upon others as a means to have a "uniform" religion or thought. Either you believe or you don't believe, and the course is your own. Discipline is distinct from religiousness.
Organized religion is unfortunately also a proven way to exploit uninformed, blind masses. It is also a way to have cohesion. "Religion" as a generic term is one of the most undemocratic institutions, for there is no room for dissent and questioning, at odds with the "me" human nature. Language is both uniform and yet expresses the "me" differences of one people from another.
When society has such identity crises with its cohesion, it is no small wonder it resorts to pseudonationalism.
One thing is for sure, when powers of the world have a big sense of "me"-ism, they will do as they please, even if it means s_iting on the same place they and others eat, religion or no religion.
World, nation, religion, language...they all exist because of each one of us. If we don't do anything, besides the sarcastic call to cease to breathe, there really won't be any breathing left for anybody. Including those who are right, those who are wrong, those who have no clue what that means, and those who would just rather not think about any of this.
So...who knows how to make henna-based emmulsions?
sepiareverb
genius and moron
ErikFive said:
Now that ErikFIve can dance!
Thanks for bringing some excellent laughs to this thread!
fgianni
Trainee Amateur
rxmd said:
Actually there is a lot of truth here, some mathematicians consider maths more like a rigorous language that a science, we could see it as the language spoken by scientists.
But of course it is just a point of view, somehow I feel we are starting to split hairs here.
Gabriel M.A.
My Red Dot Glows For You
If we're going to talk about "specialized" fields, then you're right. As a general statement, I believe what I said is true. I didn't say Philosophy isn't "rigid"; I said Mathematics, as a whole, was more so.rxmd said:
Logic is an interesting "creature", for it spans disciplines that are apparently so different from one another. You are right, I can see why some would be "offended" at some of my statements.
I'd actually like to see people being offended at things worth being offended by, not by semantical oversights which, Kant would perhaps argue, were not intended to offend.
Gabriel M.A.
My Red Dot Glows For You
I believe some scientists do that for a living. Interesting pictures, too.fgianni said:
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