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Comment by jauzeyimam | Hacker News Reader

At some level most things cannot be consistently proven though -- mathematics is premised in axioms that are not complete and consistent insofar as they cannot be proven by the systems of mathematics. They have to be taken as true, however, for the remaining systems of mathematics to be consistent. See Godel's Incompleteness Theorems: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_the...

The larger point is that derogatory comments about belief systems only point to the speakers subjective inability to comprehend said system, nothing objective about the system itself.

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You can call me subjective but you will have a harder time calling me wrong. The magic man in the clouds as a theory of how the universe works has been debunked so many times and has so little evidence it should be discounted out of hand.

Math on the hand is so useful it was used to designed my cell phone, my car and the computer I type this on.

One of these these things has evidence and rich history of working and the other is religion. There is some false equivalence going on with your saying that we can't explain every detail of math it is somehow comparable to a thoroughly incorrect view of reality.

What has the first paragraph got to do with this? There are things that cannot be proven, but what has that got to do with faith? Point me to an entirely abstract religion whose "faith" concerns only such mathematical concepts?

> derogatory comments about belief systems only point to the speakers subjective inability to comprehend said system

Why? Where do you make this point? Can I play that game too? "Failure to agree with my comments only point to listeners subjective inability to comprehend said comments."

Also, I thought that was the definition of "faith" - Is that inherently "derogatory"?

Are you familiar with Russell's teapot? The burden of proof lies upon the person making an assertion or claim.

Heh in a roundabout way Russell's teapot came back to haunt him for the same reason as my earlier comment. His goal in attempting to create an internally consistent body of mathematics with Whitehead was proven impossible by Godel--Russel's teapot was mathematics as he could not meet the burden of proof at the axiomatic level, yet we still believe it to be true.

This is not to say that mathematics is wrong, of course, just that since it is not internally consistent -- and since nothing is -- everything becomes an object of belief at some level. Therefore relying on notions like "the burden of proof lies upon the person making an assertion or claim" is turtles all the way down -- NOTHING is provable and EVERYTHING is a belief.

> NOTHING is provable and EVERYTHING is a belief

If that's the case, then it's tautological. In practice, "provability" is partially quantitative, not starkly Boolean (True/False)

I'm not sure Russell's Teapot concept was troubled by his later failures to create an internally consistent body of mathematics:

> Russel's teapot was mathematics as he could not meet the burden of proof at the axiomatic level, yet we still believe it to be true.

You don't need to meet a BoP at an axiomatic level, by definition of what an axiom is. We still accept the analogy of the teapot, because the axioms are accepted by standard. If this acceptance is "faith", it is still far from religious faith, whose "axioms" are not reduced/irreducible, but complex, dependent (on reason) and ad-hoc.

[...]since it is not internally consistent -- and since nothing is -- everything becomes an object of belief at some level.

Giant enthymematic jump right there.

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