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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame that there is such a lack of knowledge on religion and concepts of god/creator in the modern, Western world, and the widespread assumption that a simple naive concept of the divine is the only one which can be true/false. I feel like many mathematicians (including Erdos) would find Platonism and Neoplatonism relevant and interesting, especially considering that Platonism is fairly popular with regards to mathematical objects (famously supported by Gödel.)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-mathematics/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoplatonism

https://iep.utm.edu/pla-thei/

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Or if they had been better read in Aquinas, they might recognize their criteria for what makes something beautiful mirrors Aquinas's criteria of clarity, proportion and integrity, and how these criteria in various ways point not only to God's existence, but what He must be like.

I don't think any theory that attempts to divide the world into fundamentally different realms is viable. Such realms can not be isolated, they must be able to interact in some way or otherwise one could never know about their existence. And once one concedes that they must be able to interact, the distinction between the realms becomes essentially not much more than a classification, just as we divide life into animals and plants and particles into bosons and fermions.

And it really does not matter about what kind of realm one thinks - souls, ghosts, gods, mathematical objects. If those objects can not influence our physical world directly or indirectly, then you can not know about their existence in any meaningful way. And the interaction must usually also go both ways to get a sensible thing, for example your soul must be able to affect your body but also what your body experiences must affect your soul.

I think the relationship of programmer to program is a good analogy.

A religious story for the modern, Western, world:

In the afterlife, the books one will have (and the only books one will have access to) are those which, during one's life, one has lent out but were never returned.

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