Of course mathematics is not a belief system. Only someone without a knowledge of history, sociology and anthropology would believe that it is a belief system.

My sister in law calls Maths a language as she has a PhD in Mathematics and teaches several languages of Maths to arrive at the same conclusions.

//The humans that wrote the bible believed the earth was flat, but that certainly didn't make it so.//

They probably didn't. The ancient Greeks knew full well that the Earth was spherical; Eratosthenes of Cyrene measured it's circumference to an impressive degree of accuracy in 240BC. The New Testament was written in ancient Greek and it is generally accepted that the early Christian church held largely to a spherical geology. St Augustine of Hippo, for example, knew that the world was a sphere.

It think a lot of people get a bit confused about this one because the Church clung to the geocentric model of the solar system for centuries, even in the face of overwhelming evidence and famously persecuted Galileo on the pretext of his support for the heliocentric model.

//Mind you, I would put my trust in the science of mathematics any day, rather than any belief in invisible gods...//

It's not really a science... mathematicians don't base their theorems and proofs on observations and there are no 'experimental mathematicans'. I'd say that in some ways it is closer to the arts than the sciences, even if scientists do use a lot of maths.

I do agree that I'd rather have civil engineers designing bridges using maths than relying on the power prayer hold them aloft. Maths is useful and practical (although it can be fun and recreational as well), whereas religion doesn't really seem to have any useful purpose other than making the runners of this world feel smug and self-righteous. Oh, and inspiring murderous acts of religious fanaticism... yep, that seems to be about it.

"Maths like religion is merely a way of humans interpreting the Universe. It is a faith system."

No it isn't, unless you are misusing the denotations and connotations of the word 'faith' as they apply to mathematics and to religion.

Claims in mathematics are subject to proofs which establish the truth of statements.

Claims in religion are are subject to statements to establish their truth instead of proofs.

Mathematics is a creation of the human mind. As one studies the relationship of mathematical entities one is filled with beauty and awe. An elegant proof can evoke the same sort of reaction in the mind of a mathematician that a Bach score will evoke in a trained musician.

We define a point as a location in space. It has location but no non-zero dimension. A point is something we can never see (an abstraction which cannot exist as a visible object), but we place a dot to represent it. There are such marvellous mathematical concepts as dualism which indicate that point and line can be interchangeable and still make sense in geometrical axioms and theorems. Two points determine a line, and two lines determine a point.

Mathematics is sometimes taught so one can think it is no more than numeration, but set theory and topology for example do not have to have anything to do with numbers.

Whether math is a science or a human belief system depends on the definition we give to a science and a human belief system. We can define either a science or a human belief system in such a way that mathematics fits the definition. However, mathematics is to me a triumph of the human spirit - a soaring, wondrous art.

Not everyone can make mathematics - create new branches, state new axioms and postulate new theorems. However, almost everyone can be educated to appreciate mathematics. It has the beauty that most of us can understand a mathematical conjecture, but a mind of great subtlety and depth is required to prove the conjecture is true.

An example is the Goldbach conjecture. Every even number (except 2) is equal to the sum of two prime numbers. No one has found an exception, and no one has proved it is true for all even numbers.

Dear david f,

What a load of gobbledygook. Mathematics is mathematics no matter how complicated you try to make it. It's simply just all about calculating and measuring the world (and universe) we live in. My first degree was in engineering and it was just an exercise in applied math and I was glad to see the last of it when I graduated.