Creation, Evolution, and faith

See Message 401 (near the bottom of that post). See Message 415 (the last line or two).As previously posted, I have used that phrase before and nobody has considered it controversial. If you have a problem with it, then say what kind of problem.

I made a minor casual remark of no great importance. You are blowing it way out of proportion, and dragging this thread off topic. In Message 415 (the last line), I explained how you can come up with zillions of examples.

Yes, but only after you had already blown the issue way out of proportion.I made the original comment in Message 383 as a comment on the question of whether mathematics is objective or subjective. Not one of your posts on the issue has related to that question (about mathematics). The demand for an example makes no sense.If I had said "foods are made of atoms" and you demanded an example, what kind of example should I give. Would you be looking for a piece of cheese? Would you be considering that as an example of "foods" or as an example of "made of atoms"?As in the case of foods/atoms, all examples will be mundane and won't reveal anything useful. And that has been what I have tried to point out in telling you how you can come up with zillions of examples. The kind of questioning used by Rahvin in Message 403 at least made some sense at getting to what Rahvin saw as a possible problem.In your case, presumably you think there is a problem. But you have not been clear on what kind of problem concerns you.

That's total bullshit. I shall conclude that

• something troubles you about what I posted in Message 383, and troubled you enough that you posted a stream of off-topic messages;
• you are unable to make a coherent statement about what it is that troubles you.

I have already explained what I meant in previous posts. Sure, that explanation falls short of a definition - welcome to natural language. If we eliminated all words that had no definition, there would be nothing left.As for an example - I just do not understand what is being requested. I have not expressed any disagreement with what is usually considered to be objective. On the issue of the objectivity of mathematics on which I made that original comment, here's a reference to a book chapter on the objectivity of mathematics.
No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.springerlink.com/content/q5k84725100w0658/
From the page visible on the web, that does not look like pornography to me.If you disagree with what I said, maybe you or Straggler could produce an actual reasoned argument as to why you think I am wrong. That way we could at least sort out whether there is a disagreement, and what that disagreement is (if any).I thought that what I said was not controversial. Now I am getting repeated demands to clear up the controversy, but nobody is telling what the controversy is that I am supposed to clear up.

Somewhere in the past, I must have posted a message telling everybody to drop what they were doing to decide what is objective, and instead to use my new method Except that I never did. I was not giving anybody advice on how to decide what is objective. I was not defining a method to determine what is objective. According to Wittgenstein, meaning is use, and I was just commenting on how I see people using the term "objective".If you look back at where I used that expression in Message 383, it ought to have been obvious from the context that I was explaining why I (like many others) consider mathematics to be objective.

And suppose that every time we did that experiment, we found that there were 6 apples, rather than 5 apples. That would not tell us anything at all about the mathematics. But it would tell us that something strange was happening with the apples.Like it or not, mathematical questions are not settled by scientific methods.

Where did I state that I have an argument?

On that, we agree. As far as I know, "objective" is not a technical term in either science or mathematics. Presumably it is a technical term in philosophy, so "professionally speaking" should be a reference to what philosophers say. The funny thing is, that philosophers regularly contradict one another. I expect that you would find significant disagreement within philosophy, as to whether mathematics is objective.

I'll limit future comments on this to the other thread (Objective reality). Seeing the posts there, I am inclined to think that I was right all along in saying that my remark in this thread was not actually controversial.