Or music.
One of the most misleading and perhaps intellectually damaging legacies of the Enlightenment is the idea that people write music or poems. These things are no more written than equations in math are written. They are put down. There is no right word, no single word anyway, that will adequately name the thing that is done when a poem is put down. It is captured, it is discovered, it corresponds to a being or reality that preexists it and that can be perceived when the conditions are right. All artists attest to this fact. A written poem like a written equation is false. E does not equal MC cubed.
But the Enlightenment needed to create a way of increasing the stock of the commodity "writing." And so it created an author and authorship, a capitalist unit subject to reward an punishment. It's a false equation. Locke's philosophy was written. He can claim it. Whatever is false is written. Whatever is true is found. Locke figured out how to pay people for lying. For making mistakes. For getting it wrong.
The advantage of math over poetry is that math's equations can be demonstrated to a much higher degree. People who understand math and physics can show that E in fact equals MC squared. But is Hope a thing with feathers?
Still, I will not say that math or science establishes objective truth. The facts of math or science correlate to human perception and experience. E doesn't equal MC squared in heaven. If asked, God would say not "that isn't true" but "I wouldn't put it that way."
The two people whose thoughts I'd like to refine are Gervais and deGrasse Tyson. The former says for example "there are 3000 gods, what are the chances you have the right one?" And "I just believe in one less God than you do." I'd like to say, giving God 3000 names does not multiply gods. But I'd also like to say "that doesn't mean there's only one god." The question before this conversation is "does number exist without human brains." And my answer is no. If there are no numbers in reality, no platonic form for number, then the question "how many gods are there" is a nonsense question.
