Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

Dick said
interesting, huh?

Are Arizonans more literate than Coloradoans?

I don't think so.  Politicians are always clamoring to make English the official language pf the United States, even though if that were in the Constitution, virtually every law would be unconstitutional.  (It might be fun for some organization to award a grant to the school whose students find the most errors in the state statutes.)

I suspect the Arizonans are the legendary blind pig that found an acorn.

Also lending disrepute to the speaker is the fact that (s)he seems unaware that God is a referential proper noun if sorts, just as Mom, Sis, or Massa is.  The being being spoken of is different depending on who is talking. 

Abraham assembled a confederation of tribes too small to survive on each other, and realizing that they had accounting technology others did not possess, and no land of their own, sold themselves into slavery in Egypt, which was engaged on large public works projects in need pf better management.

They had different religious traditions, so they hired themselves YHWH, with the men binding themselves to the covenant with ritual mutilation of highly sensitive flesh.  Whether real or imaginary, YHWH soon declared "I am your god, you shall have no other gods before you."  Although Christians, Jews, and Muslim derive from the same history, neither Muslim nor Christian faiths have hired YHWH, and the idea that their god might favor Israel and ignore their own nation seems to be an idea most American Christians reject.

Mathematics are not an area Christian theologians excel at. Many of them - not all - seem to think it's three days from the start of the Sabbath until predawn on the following day, and they declare their multiple gods to be "three in the same" (to bring this thread drift back to the subject.)  

Mathematics is wholly artificial, of course.  Math says that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, while any geographer will point out that it's a great circle, and a physicist will point out that straight lines are not straight in the presence of geography, so if a god wants to count to three in a manner mathematicians do not approve of, that's surely a god's prerogative.

The geographer restricts his answer to points and paths on the surface of the earth. For him, the shortest distance from the North Pole to the South Pole is along one of the longitudinal lines. But the mathematician points out that the shortest distance between the poles is straight through the earth along the rotational axis. That answer is (demonstrably) correct. Why would you call it artificial?

 Artifice is "a clever trick or stratagem; a cunning, crafty device or expedient" 

Were the Earth spherical - it's not - and were it to spin on an axis - it wobbles instead - then if it could have poles that referred to exact positions, rather than vaguely reference regions. If te Earth was of uniform density - it's not - and was free of gravity from other bodies - again, it's not - then space inside the planet might not be warped.  If all these erroneous assumptions were made, then your "demonstrably" correct example might be valid.

But the map is not the territory, and while third-grade science is a useful approximation, your third- grade teacher probably never told you that the science she taught was a fairy tale.  For that matter. she probably didn't know that herself.  As a physics major in college, my first physics class taught that there were three states of matter - solid, liquid and gas.  There are actually at least six states....
Mathematics is an invention, and as such, a mathematical fact will always be a fact.  A scientific fact, OTOH, is guaranteed to be wrong; the advancement of science is discovering facts which are less wrong than what was previously believed.