We also need to remember that Cantor was a mystic. He claimed that his understanding of transfinite numbers were communicated to him by God. So from the beginning the controversy over Cantor’s theories had a religious nature to it.

My guess is that antipathy to set theory among Fundamentalists began early, and is just carried on to this day out of tradition and tribalism. 

It would take someone doing actual work (so not me) to look at the historical record to see if this is the origins or whether (as also seems possible) that it was just a reaction to “new math” in the 1970s.

(Although I can’t know this for sure since he’s not around to ask. In contrast, Neil Gaiman referenced a book of Japanese folkstories at the end of _Dreamhunters_, and after failing to find any trace of it, I asked him and he eventually did admit he was pulling a Borges.)

It is not a joke.  Well, it IS a joke, but they aren’t joking.

You are thinking of – and also misstating, though not quite as badly – postmodernism.

Modernism posits right and wrong and true and false, it just says those are arrived at through reason and science, not through obeying authority or reading the bible.

man, you are SO FAR OFF the mark with that.

sheesh

For a start, looking at set theory as the same as cantor’s work is a bit confusing. You need to look at the concept of new math, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math which was a trend in the US in the 1960s to teach primary school kids set theory and working in different bases, rather than focussing on elementary arithmetic. Which is why so many US people educated then can’t add up. It’s a pedagogically questionable decision, and selling your textbooks as working with traditional maths instead of “modern set theory” does actually make sense and is potentially a good idea. Even if it is somewhat usual these days, and is using “modern” to mean “the cutting-edge ideas of the ’60s”. This seems a lot more likely than fundamentalists being worried about concerns of the Generalised Continuum Hypothesis taking youngsters’ focus away from the Almighty.

There is a theory that (representational) sculpture is much easier than drawing.  The human figure is in there all the time – all the sculptor has to do is to  chip off the superfluous material.  Is mathematics like that?

How could you have a ‘physical infinity?  How would you check it, physically, in a finite amount of time ? Wouldn’t you need to check it?

Like a modernist, a pre-modernist believes in absolute truth. It has nothing to do with  wanting to “just do your own thing”.  I’m not sure how the author argued this, considering that he just accused fundamentalists of believing mathematical truth to be absolute in reality.

The biggest flaw with this article I’d say is that the author doesn’t appear to know enough Mathematics or philosophy.  The idea alluded to with his first quote

“Unlike the “modern math” theorists, who believe that mathematics is a creation of man and thus arbitrary and relative, A Beka Book teaches that the laws of mathematics are a creation of God and thus absolute…”

is not limited to theists. The debate about whether logic/truth is arbitrary or necessary extends far beyond theism/atheism. There are strong transcendental arguments as to why it would be necessary, and people do believe this- theist or not.  Beck only teaches Platonism as an implication of Theism, which is not wrong in itself.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for posting this. I can’t tell you how much this particular line resonated with me. 

I went to a Fundie school in Minneapolis from 1-9th grade. In history we learned all about revivals and nothing about America’s involvement in Vietnam – all from Bob Jones, who routinely came to our weekly chapel sessions to convince us to avoid “secular” universities, etc.

There weren’t too many schools like that; it would be an incredible coincidence if we were alumni.

What you can have is actual paradoxes phrased a bit like that. Russell’s paradox: Let S be the set of all sets that do not contain themselves. Does S contain itself?

If you try to say “there is no such set”, you have just stated that we are *not* allowed to define sets however we want, as made out of completely arbitrary entities; a valid view, but one that then one has to keep in mind whenever one is doing set theory. Moreover, which sets can’t one build? Do you forbid yourself from talking about the “set of all sets”? Or from the notion of “containing oneself”? The latter could happen in indirect ways, so it is then necessary to rank sets, assigning to them different “types”, with the definition of a set being allowed to refer only sets at a lower level.

So what I think get’s missed here is how tragic it is , a large segment of the population refuses to properly engage and support our scientific and economic progress.