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Joanna was entirely too abstract, brief, and acute to follow, unless you spend some time thinking about it. What she is talking about is the problem of conceptualizing the infinite through a rational methodology. It is the underlying problem in the trace of Aquainas' first cause as the terminus to the infinite regression of causal chains. Or that is one manifestation. It is also found in Zeno's Paradox. It also corresponds to several classical mathematical problems followed by Archimedes and Apollonius---the last of the ancient mathematicians who investigated curves and circles.
The general idea is that God was thought to embody the infinite. So, to understand the infinite, even in the symbolic form of mathematics was to discover God. The concept of number still has some residue of these medieveal ideals to it, as does the concept of being in the existentialists.
The ultimate residue of these mathematical ideals is on display everywhere as the Big Bang. Variously, the BB is justified through a highly related similitude to Aquainas, that a regression must end at some point. This is the underlying idea behind the theory of limits in calculus, that a single point must be contained on an interval exactly between the greatest lower bound and the least upper bound. On extended examination of this idea it becomes apparent that it is tautological, and in effect a metaphysical argument about the nature of infinity.
Theoretical physics is certainly not immune to such tautologies, and in fact has come to depend on them as a philosophical foundation that justifies their various forays into pure abstractions, such as string theories.
In short, we are not out of the woods by a long shot.
The cultural assimulation of the concept of infinity took on all sorts of forms from logical paradoxes to mathematical devices to arguments on theology, but most especially in the construction of three dimensional illusionism in painting. The fruition of these cultural adaptations can be found in most of the architectural monuments of the Renaissance, particularly those of Brunelleschi who basically invented architectural drawing in perspective. The fundamental construct was the point at infinity--towards which the eye is led in the receeding parallels that converge to a point at the horizon. Much later this general idea was given more precise meaning in the algebraic theory of imaginary numbers, and still later in the theory of rings and ideals. (And allow me to point out that the Noether Theorem on the link between physical constants and conserved quantities to their statement as ideals of a ring is intimately related to this metaphysical artiface.)
In this deepest of cultural norms, one can credit our fundamental belief in the truth of perspective to the medieveal scholastics and their late Gothic theoreticians. It is in some sense the last frontier of our belief that God exists as some geometric norm of spacetime itself. This was Einstein's deepest metaphysical conviction and why he place such overwhelming emphasis on the idea that gravity was a well of spacetime that surround all large collections of matter. He saw the universe as such a well under constant dialation in an expansion. In other words, the deepest theory of General Relativity is a metaphysical theory on the nature of infinity.
Nevertheless, I agree with Joanna. It is truly depressing that a list with sufficient brute intellect to overwhelm just about anyone should degrade itself by debating the most uninformed, lowest, and least worthy of stupid ideas. Come on folks, we can do better.
Let's get out of the Christian Right's sewers of the mind, and start attacking the core residue of this God shit at the heart of modernity...
CG