It's more likely a different belief system; I doubt most people believe in mathematics because they can derive from sound foundations arbitrary formulas, but ra

It's more likely a different belief system; I doubt most people believe in mathematics because they can derive from sound foundations arbitrary formulas, but rather that an authority (public education) told them this is the way things are and can be done, and doing it this way has worked out so far, and trusting the mathematician (or more likely for the common person, the engineer implementing it) usually works out (sometimes it won't, and they'll tell you they made a mistake in their predictions and come back with a correction). We advanced like an organism, improving in culture and knowledge as a group, but not on the individual scale. There's a reason the educated are just as susceptible to cargo-culting, trend-chasing and bandwagonning as anyone else; the primary difference is that the number of people capable of operating as authoritative figures for the educated is more limited. At best their education protects them in their own field, in the fashion of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. As a group we might have improved, but individually we still follow false gods and idols. We pretend they're not, and while ours might be somehow better than our predecessors (more predictive power, for one), they certainly don't come from a better basis.