The "it's all maths / it's not all maths" arguments are indeed bogus - but so are the "it's truly inventive, it deserves a patent" arguments. Credit should be given and easily can be without also entailing powerful monopoly exclusion rights; your ability to commercialise some invention is not dependent on its being patentable and is not something which can be guaranteed by patents anyway; furthermore, third party patents can and often do work in exactly the opposite direction!; the patent offices never have attempted to distinguish at examination time between the truly inventive and the run-of-the-mill and for obvious reasons cannot be expected to ever be able to do so (at least not reliably, fairly and at reasonable cost); the moralistic "it deserves a patent" sort of argument falls apart when independent (re-)invention is taken into account;...
...To cut a long story short, the only arguments that really stand up in the end are the economic arguments. The fundamental economic question is this: Does granting patents in some field or industry significantly promote progress, innovation and overall economic and social welfare? If not, that field or industry certainly shouldn't be burdened with the considerable weight of negative effects that are an inevitable consequence of patent eligibility. As Fritz Machlup wrote in his 1958 Economic Review of the Patent System:
If one does not know whether a system "as a whole" (in contrast to certain features of it) is good or bad, the safest "policy conclusion" is to "muddle through - either with it, if one has long lived with it, or without it, if one has lived without it. If we did not have a patent system, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge of its economic consequences, to recommend instituting one. But since we have had a patent system for a long time, it would be irresponsible, on the basis of our present knowledge, to recommend abolishing it. This last statement refers to a country such as the United States of America-not to a small country and not a predominantly nonindustrial country, where a different weight of argument might well suggest another conclusion.
While the student of the economics of the patent system must, provisionally, disqualify himself on the question of the effects of the system as a whole on a large industrial economy, he need not disqualify himself as a judge of proposed changes in the existing system. While economic analysis does not yet provide a basis for choosing between "all or nothing," it does provide a sufficiently firm basis for decisions about "a little more or a little less" of various ingredients of the patent system. Factual data of various kinds may be needed even before some of these decisions can be made with confidence. But a team of well-trained economic researchers and analysts should be able to obtain enough information to reach competent conclusions on questions of patent reform.
Here is some of that research and analysis: http://researchoninnovation.org/