[OT] Plato's Pub and Philosophical Society

[Aloofi]

Jack, that was a great post, I encourage you to continuing posting in this thread .
I just don't like how scientists blame religious people of being "religious" when they are nothing more than another religion.
If just science were neutral the way technology is......

[Alpha Kodiak]

[quote]Originally posted by spoon:

quote:

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Originally posted by Alpha Kodiak:

The Big Bang theory really doesn't explain creation, since there must have been something in order for it to explode. It is entirely conceivable that part of the act of creation was a "Big Bang", but there must have been something that existed prior to it, whether an intelligence or not.

Unless time was also created by the Big Bang. Then there would be no "before".

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Given the relativistic nature of time, I would not disagree with you. Still, the Big Bang does not address the origins of itself. Even if time originated in the Big Bang (a distinct possibility), something had to start the process.

A side question: for a photon travelling at the speed of light, does time pass at all? I know that time "slows down" as you approach the speed of light, but I am not sure what happens to time at the speed of light.

[Mephisto]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
Maybe we should implement that in classes at College... those Celts were on to something... j/k

Ah, better not. Don't want to be at the receiving end.

The Celts did have an egalitarian society for most of their history in which the women and men were fairly equal though. In fact, women were allowed to be chiefs and kings, and I recall that property was inherited through the mother's side, not the father's. The Celts also did not enslave anyone, unlike the Romans.

You might be right about equality. But the Celts did have slaves, a quick link is here:
http://perso.club-internet.fr/yesss/...Celt/celts.htm

If your argument is more on the line that the did not enslave as much people as the Romans: Well, the Romans didn't enslave everyone else either. In most cases only those who resisted them. Many Gallic tribes were not enslaves (make this almost all). They took hostages but that was not slavery.

[Ruatha]

Originally posted by Captain Kwok:

quote:

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Originally posted by Ruatha:
Didn't the monks erase Aristoteles works and use the pergament for prayer books instead?
Thereby eradicating valuable knowledge, some of which has been independetly discovered so late as in the 20:th century.

They did not. In fact, they copied his works preferentially because of their divine implications, i.e., that everything in the universe is striving for its perfect state, etc...

If we are talking about the European dark ages ~500-1400 then war/invasion/disease were all primary causes of technological stagnation, not the church! The church didn't really start to take control until the 1200s etc, and that was after the Europeans were able to manage a bit of stability. The church in 1500-1600s is more what you guys are referring to - but even to some degree, it was the thinkers who were stuck on Aristotle and not open to new possibilities that kept new thinkers from making a bigger splash then they did...

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Ahh, yes I remembered wrongly .
It was Archimede's works they erased and used to write again on.
Most notably the Principles that now exist only as a palimpsest.
And it was propably around 1300 if I remember correctly. (Can't bother to do a search tonight, G'night)

(Edit Spellling)

[ March 12, 2003, 21:42: Message edited by: Ruatha ]

[Jack Simth]

Originally posted by Aloofi:
Jack, that was a great post, I encourage you to continuing posting in this thread .
I just don't like how scientists blame religious people of being "religious" when they are nothing more than another religion.
If just science were neutral the way technology is......

Technically, evolution isn't proper science, as it doesn't follow the scientific method:
1) Observe something
2) Hypothisize about what could cause it
3) Test Hypothesis via experiment
4) Check results against Hypothesis
5) Refine Hypothesis to better match results
6) back to 3, repeat indefinately

Evolution and cosmology can't follow this - one cannot test events that happened in the past, and any time scale on the order of thousands of years can't be done due to scientist death, and certainly could not be repeated. Evolutionary theory and modern cosmology use time scales on the order of millions of years. Thus they are not truely scientists. Likewise, even assuming the big bang actually happened, it was a one-shot deal, and cannot be repeated.

[Wardad]

Actually, Science is the Art of Repeatable Results. Since the results are repeatable they are open to use or abuse by anyone.

The scientific method is used to determine what is repeatable and help in turn predict what should be repeatable. Observation, theory, and experimentation all have their place in this pursuit.

Evolution is a theory. It is useful for explaining observation and maybe even predicting results.

Generally, a theory is wrong if it fails once. Often a theory is incomplete and does not encompass all variables. That's how we learn about other factors that also produce repeatable results.

Ex. Evolution theory may not account for third party intervention (Divine or Human) or even the nuclear core of the Earth increasing it's radiation. OR DOES IT???? Bwahahahaahaaaa.

Often in applied science an exacting degree of perfection is not needed. Sure mass increases with the speed of light, but I'm not going to lose a few pounds by sitting on the couch.

Some of the sciences are not true sciences. I think science got such a good name that every related subject wanted to cash in on it.
Take psychology, PLEASE! Ok now, it can benifit from the scientific method and statistics, but in application it is heavily affected by the whims and perceptions of the subject and observer.

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Religion depends on prayers and the whims of deities and/or demons (not repeatable).

What kind of deity would give us a universe with repeatable results that we can use/abuse? Maybe the same one who would give you a free will, watch your actions, and sit in judgement of your choices.
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Accepting religion is like declaring this exsistance a simulation. Accepting science is like learning the simulation.

[ March 12, 2003, 23:50: Message edited by: Wardad ]

[Wanderer]

*bites*

Jack:
I'm going to be slightly rude. Can I apologise in advance?

Your 'scientific method' is a litle too naive for my liking.

The important steps are that to stand up a theory must make predictions of the universe that can be tested and checked by others. How you a arrive at a theory is not really important - some theories are created in a moment of inspiration, others after years of careful observation.

It doesn't require that you perform an experiment that repeats the big bang to theorise that it took place, only that you explain what observations you would expect to be able to make in a universe created by a big bang.

Friedmann used Einstein's general relativity to argue the universe must be expanding to avoid gravity condensing it into a point. Einstein thought this was a complete fallacy, and thought his cosmological constant (a property of space that causes it to repel - i.e. a sort of anti-gravity) was right. Then Hubble made observations that showed the universe was expanding...

...the natural extrapolation is that if the universe is expanding it must be smaller the further you go back in the past.

Many scientists have tried to come up with alternatives to the big bang - for example, some have postulated a fractal universe. None have had any success so far.

I recommend Joao Magueijo's Faster Than The Speed Of Light for anyone who wants to read up on some modern big-bang physics.

I'm not going to touch evolution again with a 60ft barge-pole

Addendum: give me a powerful enough telescope and I can look at parts of the universe as they were several billion years ago. Why experiment when you can observe the real thing?

[ March 12, 2003, 23:55: Message edited by: Wanderer ]

[Fyron]

The 'date' that is most often used for the 'age' of the rock in question is based on the so called 'index fossils' found either in the rock itself or in the same geologic strata. However, the scientists then turn around and use the 'evidence' of the age of the rock to 'support' the theory of evolution, which is circular reasoning, as they used the theory of evolution to date the rock.

That is wrong. The ages of rocks are calculated from the half-lives of and relative levels of Carbon, Uranium, and a few other substances in the rocks. This has nothing at all to do with the theory of evolution, and is in no way circular reasoning.

Originally posted by Mephisto:

quote:

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Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
Maybe we should implement that in classes at College... those Celts were on to something... j/k

Ah, better not. Don't want to be at the receiving end.

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Well... all of my lectures have at least half of the enrolled students gone each day. Maybe just sacrifice those that consistently fail to show up? j/k ofc

You might be right about equality. But the Celts did have slaves, a quick link is here:
http://perso.club-internet.fr/yesss/...Celt/celts.htm

First off, that links to a page discussing the Irish Celts, and as such, is not representative of Celts in general. With that being said, I had never heard anything about Celts owning slaves. I guess they did not own very many of them. Not that the Romans owned huge amounts; they did have a higher proportion of slaves than the Celts would have had though.

If your argument is more on the line that the did not enslave as much people as the Romans: Well, the Romans didn't enslave everyone else either. In most cases only those who resisted them. Many Gallic tribes were not enslaves (make this almost all). They took hostages but that was not slavery.

The Romans did not enslave everyone; that was not my point. Like the Greeks, their slaves were mostly prisoners of war, those that could not pay off their debts, and people sold into slavery as children by their parents so that they could pay off their debts (though I think the Last one was not very common). And, of course, it was not racial slavery, but economic slavery. They did not enslave whole races of people.

[ March 13, 2003, 01:37: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]

[Chronon]

Orignally posted by QuarianRex;
In short, we would make far more progress in this debate if we found a term to use other than 'myth'. Its meaning is far too biased to be useful.

Absolutely, I won't argue with you on that point, QuarianRex. Now...what term to use? I'm afraid my thesaurus gives me even more terms with connotations of falsehood: lore, fable, legend, and fantasy. Any ideas?

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
The Romans did not enslave everyone...their slaves were mostly prisoners of war, those that could not pay off their debts...it was not racial slavery, but economic slavery. They did not enslave whole races of people.

Technically speaking, you are absolutely right Fyron, but if you substitute ethnic for racial, then the Romans did enslave whole Groups of people. At the end of the Third Punic War (146 BCE), for example, the Romans destroyed the city of Carthage, and sold all 55,000 remaining Carthaginians into slavery.

The Romans had many slaves from their many conquests, and much of their economy depended on the work of slaves. The large agricultural estates in Sicily, for example, and the silver mines, were all worked by slaves. Their roads, aquaducts, and public buildings were built on the backs of slave labor, and then there were the gladiator slaves who died for entertainment.

On the whole, even though they were taken in battle, the Romans treated their slaves poorly. Here's a quote from my Western Civ textbook, "Roman slaves were scarcely considered people at all but instruments of production like cattle. Notwithstanding the fact that some of them were cultivated foreigners taken as prisoners of war, the standard policy of their owners was to get as much work out of them as possible during their prime until they died of exhaustion..." Considering the ubiquity of slavery throughout the Ancient Period, this is one area where the Middle Ages (very few slaves) weren't so dark.

[Fyron]

Absolutely, I won't argue with you on that point, QuarianRex. Now...what term to use? I'm afraid my thesaurus gives me even more terms with connotations of falsehood: lore, fable, legend, and fantasy. Any ideas?

The problem here is that mythology does not denote falsehood, and does not actually connote it either; that is a misconception perpetuated by a Christian-dominated culture that has butchered the term so that it can be used by those that do not have a strong grasp on the intricacies of the English language to deride all non-Christian myths, while leaving Christian myths alone (accompanined by not using the term myth to describe Christian myths). Being a myth has no bearing on the effect/meaning of a story.

... just so there is no confusion, this is an argument about language, not about anything really religious.

[ March 13, 2003, 08:16: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]