Thread: What if Christianity never existed Board: Purgatory / Ship of Fools.


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Posted by rolyn (# 16840) on :
 
Apologies for those who do not like What if scenarios, like what if the Nazis had won the war and all that.

But another thread really did get me wondering how things would have turned out for humanity if Christianity never came to exist. As in God decided against sending His only Son or, alternatively, a Galileean carpenter turned preacher never came to achieve messianic status after his death.

Would Islam also not have come into being ? The spread of that religion seems to have happened as a counter measure to the spread of Christianity. And without these two dominant religions would we simply have had a continuation of a vast range of different tribal rituals, superstitions and cult practice, or would Secularism, (what ever that is), come to prominence at a much early stage in our history?
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by rolyn:
Apologies for those who do not like What if scenarios, like what if the Nazis had won the war and all that.

But another thread really did get me wondering how things would have turned out for humanity if Christianity never came to exist. As in God decided against sending His only Son or, alternatively, a Galileean carpenter turned preacher never came to achieve messianic status after his death.

Would Islam also not have come into being ? The spread of that religion seems to have happened as a counter measure to the spread of Christianity. And without these two dominant religions would we simply have had a continuation of a vast range of different tribal rituals, superstitions and cult practice, or would Secularism, (what ever that is), come to prominence at a much early stage in our history?

So, your religion is divinely inspired, even if God chooses not to and theirs is purely reactionary. Nice.
Personally, I think the rise in population is what necessitated what good behaviour we have.
 
Posted by Og, King of Bashan (# 9562) on :
 
From a historical rather than faith based perspective, I have heard that Cyrus the Great is probably responsible for this not happening. He had a policy of setting Persia apart from earlier empires by letting local populations stay in place (or return from exile) and keep their religious beliefs, rather than enslaving or killing them all. Without that? Judaism probably doesn't make it long enough for Jesus to hit the scene.
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
We'd either have competing "pagan" religious traditions, or the dominant "pagan" tradition would absorb the others, as the Roman did the Greek.
 
Posted by Bishops Finger (# 5430) on :
 
Perhaps by now we'd all be worshipping Marduk...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marduk

Either way, I love 'what if?' scenarios, and alternative histories! We wouldn't have the huge heritage of Christian art, literature, architecture etc. etc., but human nature being what it is, there'd be alternatives....

Sadly, human nature being what it is, there'd still be religions, and religious wars, of various sorts.

IJ
 
Posted by Bishops Finger (# 5430) on :
 
What mousethief said - but, indeed, who'd be the 'pagans'?

Personally, I trust and believe in Lord Marduk...all these new-fangled Greek gods are just so many Johnny-come-latelies....

IJ
 
Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :
 
It's been done. I think it was Gibbon (if you are interested I could find the citation) who wrote an essay "What if Alexander the Great Had Not Died in Babylon." The great Greek conqueror was a syncretist and, having not died in his 30s went on to consolidate his rule across the ancient world over a long life, moving on to strangle the nascent Roman empire and extend his rule across Europe. Under the aegis of the empire's peace steam power, already known to the Greeks, moved to commercial importance before the turn of the millennium. The young Yeshua-ben-Joseph was able to look up from his carpenter bench in Nazareth and watch the train go by, that connected Syria to Egypt. In this telling there was neither Christianity nor Islam, and the World Empire is pleasantly ruled in the 20th century by the emperor, Alexander XXXV.
 
Posted by Mere Nick (# 11827) on :
 
Lots of folks would be worshiping money, fame and power. Thankfully, that doesn't happen anymore.
 
Posted by Og, King of Bashan (# 9562) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Bishops Finger:
Perhaps by now we'd all be worshipping Marduk...

Presumably someone has been able to pinpoint when the last organic generation of Marduk worshippers was born, and what took their place. Or are they still out there? (Not talking about any odd neo-Babylonian movement that no doubt exists somewhere on the internet.) Mildly curious.
 
Posted by Pangolin Guerre (# 18686) on :
 
My training being (in part) history, I cannot abide "what if"'s. Counterfactual history (pace Bishops Finger and Niall Ferguson) are at best parlour games best done after your third brandy. To answer a bit here. Islam - at least as we know it - could not have come into being without Christianity. (Jesus is, after all, recognised as a prophet.)

I did have this sort of conversation with a friend of mine (half Jewish, half Catholic, non-practising), and I said that a dominant monotheism was good to go. I said, my money might have been on Zoroastrianism. There goes my fiver. Oh, and another brandy, please.
 
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
quote:
Originally posted by rolyn:
Apologies for those who do not like What if scenarios, like what if the Nazis had won the war and all that.

But another thread really did get me wondering how things would have turned out for humanity if Christianity never came to exist. As in God decided against sending His only Son or, alternatively, a Galileean carpenter turned preacher never came to achieve messianic status after his death.

Would Islam also not have come into being ? The spread of that religion seems to have happened as a counter measure to the spread of Christianity. And without these two dominant religions would we simply have had a continuation of a vast range of different tribal rituals, superstitions and cult practice, or would Secularism, (what ever that is), come to prominence at a much early stage in our history?

So, your religion is divinely inspired, even if God chooses not to and theirs is purely reactionary. Nice.
EVERY religious person thinks their religion is "divinely inspired"/ true and the others aren't-- that's kind of the point. Why in the world would we follow a religion if we didn't think it was true? And really, that holds to every passionately held truth. We believe in something because we think it's true. Other than things that are just a matter of taste (i.e. chocolate mint is better than strawberry) or verifiable empirical truth (gravity is a real thing) that's the very nature of belief-- religious belief, political belief, whatever. To get all snooty about it seems rather silly.

Now the fact that we (the adherents of any particular belief system) believe our system is true and the others aren't doesn't have to mean we are so arrogant as to assume we can't be wrong. We can passionately hold a set of beliefs while still acknowledging we might be mistaken. And we can hold a set of beliefs while still defending the rights of others to hold different views.

That is a bit of a flaw in this particular thought experiment then, as well. It assumes Christianity is not true and therefore could "not exist". But for those of us who assume Christianity is true-- or at least based on a Truth-- that's not really viable. Even if no one believed in Christ, we (Christians) would assume there would still be "Christianity" because there would still be a God who loved us and acted incarnationally to come to us and seek us out. For the thought experiment to make sense we have to begin with the assumption that Christianity is not true, which I'm guessing is not an assumption most on this thread would share. But then, "what ifs" are by definition assuming things that we know are not the case.


quote:
Originally posted by Mere Nick:
Lots of folks would be worshiping money, fame and power. Thankfully, that doesn't happen anymore.

This. [Overused]

[ 30. June 2017, 16:16: Message edited by: cliffdweller ]
 
Posted by SvitlanaV2 (# 16967) on :
 
Peter Hitchens once described 'The Game of Thrones' as the Middle Ages without Christianity....

From a sociological point of view we could wonder whether various forms of paganism would simply have continued to develop, or whether human development would have eventually called for some kind of globalised religious system of some sort.

But from a 'Christian' perspective ISTM that our God, if he is Love, would always have wanted to reach out to us. He chose one way of doing so, but being God he could have chosen another. So I suppose we would have had Christianity by another name.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
EVERY religious person thinks their religion is "divinely inspired"/ true and the others aren't-- that's kind of the point.

It is a poor start to a thought experiment about Christianity not existing by saying "but really it does" and to characterise another religion as purely reactionary. Describing Christianity as reactionary to its circumstances is just as valid.
It would be simple to say: What would happen if Christianity didn't exist?
That simple sentence.
Christianity and Islam are intertwined, so exploring that is a legitimate part of this experiment. But the way it was presented in the OP is unnecessarily biased.
 
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
EVERY religious person thinks their religion is "divinely inspired"/ true and the others aren't-- that's kind of the point.

It is a poor start to a thought experiment about Christianity not existing by saying "but really it does" and to characterise another religion as purely reactionary. Describing Christianity as reactionary to its circumstances is just as valid.
It would be simple to say: What would happen if Christianity didn't exist?
That simple sentence.
Christianity and Islam are intertwined, so exploring that is a legitimate part of this experiment. But the way it was presented in the OP is unnecessarily biased.

No, it was framed in a way that was appropriate on a forum that is specifically targeting Christians who assume that Christianity is true. So the OP is simply saying, given our set of beliefs, what if...

One could of course frame the "what if" differently, "what if Christianity didn't exist because it isn't true" which would be an interesting thought experiment as well. That's the fun of a what if"-- unlike real life, you can begin with any set of assumptions you wish. But there's nothing inherently wrong or "biased" about a thought experiment that begins with one set of assumptions and not another.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
What you are describing is "What if God revealed Christianity in a Different way". Because the OP doesn't eliminate Judaism, but it does dismiss it.
 
Posted by stonespring (# 15530) on :
 
A religion like Islam may have arisen in a world without Christianity, but it would not be Islam, because Islam sees itself as the final, complete, and undistorted revelation in a series that included the revelations that gave rise to Judaism and Christianity, but that became distorted by humans in the earlier religions.
 
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
What you are describing is "What if God revealed Christianity in a Different way". Because the OP doesn't eliminate Judaism, but it does dismiss it.

Which, again, is a perfectly valid thought experiment, since "what ifs" are by definition open to all sorts of presumptions. You, of course, are free to submit a different thought experiment.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
The best interpretation of the OP that I can arrive at following your thoughts is that it is flawed in its presentation.
Actually, I think that regardless.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
I mean, Jesus. I know there has been a big dismissal of Judaism within Christianity, but it is part of the foundation of Christianity. The OP doesn't even mention it.
 
Posted by SusanDoris (# 12618) on :
 
Humans evolved with the brain and the language to think up the question, 'Why?', so we were probably doomed from the start to go through a succession of varing beliefs! Alongside the development of gods and religious beliefs went the continuous finding out how actual things actually worked and the passing on of the knowledge gained to subsequent generations. I think the move towards non-belief (and secularism) was inevitable whichever way you look at it, because the advances in science and technology have replaced many religious answers to that why question.

Prior to the Christian era, the written records of people's ideas and beliefs were fewer; they were read, understood and taught by only a few. Now there are many books where the written words are accepted by many as sacrosanct.

Just a few thoughts from this atheist.
 
Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :
 
C.S. Lewis has discussed this. Can we imagine other planets with rational inhabitants? Do they have souls? Are they fallen? And if they are, could we imagine Christ coming to them, incarnate as an Ewok or something? I don't see why not.
Current quantum theory has it that there are, possibly, an infinite number of universes. Infinity is a fun concept, because any subset of something infinite is also infinite. Thus there are an infinite number of universes with human beings, with a fallen Earth, etc. etc. I have no problem with this. With an infinite number of cards to play with, you can shuffle the deck and get any layout you can imagine.
 
Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on :
 
I have a problem with this sort of speculative history, because I am a big sci-fi fan. There is such a lot of SF that deals with questions of "what-if" for very small changes. Mostly, they show that very small, trivial changes can have big impacts across the rest of history.

The thing is, it makes questions this big impossible to start with. Maybe God would have revealed himself in another way, and everything would have been very much the same (although we might worship Frank instead of Jesus), or maybe we would all be speaking Latin, and beleving ourselves to be at the centre of the universe.

Or maybe some other minor change would also have happened, and we would all have been wiped out by an asteroid.

And, as Jonathan Bach in his superb book "One" muses (in one chapter), maybe another religious would have arisen based on another truth, and would have vied with the other faiths and won and destroyed them all. Or changed and shaped them differently.
 
Posted by mark_in_manchester (# 15978) on :
 
Personally, if I became convinced there was no God and Jesus was therefore not His son - then I would have to place my Faith in something or someone else, or become a nihilist.

After all, you gotta serve somebody.
 
Posted by rolyn (# 16840) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
I mean, Jesus. I know there has been a big dismissal of Judaism within Christianity, but it is part of the foundation of Christianity. The OP doesn't even mention it.

Well, I only sketched it out in my head so if you think this needs to be added then by all means.
Judaism would not have spread as it was tribal and very much the preserve of those who espoused it. Paul was the big big player in *spread* by insisting that Jesus was the universally promised Messiah, available to everyone regardless of race, culture, gender, tradition or anything else.

As for 'bias' none was intended in the OP. Maybe Christianity and Islam did develop entirely independently of each other, I'm not an historian. It certainly wasn't meant to provoke the Us and Them mentality.
 
Posted by SvitlanaV2 (# 16967) on :
 
AFAIUI Islam owes a certain amount to Christianity and Judaism. Muhammad is believed to have had considerable contact with both Christians and Jews, and Jesus is revered as a prophet.

[ 30. June 2017, 19:32: Message edited by: SvitlanaV2 ]
 
Posted by wabale (# 18715) on :
 
Just to stay on firm historical ground for a moment, the Christian faith has often been a unifying factor which has been a catalyst and sometimes even the dominant factor in creating nations, from the coming together of the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy to the emergence of African states in the 20th Century.

Somewhat more controversially, I too don’t think Islam would have happened in the way that it did without Christianity providing the initial challenge. However, being very impressed by ‘Dune’ by Frank Herbert, I wouldn’t rule out some other desert-based universal religion producing an empire that took over half the world, and replacing the Greek/Roman civilization.

Both Christianity and Islam have a relationship with military power that has helped create larger and ever more militarised political units. I can’t think of another universal religion that could have taken its place: there is of course Judaism , but perhaps let’s not go there. (However, I would point out that Judaism was remarkably adaptable, and was the basis of political states in South Russia and Ethiopia for example.) Without the Abrahamic religions one can imagine Buddhism filling much of the religious vacuum in the world, but probably not the political/military one. So perhaps the world would have become even more fragmented than the one we find outselves in. Or perhaps a more fragmented world would have been easy prey for a military state like that of Genghis Khan which relied simply on military technology and organisation.

Carl Sagan, the astronomer, envisaged a world where Greek philosophy became the dominant human force. Without the inhibiting effect of religion he thought human progress would than have happened much faster. (I don’t share this opinion.) One of his more striking illustrations depicted two spaceships with Greek letters on the side, mankind having conquered space long before the 20th Century.
 
Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :
 
Richard Garfinkle wrote one too -- an entire universe based on Ptolemaic philosophy. The space travel between the spheres was especially cool.
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by SusanDoris:
I think the move towards non-belief (and secularism) was inevitable whichever way you look at it, because the advances in science and technology have replaced many religious answers to that why question.

Would there have been science without monotheism? The Greeks didn't seem inclined that way and they were the best shot the ancient world had. Science is a direct result of the belief that one can learn about God by studying His world. Without the idea that the world is rational because it is the creature of a rational god, we may never have had science.
 
Posted by Doc Tor (# 9748) on :
 
I've actually done this in a book: no Christianity, and no Islam (partly for balance, and partly because I think ... well, maybe without ME Christianity, there might not have been Islam, or at least a radically different Islam).

My 1000-years-after-the-fall-of-Rome central Europeans (ignoring the whole magic thing) were Germanic pagans, but it's as if the Church of England had taken over the human sacrifices, blood rituals and warrior culture and reinterpreted it for decent people who didn't like to get entrails on their robes and thought that a fertility rite that involved mass drunkenness followed by an orgy just a bit infra dig.

The Jews are still there, though. That's where you get your science from.
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:
The Jews are still there, though. That's where you get your science from.

The science-minded Jews went into Kabbala. Not sure science would have emerged from that.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
Would there have been science without monotheism? The Greeks didn't seem inclined that way and they were the best shot the ancient world had.

Seriously dude? I can't even...
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
Would there have been science without monotheism? The Greeks didn't seem inclined that way and they were the best shot the ancient world had.

Seriously dude? I can't even...
Point me at the Greek who invented the scientific method. Oh wait. That was a Christian.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
Would there have been science without monotheism? The Greeks didn't seem inclined that way and they were the best shot the ancient world had.

Seriously dude? I can't even...
Point me at the Greek who invented the scientific method. Oh wait. That was a Christian.
[Roll Eyes]
First, not sure Ibn al-Haytham would have considered himself a Christian.
Second, science was being done before Jesus was a twinkle in his Father's Eye.
The increasing sophistication of the sciences has more to do with more information being gathered than the religion of its perusers. Not that religion can have no effect, it has, both positive and negative. Making the assumption that monotheism is inherently more scientific does not appear to have any basis in fact.
 
Posted by Og, King of Bashan (# 9562) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by SusanDoris:
I think the move towards non-belief (and secularism) was inevitable whichever way you look at it, because the advances in science and technology have replaced many religious answers to that why question.

Would there have been science without monotheism? The Greeks didn't seem inclined that way and they were the best shot the ancient world had. Science is a direct result of the belief that one can learn about God by studying His world. Without the idea that the world is rational because it is the creature of a rational god, we may never have had science.
Good thing we monotheists were generous enough to share the good stuff with the Chinese, they might have been stuck in the stone age for years...
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
Making the assumption that monotheism is inherently more scientific does not appear to have any basis in fact.

Which is not what I've said -- which level of misreading is probably why I've aroused such ire.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
I read what you wrote again and can not see another interpretation. Can you help me here?
 
Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on :
 
this thread has officially gone off the rails.
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
First, not sure Ibn al-Haytham would have considered himself a Christian.

I'm almost certain he would have considered himself a monotheist.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
this thread has officially gone off the rails.

meh. It was half-tracked from the first.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
First, not sure Ibn al-Haytham would have considered himself a Christian.

I'm almost certain he would have considered himself a monotheist.
[brick wall]
 
Posted by Doc Tor (# 9748) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:
The Jews are still there, though. That's where you get your science from.

The science-minded Jews went into Kabbala. Not sure science would have emerged from that.
The internet tells me that 22.4% of all Nobel prizes have been won by Jews. Clearly not all of them for science, but ...
 
Posted by Doc Tor (# 9748) on :
 
(al-Haytham appears in the book too, or at least his works do)
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:
The Jews are still there, though. That's where you get your science from.

The science-minded Jews went into Kabbala. Not sure science would have emerged from that.
The internet tells me that 22.4% of all Nobel prizes have been won by Jews. Clearly not all of them for science, but ...
I was talking about how science arose, not what's going on now. I don't think science would have arisen from Kabbala, which is where the analytical minds of medieval Judaism seemed to congregate. I may be wrong; that's okay too.

Now that science is here, the conditions of its genesis are of historical but not scientific interest. Anybody from any country or religion can drive a car, now that they've been invented. Anybody from any country or religion can do science now that it's been invented. Jews, as you rightly point out, have been no slouches in that department, and we owe a lot to Jewish scientists, and scientists of course of every religion or no religion at all.
 
Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :
 
@OP
No Christianity, would Europe continue the Indo-European expansion to dominate the western hemisphere? Because capitalism is supposedly a Christian idea; the Chinese specifically abandoned overseas trade and exploration.

Maybe different timing for the European invasion by Columbus et al, maybe they repell the Spanish and maintain their culture. Maybe no communism, that other feral child of Christianity.

Maybe new world religious ideas invade Europe, with specific influence at not separating humans from their natural world context. So we don't pretend we can do economic development at the expense of the environment. We don't democracy by vote, we do it by consensus, accommodating all views. We don't boss each other around the same way.

So now I riff:
Jesus is named Ahtahkoop (Star Blanket) and ordained the sweat lodge. The last supper is beaver tail, venison and labrador tea. He leaves in a canoe. No one kills anyone. We think he became a hawk and flew into a sky of suns in 24 hour daylight from a lake of liquid jade (sundogs, a real phenomenon, where suns ring the entire 360° horizon). He talks to us in the sweat lodge. Tells us to be respectful and ask "can I help" to everyone and to help. And sharing is so obvious everyone assumes it.
 
Posted by Og, King of Bashan (# 9562) on :
 
@NP, we sing that one every Christmas; the Huron Carol.

I do think this idea that somehow the Greeks were on track for steam engines and space travel before Christianity happened is a little silly. Athens' moment had passed long before Jesus' time. Civilizations have their moment, but the temptation to overreach into empire and the inevitable decline that follows is an almost unbreakable rule in human history.
 
Posted by simontoad (# 18096) on :
 
No Christianity? Sol Invictus and Mithras get a boost in the Roman empire. Jewish unrest continues until the Romans get sick of them and flatten Jerusalem. Post-temple Judaism is born out of the maelstrom in a manner unaffected by Christianity's absence.

The Western Roman empire is severely weakened by infighting and pressure from the movements of peoples seeking to escape the depredations of steppe nomads (and get a piece of that juicy and safe Roman action). Over a few hundred years, the West has splintered into smaller and less stable kingdoms. There is no recognition of any central religious or political authority, although local leaders are wont to clothe themselves in the titles and symbols of Old Rome.

The Eastern Roman Empire lives, where Sol Invictus has become the dominant belief. The Emperors sponsor the worship of the Invincible Sun, and the magnificent Hagia Sophia is built as the central place of worship in Constantinople. The Emperor is seen as the incarnation of the Sun on earth, and while this belief is compulsory, it does not preclude belief in other gods, so the Jews are still in a precarious position.

By the seventh century, Rome in the east is at its maximum extent. Due to the strength of the nomads, it is unable to expand north of the Black Sea, and fights with the Bulgars, who have been pushed into the area around the mouth of the Danube. The Persians are in one of their declines, again under attack from the nomads. Armenia, that crucial buffer zone, is under Roman dominance. Palestine, Anatolia, Syria and Egypt are all posessions of the Eastern Empire, as is much of southern Italy. Palestine is a Jewish backwater of no particular significance.

In the Arabian Peninsula, a great Prophet is born. The region has long been influenced by Judaism, and Mohammed (BBHN) is well-versed in them. He receives a revelation from God and under his leadership the people of the Peninsula strike out towards Jerusalem. They conquer Persia, Palestine, Egypt, Syria, north africa and the Iberian Peninsula. In Southern France there is a pivotal battle, but without the unity of Christendom in the West, Charles Mantel loses. France, Italy and the Balkans are added to the Empire of Islam, blessed by God to an impressive extent. Victory is next to Godliness.

Only the Eastern Romans hold out, because of the strength of their walls in Constantinople and the blessings of the Invincible Son. Nevertheless, the Empire has been severely weakened by the loss of Syria and Egypt, and it stands alone against a foe of impressive unity and fervor.

Will the Arabs be able to destroy the only remaining bastion of the Empire of the Sun God? Or will it be riven by faction and splinter in the next generation?

Who knows.
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
Seriously dude?, I can't even...

As one of your links was to Archimedes I'll use him as an example.
Archimedes got his statement of Archimedes' Principle wrong.
Archimedes stated that bodies float when they displace a weight of water equal to their weight. This is not true. A body floats when it displaces a weight of water equal to the weight of that part of the body that is under the water.

Galileo showed that experimentally. He had a tall glass cylinder, put a small quantity water in at the bottom, and put a wooden rod in the cylinder. The rod was heavier than the total weight of the water, but it floated anyway even though according to Archimedes' statement of his principle there wasn't enough weight of water for it to float in.

Archimedes says nothing in On Floating Bodies about conducting experiments. Whereas by the seventeenth century there was a developing culture of describing experiments.

The Greeks were very good at proving geometry from first principles and applying them: land surveying and astronomy both rely on geometry. And they could build mechanisms. But they didn't ever take the step of thinking that geometry could be used to describe physical laws, and they never had any culture of experimentation, certainly not of describing experiments.

(Your last link cites James Fraser to establish a point. I don't think any scholar who keeps up with current research would ever cite Fraser to establish anything about science or magic. They also use the word 'superstitions' to describe the Egyptians' practices, which again, no scholar who wants to be taken seriously by current scholarship would do.)
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
I think I must have got the revised version of Archimedes' principle wrong somehow. (If my statement were correct no part of an object less dense than water would sit under the water.) The point stands that Galileo's experiment floated a wooden rod in water that weighed less than the rod. According to Archimedes that shouldn't be possible.
 
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on :
 
It's the weight of the water displaced that counts. The rod displaces a volume of water equal to the volume of that part of the rod under water. This may be much less than the total weight of the water.

I think that both Archimedes and Galileo are right.
 
Posted by mark_in_manchester (# 15978) on :
 
I was worrying about the (un-immersed) superstructure of the ship poking up out of the sea with a great big m.g acting downwards on it!

Meanwhile, a Canadian correspondent posts

quote:
...We think he became a hawk and flew into a sky of suns in 24 hour daylight from a lake of liquid jade...
Oooh. (sings) 'lah lah ...like a pearl in a sea of liquid jade...like a crystal swan in a sky of swans... lah lah'

So tell me where these bits of funky hippy imagery came from that I've been humming all these years! Or did you feed those lyrics back into your alternative vision, and they are their own source?
 
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on :
 
I remember an uncle, many years ago, asking me how much water you would need to float the Queen Mary. A cupful, he said, if you has a dock that was a perfect fit for it.
 
Posted by Jay-Emm (# 11411) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
I remember an uncle, many years ago, asking me how much water you would need to float the Queen Mary. A cupful, he said, if you has a dock that was a perfect fit for it.

I think, it still needs to displace it's weight, so that water would be heading up the sides of the dock as it's descending (unless you can keep the edges sealed as you lower it, easier with a cube).

Even then a cupful is 250cc, while the QM's 250m long, each cc of water (less than a teaspoon, is being spread over an area 1m*(however far it needs to go along the side), leading to a 'depth' of much less than 1 micrometer (and such that the middle of the plates with deform that much, which the edge of the plates makes firm contact).
 
Posted by Jay-Emm (# 11411) on :
 
Off to think that through a bit more. There would be the virtual displacement mentioned before. And so the water would stop rising when it's Hydrostatic head was equiv to the normal floating point of the boat (except with it being so close, you'd have surface tension effects).
 
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on :
 
If you think of Galileo's wooden rod again, and imagine it's quite a tight fit in the glass tube, say the rod is 0.5m long and 5cm in diameter, and the glass cylinder is 0.451m deep and 5.2cm in diameter, and the rod has a density 90% of water. When you put the rod in to the glass cylinder full of water, nearly all of it will overflow leaving a 1mm layer of water around the rod. It still floats though, because of the weight of water, now on the carpet, which it displaced.
 
Posted by Jay-Emm (# 11411) on :
 
Yes, I was clearly wrong in the first bit of the ship case (because the initial movement of fluid is so much I didn't think of it stopping).

And of course the water that's now on the carpet never needed to actually be there, and isn't doing anything now. It just makes it even more obvious that it is displaced when it literally moves, rather than the water rising at the edges.
 
Posted by Doc Tor (# 9748) on :
 
In any event... the trajectory of scientific discovery within Renaissance Europe was very much one of re-discovery. The Latin and Greek texts that had been lost to Europe and then copied back from the Arabic and Persian were the starting point. The Arabic and Persian texts that came along with them were the springboard that led to the questioning of the wisdom of the ancients.

Science was far, far more advanced in North Africa and the ME/Asia during the Middle Ages than in Europe (excepting Spain). And Jews were in the position of being able to translate books from Arabic to Persian to Hebrew to Latin and Greek and back again, serving in royal courts across the Islamic world.

How much the Church did to suppress scientific innovation is up for debate, but if the trajectory of Islamic science had continued beyond the 16th century (when, more or less, theology turned against science) then there's little doubt that that would be the real Jonbar point.

Given the Persians passion for scientific discovery wasn't interrupted by adoption of Islam, I feel that we'd be in a familiar world, albeit with radically different cultural references.
 
Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on :
 
Odd how theology can turn against science. This seems to be happening in the USA too.
 
Posted by ACK (# 16756) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Og, King of Bashan: From a historical rather than faith based perspective, I have heard that Cyrus the Great is probably responsible for this not happening. He had a policy of setting Persia apart from earlier empires by letting local populations stay in place (or return from exile) and keep their religious beliefs, rather than enslaving or killing them all. Without that? Judaism probably doesn't make it long enough for Jesus to hit the scene.
Agree with you that was his policy and why they returned to Judea, but my understanding is that there was a strong Jewish community in Babylon during the Exile. That is where much of the Hebrew Bible came together, and what is means to be Jewish was codified. The driving force being that they were in a foreign land and wanted to make it clear what was different about them and the other cultures in Babylon. Most of them did not return under Cyrus's offer.
Plus only the elite went into exile, the poor were left in Judea.
Also, the northern kingdom, Israel/Samaria fell a century earlier to Assyria, with the elite going into exile and other people imported, creating a mixed race, still following a form of the same religon, even though the Samaritans were despised by the southern kingdom.
That is, even without Cyrus, Judaism would have survived in some form or another.

Another major event was the destruction of the Temple in the 1st Century AD. Two sects of Jewish origin actually managed to dust themselves off and survive that and define what their faith meant without the Temple. One was the Christians, the other the Pharisees, who put together the foundations of modern Judaism.
I think without Christianity, the Pharisees vision would have filled more or less the space Christianity takes. I am assuming in that, that Paul, in the absence of Christianity, had put his zeal behind it.
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
Here's the passage from the book I was referring to. Wootton. The upshot is that Archimedes' principle is only true as stated in an unbounded body of liquid.
Wootton's entire book is about how the practice of science as done by the Greeks and Arabs (and Chinese and others) changed into the practice of science as done by Western Europe in the eighteenth century and onwards. He is incidentally a sceptic about Christianity's role in the process.
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:
In any event... the trajectory of scientific discovery within Renaissance Europe was very much one of re-discovery. The Latin and Greek texts that had been lost to Europe and then copied back from the Arabic and Persian were the starting point. The Arabic and Persian texts that came along with them were the springboard that led to the questioning of the wisdom of the ancients.

I think that the Latin and Greek texts in question were all available before we get to what we now call the Renaissance. Normally we don't talk about the thirteenth century when Aristotle became part of the scholastic canon as the Renaissance.
In some ways what is now called the Renaissance set the process of scientific discovery back half a century or so: Bradwardine, Oresme and other scholastics had been willing to question Aristotle, whereas humanists were far less so.

Wootton, in his book The Invention of Science, thinks that the main trigger to Europe as a whole rejecting the past as such was the discovery of the Americas (which the ancients clearly did not know about).

quote:
Science was far, far more advanced in North Africa and the ME/Asia during the Middle Ages than in Europe (excepting Spain). And Jews were in the position of being able to translate books from Arabic to Persian to Hebrew to Latin and Greek and back again, serving in royal courts across the Islamic world.
This is true. I should add that the non-Chalcedonian Christian groups were just as much involved as Jews under the Islamic courts.

quote:
How much the Church did to suppress scientific innovation is up for debate, but if the trajectory of Islamic science had continued beyond the 16th century (when, more or less, theology turned against science) then there's little doubt that that would be the real Jonbar point
.

Theology in the Islamic world was in a poorer position to put a stop to science than it was in the Western Christian world. And in the Western Christian world it clearly didn't. I don't think al-Ghazali and his followers can be credited with inhibiting the progress of Islamic thought except in so far as something about the Islamic world (e.g. perhaps the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols) had already created conditions in which that could happen.
 
Posted by SusanDoris (# 12618) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by SusanDoris:
I think the move towards non-belief (and secularism) was inevitable whichever way you look at it, because the advances in science and technology have replaced many religious answers to that why question.

Would there have been science without monotheism?
I have read all the intervening posts but thought I’d go back to this one anyway. I am very firmly of the opinion that science was inevitable, especially since it has been going on since humans started making better stone tools and has gradually come to the present time when changes and improvements (or not) happen in far less time. Whatever religious, faith beliefs there were throughout history, there was the in-built human drive to find out how things worked and then to improve on them. Progress might have been quicker if non-believers, from the earliest unknown ones, via Epicurus and other ancient Greek thinkers to Hume, had been paid more attention to!
quote:
Science is a direct result of the belief that one can learn about God by studying His world. Without the idea that the world is rational because it is the creature of a rational god, we may never have had science.
Science would have happened regardless of whether any god was believed to exist I think. The movements of people, the battles, conquests and defeats would probably have happened differently, but that human drive was, and I’d say, still is, unstoppable.

[ 01. July 2017, 15:24: Message edited by: SusanDoris ]
 
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 
The invisible effects of Christianity, which subverted Rome, wouldn't have happened from that source. So the contagious humanist, revolutionary aspects of the social gospel would have come from other sources. They were there in the confluence of Jewish and Greek, particularly Stoic thought. Nero's excesses weren't just disapproved of by his Christian victims, but by civilized Romans. The visible effects of Christianity are as the beast's prophet; the religious, mystic justifier of the state. There was no change, apart from a possibly enhanced degree of effectiveness. The Empire fell with that of the Sasanians in deadlock. Islam arose. And found its limits.

I find this proposition the most fascinating: that the church, as well as being the sole European repository of social authority, knowledge, the arts in the dark ages, perpetuated the latter for a thousand years. The church wasn't concerned with worldly affairs: economics, trade, technology.

Tertullian: 'What is there in common between Athens and Jerusalem?'.

Basil of Caesarea: 'Let Christians prefer the simplicity of our faith to the demonstrations of human reason'.

Augustine: 'For to spend much time on research about the essence of things would not serve the edification of the church.', "in his Confessions condemning as a 'disease' the yearning to discover 'the hidden powers of nature… which to know profits not'.".

We lost Aristotle and a thousand years of practical intellectual work. And its mutual effects on population, society, technology. We would be now where we'll be in the year 2525 ...

And we wouldn't have any warrant whatsoever for believing in a best-case God. Could Jewish thought have got there? Some would say it did. Without Jesus? Not a chance. There is no evidence for such a God without Him, even though Isaiah was a socialist who informs Islam.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
Dafyd,

That Archimedes didn't fully present a unified floating theory does not invalidate him as an example of (rudimentary in his case) scientific approach outside of monotheism. Just as the shortcomings of Newton's gravitational theory do not invalidate him.

As far as James Fraser, didn't look at the page beyond seeing reference to ancient discovery.

Regardless, my point that monotheism is not the backbone of science stands.

quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
I remember an uncle, many years ago, asking me how much water you would need to float the Queen Mary. A cupful, he said, if you has a dock that was a perfect fit for it.

You would need more than a cup, I think. Even spread to one water molecule thick, I'm not certain there would be enough surface area to surround the ship.
But it would not take much.

quote:
Originally posted by ACK:

I think without Christianity, the Pharisees vision would have filled more or less the space Christianity takes. I am assuming in that, that Paul, in the absence of Christianity, had put his zeal behind it.

Why? Judaism isn't an evangelical tradition. When their ties to the state ended, so to did any serious expansion. They are a great religion more for their influence in two that did spread than any expansion themselves. A video time-line. Not a perfect example as Christianity doesn't exist in this thought experiment and Islam would be different if it did exist.
Still, Judaism spread as a component of the state, no reason to think it would when it wasn't.
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:

That Archimedes didn't fully present a unified floating theory does not invalidate him as an example of (rudimentary in his case) scientific approach outside of monotheism. Just as the shortcomings of Newton's gravitational theory do not invalidate him.

You're missing the point. It's not that Archimedes was incomplete or wrong. It's that he didn't use experiments to establish or test his theory. He reached it by a priori geometric reasoning. Science is an enterprise to which experimental testing is central.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:

That Archimedes didn't fully present a unified floating theory does not invalidate him as an example of (rudimentary in his case) scientific approach outside of monotheism. Just as the shortcomings of Newton's gravitational theory do not invalidate him.

You're missing the point. It's not that Archimedes was incomplete or wrong. It's that he didn't use experiments to establish or test his theory. He reached it by a priori geometric reasoning. Science is an enterprise to which experimental testing is central.
So, Einstein didn't do science? Science begins as an exploration. Experiments strengthen the hypothesis, but it needed to start somewhere. You are shaving the nits off camel's back so that it can fit through a needle. Or something.
 
Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :
 
As far as I know Bruce Cockburn took the images from some South American indigenous imagery and found they resonated with other things. There is a collective unconscious which is Jung's term: the spirits of ancestors is an indigenous idea that parallels. To not grieve so much for kokum (grandmother) because there are elements obvious of her within daughter (it isn't reincarnation, nor earthly rebirth). All The Diamonds In The World is a great song.

The Huron were almost exterminated by the Iroquois. Huron aligned with French, Iroquois with English. Waynadot (various spellings) is Huron name for themselves as far as I know. Cultures and languages are as different among indigenous groups as Chinese is to English is to Hungarian.

I suspect that God had nothing to do with Roman or Greek or anyone's else's ascendency. Working out all of it within what humans do. And it is a work in progress.
 
Posted by Galilit (# 16470) on :
 
Roses are reddish
Violets are bluish
If it wasn't for Jesus
We'd all be Jewish
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Science is an enterprise to which experimental testing is central.

So, Einstein didn't do science? Science begins as an exploration. Experiments strengthen the hypothesis, but it needed to start somewhere.
Science is a social enterprise. You can participate even if you aren't doing experiments yourself. And there are some branches of science where experiments aren't entirely feasible (e.g. palaeontology, string theory). But the enterprise is based around an ideal of submitting theories to experimental or at least empirical verification. That's why in the last two hundred years our culture has been excited about science in a way that the Romans and Greeks were not.
Someone who comes up with a theory that they don't even consider testing empirically isn't engaged in the social enterprise we call science.
 
Posted by Callan (# 525) on :
 
The question is, where do the timelines diverge?

Events in Bronze Age Canaan prevent the establishment of Israel? Israel conquered and assimilated by Philistines? No Cyrus the Great? No Alexander the Great? No Roman Empire? Jesus of Nazareth dies young? St. Paul stays Jewish? Rome stays stable and an Emperor embraces Manicheanism? Constantine loses at Milvium Bridge? Julian doesn't invade Mesopotamia?

The possibilities are pretty much endless. The Confederacy winning the Civil War allows for a variety of outcomes. How much more so an event centuries or millennia ago.
 
Posted by Jay-Emm (# 11411) on :
 
The simplest would be some variation on Jesus not being born (yet).

Theologically, it requires the least assume our beliefs are wrong. You can just say the we're still living in pre-the-incarnation times, if you want. Then you don't have to explain a (failing) Jesus away, and you still get to keep all the OT as happening. It won't be perfect, but you only have to assume what your assuming.
Similarly historically it keeps everything pre-change, while not having to deal with the outcomes of a partial event.

However the consequences, will constantly be reinforced, and make speculation at any point instantly meaningless. I think much more than other contra-factuals, which you can isolate a little more.

[ 01. July 2017, 21:03: Message edited by: Jay-Emm ]
 
Posted by Dave W. (# 8765) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I think I must have got the revised version of Archimedes' principle wrong somehow. (If my statement were correct no part of an object less dense than water would sit under the water.) The point stands that Galileo's experiment floated a wooden rod in water that weighed less than the rod. According to Archimedes that shouldn't be possible.

I'd be interested in reading Galileo's account - do you have a reference for that experiment? I looked through his Discourse on Floating Bodies briefly but didn't see it. (He does seem pretty supportive of Archimedes against Renaissance detractors, though.)

In any case, it seems to me your criticism of Archimedes depends on taking a rather narrow view of what he meant by "the weight of the fluid displaced". Galileo's experimental result is in agreement with Archimedes if the "fluid displaced" is taken to be "the volume below the surface which is occupied by the object rather than fluid." I think this is justified by his explanation of Proposition 5 in On Floating Bodies, in which the portion of the "fluid displaced" is identified as being equal to the portion of the it "immersed when the fluid is at rest."
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I think I must have got the revised version of Archimedes' principle wrong somehow. (If my statement were correct no part of an object less dense than water would sit under the water.) The point stands that Galileo's experiment floated a wooden rod in water that weighed less than the rod. According to Archimedes that shouldn't be possible.

I'd be interested in reading Galileo's account - do you have a reference for that experiment? I looked through his Discourse on Floating Bodies[/URL] briefly but didn't see it. (He does seem pretty supportive of Archimedes against Renaissance detractors, though.)
Did you see my link to Wootton's book in my later post? I don't have the book to hand so I can't look up Wootton's references.

quote:
In any case, it seems to me your criticism of Archimedes depends on taking a rather narrow view of what he meant by "the weight of the fluid displaced". Galileo's experimental result is in agreement with Archimedes if the "fluid displaced" is taken to be "the volume below the surface which is occupied by the object rather than fluid." I think this is justified by his explanation of Proposition 5 in On Floating Bodies, in which the portion of the "fluid displaced" is identified as being equal to the portion of the it "immersed when the fluid is at rest."
It's not an explanation. It's a proof. Does nobody read Euclid anymore?
Anyway I got the error in Archimedes' proof wrong. Archimedes is correct in the case that he is considering. That case is where the fluid is free to move across the entire sphere. (See the diagram.) It's just that it doesn't apply in the cases which he doesn't consider, namely where the fluid is in a bounded container and therefore cannot move sideways without limit. My point is that the only situation in which he could have experimentally tested his results would be in a bounded container - to which his result does not apply - so the fact that he doesn't mention those cases shows that he never tested his results experimentally.

The interpretation of 'immersed when the fluid is at rest' seems to me clearly to mean 'immersed once the fluid has settled down and is not moving'. If I understand Wootton's explanation, this is not true. In the general case the volume that is displaced is equal not to the volume of the object underwater once the water is at rest but to the volume of the object under the original surface level without the object.
In the limit case that Archimedes is considering where the fluid can move sideways without constraint the two levels are equivalent. But under actual experimental conditions they differ. Or so I understand. (Archimedes' proof fails under such circumstances if I understand correctly because he assumes in his first postulate that the only pressures in the water are exerted downwards.)
 
Posted by Dave W. (# 8765) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I think I must have got the revised version of Archimedes' principle wrong somehow. (If my statement were correct no part of an object less dense than water would sit under the water.) The point stands that Galileo's experiment floated a wooden rod in water that weighed less than the rod. According to Archimedes that shouldn't be possible.

I'd be interested in reading Galileo's account - do you have a reference for that experiment? I looked through his Discourse on Floating Bodies[/URL] briefly but didn't see it. (He does seem pretty supportive of Archimedes against Renaissance detractors, though.)
Did you see my link to Wootton's book in my later post? I don't have the book to hand so I can't look up Wootton's references.

quote:
In any case, it seems to me your criticism of Archimedes depends on taking a rather narrow view of what he meant by "the weight of the fluid displaced". Galileo's experimental result is in agreement with Archimedes if the "fluid displaced" is taken to be "the volume below the surface which is occupied by the object rather than fluid." I think this is justified by his explanation of Proposition 5 in On Floating Bodies, in which the portion of the "fluid displaced" is identified as being equal to the portion of the it "immersed when the fluid is at rest."
It's not an explanation. It's a proof. Does nobody read Euclid anymore?
Anyway I got the error in Archimedes' proof wrong. Archimedes is correct in the case that he is considering. That case is where the fluid is free to move across the entire sphere. (See the diagram.) It's just that it doesn't apply in the cases which he doesn't consider, namely where the fluid is in a bounded container and therefore cannot move sideways without limit. My point is that the only situation in which he could have experimentally tested his results would be in a bounded container - to which his result does not apply - so the fact that he doesn't mention those cases shows that he never tested his results experimentally.

The interpretation of 'immersed when the fluid is at rest' seems to me clearly to mean 'immersed once the fluid has settled down and is not moving'. If I understand Wootton's explanation, this is not true. In the general case the volume that is displaced is equal not to the volume of the object underwater once the water is at rest but to the volume of the object under the original surface level without the object.

I got "immersed when the fluid is at rest" from "On floating bodies" (see previous link) so that's what I think Archimedes meant by "fluid displaced."

I don't see why one should prefer Wootton's interpretation of Archimedes' phrase to Archimedes' own interpretation ("For let the solid be EGHF, and let BGHC be the portion of it immersed when the fluid is at rest" - assuming that T.L. Heath, "sometime fellow of Trinity College", knew what he was translating.) Why insist that it meant "the volume of the object under the original surface level without the object?" Why should we think that Archimedes believed the original surface level had anything to do with it? If there are other people than Wootton who have pointed out Archimedes' supposed error, it seems odd (though not conclusive) that it doesn't seem to show up in Google searches.

If "fluid displaced" means "volume below the water line at rest" and not "volume below original water line" then Archimedes will agree with Galileo's observation; this doesn't provide support for the contention that Archimedes never experimented.
 
Posted by Latchkey Kid (# 12444) on :
 
A theory could be made that the growth of new religions and schisms in religions were satisfying unmet needs of societies. Tribal gods to Judaism to Christianity to Islam and various splits in Christendom, to Bahai and Sikhism and various splits in Islam, and from Christendom to post-Christian religions such as Mormonism and Christian Science.

Indian sourced religions have similar trajectories, but I understand that Buddhism has a much more civilised approach to schisms than does Christianity.

PS. I don't think that (one type of) Christianity is the only inspired religion, but I can't change my spiritual heritage.
 
Posted by SvitlanaV2 (# 16967) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Latchkey Kid:
I understand that Buddhism has a much more civilised approach to schisms than does Christianity.

PS. I don't think that (one type of) Christianity is the only inspired religion, but I can't change my spiritual heritage.

Yet people move on from their spiritual heritage all the time. New religions and religious movements wouldn't exist if that weren't the case. Christians are particularly prone to this, ISTM.

In what sense does Buddhism have a more civilised approach to schism than Christianity?
 
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 
If Christianity is a pious fraud, then something like it couldn't have not come in to existence at that time and place. At the confluence of Athens and Jerusalem. Rome and India. It is deterministic, a function of social evolution.

As it was, all of that was going on, but the nucleation point for phase change was the Incarnation. But what medium changed phase? Gelled? Condensed? Did a hard layer of human hearts begin to soften, warm, melt that otherwise wouldn't for millennia, if ever? Humanism would have developed in pace with far earlier acquired science and technology, but it couldn't coalesce around a transcendent existential hope. Until Christ. The phase change is to a still all but peripherally unseen, unfelt vapour that yet percolates the sand of human hearts.

Like the unbelievable reality of God and the supernatural, there is no evidence that Christianity ever did exist except in Christ and all the very little that has been done in His true light.

Actual reality is all but utterly overwhelming.
 
Posted by Russ (# 120) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:
I've actually done this in a book: no Christianity, and no Islam (partly for balance, and partly because I think ... well, maybe without ME Christianity, there might not have been Islam, or at least a radically different Islam).

Can you give us a link to the book ? Sounds worth a read.

I'd agree - Mohammed was inspired by Christianity, so no Islam as such in this alternate reality.

America colonised by the Vikings ?

Weaker Europe (no Holy Roman Empire).

What happens to the Ottoman empire without Islam ?
 
Posted by Jay-Emm (# 11411) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Russ:
I'd agree - Mohammed was inspired by Christianity, so no Islam as such in this alternate reality.

America colonised by the Vikings ?

Weaker Europe (no Holy Roman Empire).

What happens to the Ottoman empire without Islam ?

Ditto (or at least different in many bits). Whatever extent God had in the creation of and response to Islam the base would have been totally different (so he'd have had to act differently for the same effects, or the same for different-to the extent that saying God must is meaningful).

None of the little Christendom or Islamic natural togetherness. The energy of the crusades going into one more internal squabble than actually happened.

Mongols going much further west than they did (partly as the otherwise-muslim world would have fallen quicker, partly as Europe did at least partially unite against them)

There had been an empire in Persia (the Sassanian). That might have regrown before and then following the mongols.
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
The interpretation of 'immersed when the fluid is at rest' seems to me clearly to mean 'immersed once the fluid has settled down and is not moving'. If I understand Wootton's explanation, this is not true. In the general case the volume that is displaced is equal not to the volume of the object underwater once the water is at rest but to the volume of the object under the original surface level without the object.

I got "immersed when the fluid is at rest" from "On floating bodies" (see previous link) so that's what I think Archimedes meant by "fluid displaced."

I don't see why one should prefer Wootton's interpretation of Archimedes' phrase to Archimedes' own interpretation ("For let the solid be EGHF, and let BGHC be the portion of it immersed when the fluid is at rest" - assuming that T.L. Heath, "sometime fellow of Trinity College", knew what he was translating.) Why insist that it meant "the volume of the object under the original surface level without the object?" Why should we think that Archimedes believed the original surface level had anything to do with it? If there are other people than Wootton who have pointed out Archimedes' supposed error, it seems odd (though not conclusive) that it doesn't seem to show up in Google searches.

If "fluid displaced" means "volume below the water line at rest" and not "volume below original water line" then Archimedes will agree with Galileo's observation; this doesn't provide support for the contention that Archimedes never experimented.

OK. I agree with you on your interpretation of Archimedes. Apologies if I was not clear. Archimedes is clearly talking about the volume of the object below the water at equilibrium. And I think Wootton agrees with you too.

I would assume that if there is a mistake going on somewhere it is in my interpretation of Wootton. Certainly my first post is completely wrong about the point at issue (I'd forgotten that it has to do with bounded containers).

Anyway: if I read Galileo's Theorem I correctly, Wootton is right to say that Archimedes' principle only applies in a special case. Alternatively Archimedes' principle is correct if you gloss 'the weight of the fluid displaced' as 'the weight of the fluid that would occupy the volume of the object underwater'. But the volume of the fluid that is actually physically displaced will be less that the fluid that would occupy the volume of the object underwater by the volume of the object that lies between the original water level and the new water level.

On the sphere of the earth the level by which the water is raised will be negligible. (And the same for any sufficiently large container). Therefore the difference between the volume of fluid physically displaced and the volume of the object underwater is negligible. But this is not so in a bounded container.

The conclusion is that Archimedes' theorem 6 is incorrect if it is taken to imply that you can't float an object if the object weighs more than the water available for the object to displace. In a bounded container the quantity of water that the object's volume occupies once floating would be considerably greater than the actual volume displaced.

The case against Archimedes using experiments is that a) nothing in his expressed reasoning process requires experiments or refers to any experiments - Galileo does do so in both his introduction and his conclusion; b) he does not ever discuss how his principle is affected by the change in water level or distinguish between volume of water displaced and volume of water that would occupy the volume of the object - for Galileo who we know is actually performing experiments that is the most salient and obvious part of the business that he discusses first.
 
Posted by ACK (# 16756) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
Why? Judaism isn't an evangelical tradition. When their ties to the state ended, so to did any serious expansion. They are a great religion more for their influence in two that did spread than any expansion themselves. A video time-line. Not a perfect example as Christianity doesn't exist in this thought experiment and Islam would be different if it did exist. Still, Judaism spread as a component of the state, no reason to think it would when it wasn't.

Thanks for the timeline - really interesting.
My feeling is that maybe without Christianity, Judaism would have filled that space is because I suspect the time was right for something to spread out of Judaism. Without it happening with Christianity, would that conversion drive have happened to some other part or off-shoot of Judaism?
i.e. people like Paul might have taken Judaism to the nations instead, or something else coming out of Judaism. Maybe not. But Judaism might have become an evangalising religion. Is is a religion with a history of change in time of stress. It changed during the Babylonian exile, it changed when in contact with the Greeks, it changed from a Temple religion to a religion of Book after the destruction of the Temple.
There is a conflict in the Hebrew Bible between books like Ezra and Nehemiah, with the concept of racial purity and the religion only being for their race, and Ruth and Jonah, with a different perspective on foreigners. Isaiah (2nd one) suggests God is the God of all nations with Israel to be the light of the nations. Sometimes this is seen as happening through Jesus, identifying him as the suffering servant, bringing justice to the nations.
Was the forfilment of the idea of something errupting out of Judaism to the gentiles inevitable at this time, and if Christianity had not happened it would have worked in some other way?
Maybe not...
In the early days there was an argument over whether you needed to be or become a Jew to be a Christian. Would Christianity have had much impact with people not already Jews if it required circumcism and obedience to all Jewish law?
 
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Russ:
quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:
I've actually done this in a book: no Christianity, and no Islam (partly for balance, and partly because I think ... well, maybe without ME Christianity, there might not have been Islam, or at least a radically different Islam).

Can you give us a link to the book ? Sounds worth a read.

I'd agree - Mohammed was inspired by Christianity, so no Islam as such in this alternate reality.

America colonised by the Vikings ?

Weaker Europe (no Holy Roman Empire).

What happens to the Ottoman empire without Islam ?

Rome and the Sasanians would still have exhausted themselves and created a vacuum for Muhammad. I fail to see how the absence of a Syriac minority would have prevented the rise of Islam in reaction to polytheism and Judaism alone. I see these things as sinks not saddles in chaos terms.

If the Enlightenment began a thousand years earlier in which case we'd have been here a long, long time ago. A dominant materialist West vs. the rest.

[ 02. July 2017, 15:47: Message edited by: Martin60 ]
 
Posted by Dave W. (# 8765) on :
 
I can't address Wootton's argument directly - for me, the link you gave doesn't lead to a specific passage, and the Galileo/Archimedes bit doesn't seem to be in the free sample Google provides.

But I don't see anything wrong with Archimedes' principle as presented by Archimedes - that is, the volume of "fluid displaced" is the volume of the "portion of [the body] immersed when the fluid is at rest." In this view Archimedes is entirely compatible with Galileo's observations, whether the water is in a bounded container or not. Galileo himself didn't seem troubled either - he mentions Archimedes many times in his Discourse on Floating Bodies but generally to defend him against attacks by one Signor Buonamico.

Maybe Archimedes did experiments, maybe he didn't. (If he wasn't interested in the practical applications, it's kind of a mystery that he spent so much of Book II examining the flotation of boat-like shapes.) But I don't think he made any errors that make it obvious that he didn't do experiments. For that project, I suspect Aristotle is a better target.
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.:
I can't address Wootton's argument directly - for me, the link you gave doesn't lead to a specific passage, and the Galileo/Archimedes bit doesn't seem to be in the free sample Google provides.

If you Google 'Galileo Archimedes Principle' a link to the relevant passage in the book appears six or seven entries down.

quote:
But I don't see anything wrong with Archimedes' principle as presented by Archimedes - that is, the volume of "fluid displaced" is the volume of the "portion of [the body] immersed when the fluid is at rest."
I think it is natural to take 'the volume of fluid displaced' to mean the volume of the portion of [the body] below the original level of the fluid. Because that's the fluid that's actually been displaced. Maybe the problem lies with the translation. Archimedes has to find some way to talk about the volume in which there is no fluid because that volume is occupied by the floating body, and maybe 'fluid displaced' is the best way to do so. In the case Archimedes considers there is no difference. But in any case where the level of water changes there is a difference. The phraseology in the translation is at the most generous ambiguous. And clearly either Archimedes or the translator didn't spot that.

quote:
Maybe Archimedes did experiments, maybe he didn't. (If he wasn't interested in the practical applications, it's kind of a mystery that he spent so much of Book II examining the flotation of boat-like shapes.) But I don't think he made any errors that make it obvious that he didn't do experiments. For that project, I suspect Aristotle is a better target.
I think that if Book II is about boat-like shapes it is as in the joke about spherical cows. He's talking about solids formed by rotation which, aside from coracles and such like, boats are not.

The point of addressing Archimedes is that he's the strongest case and the most likely counterexample to the generalisation. If Archimedes falls on the applied mathematician side of the applied mathematician/ physicist line then it's plausible that all Greek natural philosophers did so.
 
Posted by Leorning Cniht (# 17564) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Jay-Emm:
quote:
Originally posted by hatless:
I remember an uncle, many years ago, asking me how much water you would need to float the Queen Mary. A cupful, he said, if you has a dock that was a perfect fit for it.

I think, it still needs to displace it's weight, so that water would be heading up the sides of the dock as it's descending
The Queen Mary drew 39', was close to 1000' long at the waterline, and had a 118' beam. That gives it a wetted area of something like 140,000 square feet when afloat.

A cup of water distributed over that area forms a layer 20nm thick.

Of course, you couldn't actually get the QM into this interestingly tight dock, because it has to wrap around rivet heads and things. But as a thought experiment - sure.
 
Posted by mark_in_manchester (# 15978) on :
 
Am I alone in remembering from school the 'eureka can' experiment? The idea there is to show the weight of displaced water (in a bounded system) to be equal (+- errors) to the mass of the floating body.

Not saying the experiment was ever carried out by Archimedes, of course.

The derivation behind this even drove me back to websites dealing with boundary integrations (Green's functions) etc. Didn't take long to remember why I now sweep up the lab and sharpen the drill bits [Smile]
 
Posted by Dave W. (# 8765) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.:
I can't address Wootton's argument directly - for me, the link you gave doesn't lead to a specific passage, and the Galileo/Archimedes bit doesn't seem to be in the free sample Google provides.

If you Google 'Galileo Archimedes Principle' a link to the relevant passage in the book appears six or seven entries down.

Maybe so when you Google it; I get a couple of Google Books results, but Wootton isn't among them.
quote:

quote:
But I don't see anything wrong with Archimedes' principle as presented by Archimedes - that is, the volume of "fluid displaced" is the volume of the "portion of [the body] immersed when the fluid is at rest."
I think it is natural to take 'the volume of fluid displaced' to mean the volume of the portion of [the body] below the original level of the fluid. Because that's the fluid that's actually been displaced. Maybe the problem lies with the translation. Archimedes has to find some way to talk about the volume in which there is no fluid because that volume is occupied by the floating body, and maybe 'fluid displaced' is the best way to do so. In the case Archimedes considers there is no difference. But in any case where the level of water changes there is a difference. The phraseology in the translation is at the most generous ambiguous. And clearly either Archimedes or the translator didn't spot that.

"Clearly"? Maybe Archimedes didn't say anything about the "original level of the fluid" because he realized, correctly, that it's entirely irrelevant to the problem. All that matters is how much volume is below the surface at rest, which is what Archimedes says. I don't see why one should insist on a reading which runs counter to the text, unless it's really important to show an error (which Galileo himself doesn't seem to complain about) to support an argument about lack of experiments.
quote:

quote:
Maybe Archimedes did experiments, maybe he didn't. (If he wasn't interested in the practical applications, it's kind of a mystery that he spent so much of Book II examining the flotation of boat-like shapes.) But I don't think he made any errors that make it obvious that he didn't do experiments. For that project, I suspect Aristotle is a better target.
I think that if Book II is about boat-like shapes it is as in the joke about spherical cows. He's talking about solids formed by rotation which, aside from coracles and such like, boats are not.

Good point.
quote:
The point of addressing Archimedes is that he's the strongest case and the most likely counterexample to the generalisation. If Archimedes falls on the applied mathematician side of the applied mathematician/ physicist line then it's plausible that all Greek natural philosophers did so.

Yes, it's clear that Wootton is trying to make that case - but this is pretty weak evidence. ("Ah, but Archimedes never explicitly considered narrow containers - and if we ignore his gloss on "fluid displaced" and replace it with our own which critically relies on an "original level" to which he never refers, he's wrong - which proves he never did experiments!")
 
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.:
I can't address Wootton's argument directly - for me, the link you gave doesn't lead to a specific passage, and the Galileo/Archimedes bit doesn't seem to be in the free sample Google provides.

If you Google 'Galileo Archimedes Principle' a link to the relevant passage in the book appears six or seven entries down.

Maybe so when you Google it; I get a couple of Google Books results, but Wootton isn't among them.
quote:

quote:
But I don't see anything wrong with Archimedes' principle as presented by Archimedes - that is, the volume of "fluid displaced" is the volume of the "portion of [the body] immersed when the fluid is at rest."
I think it is natural to take 'the volume of fluid displaced' to mean the volume of the portion of [the body] below the original level of the fluid. Because that's the fluid that's actually been displaced. Maybe the problem lies with the translation. Archimedes has to find some way to talk about the volume in which there is no fluid because that volume is occupied by the floating body, and maybe 'fluid displaced' is the best way to do so. In the case Archimedes considers there is no difference. But in any case where the level of water changes there is a difference. The phraseology in the translation is at the most generous ambiguous. And clearly either Archimedes or the translator didn't spot that.

"Clearly"? Maybe Archimedes didn't say anything about the "original level of the fluid" because he realized, correctly, that it's entirely irrelevant to the problem. All that matters is how much volume is below the surface at rest, which is what Archimedes says. I don't see why one should insist on a reading which runs counter to the text, unless it's really important to show an error (which Galileo himself doesn't seem to complain about) to support an argument about lack of experiments.
quote:

quote:
Maybe Archimedes did experiments, maybe he didn't. (If he wasn't interested in the practical applications, it's kind of a mystery that he spent so much of Book II examining the flotation of boat-like shapes.) But I don't think he made any errors that make it obvious that he didn't do experiments. For that project, I suspect Aristotle is a better target.
I think that if Book II is about boat-like shapes it is as in the joke about spherical cows. He's talking about solids formed by rotation which, aside from coracles and such like, boats are not.

Good point.
quote:
The point of addressing Archimedes is that he's the strongest case and the most likely counterexample to the generalisation. If Archimedes falls on the applied mathematician side of the applied mathematician/ physicist line then it's plausible that all Greek natural philosophers did so.

Yes, it's clear that Wootton is trying to make that case - but this is pretty weak evidence. ("Ah, but Archimedes never explicitly considered narrow containers - and if we ignore his gloss on "fluid displaced" and replace it with our own which critically relies on an "original level" to which he never refers, he's wrong - which proves he never did experiments!")

So, if Christianity never existed, would the Queen Mary Rose have been launched in a tea cup in 1434?
 
Posted by wild haggis (# 15555) on :
 
Really gone off! Pooh!!!
The thread is about religion not science.

Let's face it without Judio/Christianity/Islam, certainly in Britain we'd all still be building monoliths, stone circles and chasing each other with clubs.

Three cheers for the Flintstones.

I'm Wilma in disguise! Watch out or I'll make you eat dinosaur stew.
 
Posted by mr cheesy (# 3330) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by wild haggis:
Really gone off! Pooh!!!
The thread is about religion not science.

Let's face it without Judio/Christianity/Islam, certainly in Britain we'd all still be building monoliths, stone circles and chasing each other with clubs.

Three cheers for the Flintstones.

I'm Wilma in disguise! Watch out or I'll make you eat dinosaur stew.

See now that's an interesting thought. I think the reverse is true: without Christianity, we'd probably have invented something else to take its place in our cultures.

In a parallel universe, I suspect there is a religion with grand buildings and leaders wearing silly hats which revere Plato and read reverently from The Republic.
 
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 
We'd have had the same patriarchal, redemption through violence, mystery religion that the People of the Book still have, the anything but the radical inclusion in social justice of Jesus that is resurfacing at the margins where it will remain. But we'd have it with no warrant whatsoever. Not that that's ever stopped us.
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.:
]Yes, it's clear that Wootton is trying to make that case - but this is pretty weak evidence.

I'll just point out that you don't know what case Wootton is trying to make as you haven't read him. He isn't directly reflecting on Archimedes' practice - that's a conclusion I've drawn from his argument about Galileo.

quote:
("Ah, but Archimedes never explicitly considered narrow containers - and if we ignore his gloss on "fluid displaced" and replace it with our own which critically relies on an "original level" to which he never refers, he's wrong - which proves he never did experiments!")
Archimedes does not gloss 'fluid displaced'. He equates it with the volume of the body under water. An equation of two physical quantities is not a gloss of the name of one of the quantities.
You are assuming that because Archimedes cannot have made a mistake he cannot have literally meant 'fluid that has been displaced' and must have meant the correct volume. If you found the equivalent formulation (and didn't recognise it) in a schoolboy exam paper you would assume that the schoolboy had made a schoolboy error.

At the very least from Archimedes' text one wouldn't realise that it was an error that one had to avoid.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by ACK:

My feeling is that maybe without Christianity, Judaism would have filled that space is because I suspect the time was right for something to spread out of Judaism.

Well, it kinda depends. If you take the OPs position that everything is the same except no Jesus, then yes. Because all the reasons for Jesus would still exist. This then becomes what other way did God reveal the TRUTH.ᵗᵐ
However, if you remove that inevitability, I don't see any impetus in Judaism for evangelicalism.
quote:
Originally posted by wild haggis:
Really gone off! Pooh!!!
The thread is about religion not science.

And never the two shall meet?
quote:

Let's face it without Judio/Christianity/Islam, certainly in Britain we'd all still be building monoliths, stone circles and chasing each other with clubs.

A great dismissal of the other religious traditions that did science independently of the those three.
BTW: Judio? Is that a martial arts radio channel?
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
Dave W and Dafyd:

The geek slap-fight is interesting and all, but I've a question for you:

Do you think monotheism is important to scientific discovery?

That is the claim that started this tangent.

Dafyd, the difference between Einstein and Archimedes is one of time. The scientific method is prescriptive, yes. So you can make the argument that Archy didn't use that. But his was one of making that first observation, that first leap. That he didn't stick the landing is a secondary issue to the exploration of the how of universe that is the basis of science.
 
Posted by Dave W. (# 8765) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.:
]Yes, it's clear that Wootton is trying to make that case - but this is pretty weak evidence.

I'll just point out that you don't know what case Wootton is trying to make as you haven't read him. He isn't directly reflecting on Archimedes' practice - that's a conclusion I've drawn from his argument about Galileo.

Sorry - I meant clear from what I thought was your representation of Wootton. You haven't provided a usable link, or even a quote, so you're quite correct that I can't be sure how much of this is coming from you and how much is coming from him.
quote:

quote:
("Ah, but Archimedes never explicitly considered narrow containers - and if we ignore his gloss on "fluid displaced" and replace it with our own which critically relies on an "original level" to which he never refers, he's wrong - which proves he never did experiments!")
Archimedes does not gloss 'fluid displaced'. He equates it with the volume of the body under water. An equation of two physical quantities is not a gloss of the name of one of the quantities.

I don't know why you're quibbling over the term gloss ("a brief explanation of a difficult or obscure word or expression"), but if you insist on "equation" then Archimedes still gets exactly the right answer.
quote:

You are assuming that because Archimedes cannot have made a mistake he cannot have literally meant 'fluid that has been displaced' and must have meant the correct volume.

No, I'm pointing out that he indicates exactly what he means in the text immediately following the statement of the proposition, which leads to the right answer. You (and possibly Wootton, I don't know!) seem to be insisting on an interpretation based only on what you think is "natural" and that ignores what he wrote.
quote:
If you found the equivalent formulation (and didn't recognise it) in a schoolboy exam paper you would assume that the schoolboy had made a schoolboy error.

Oh I would, would I? I'm not at all confident of your ability to spot schoolboy errors regarding Archimedes' principle; I can't imagine the basis for your opinion on what assumption I would make.
quote:

At the very least from Archimedes' text one wouldn't realise that it was an error that one had to avoid.

I'm sure the number of errors Archimedes doesn't warn you to avoid is limitless.

lilBuddha:
I don't see any particular reason to think that monotheism per se is particularly important to scientific discovery.
 
Posted by Jay-Emm (# 11411) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by wild haggis:

Let's face it without Judio/Christianity/Islam, certainly in Britain we'd all still be building monoliths, stone circles and chasing each other with clubs.

(Think you may have been sarcastic, but in any case)
The romans were about to invade semi-successfully, shortly after Christianity existed but before it (or Judaism) had much chance to change the world.

Before that the southern British were definitely pro-European, and picking up Romanish behaviours.

And regardless of the roman influence the stone circles were (two thousand) years before. What they were doing, now, I'm not sure (related to the druids at anglesey). Though Britain had always been part of Europe.
 
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
Dave W and Dafyd:

The geek slap-fight is interesting and all, but I've a question for you:

Do you think monotheism is important to scientific discovery?

That is the claim that started this tangent.

Dafyd, the difference between Einstein and Archimedes is one of time. The scientific method is prescriptive, yes. So you can make the argument that Archy didn't use that. But his was one of making that first observation, that first leap. That he didn't stick the landing is a secondary issue to the exploration of the how of universe that is the basis of science.

While they consider, Islamic monotheism embraced Greek scientific discovery whereas Christian rejected it for a thousand years.
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
Do you think monotheism is important to scientific discovery?

I don't think it is now (although intellectual environments that don't share a couple of deep features with monotheism may not be conducive to it).(*)
Do I think monotheism was important to the birth and early development of the sixteenth/seventeenth century scientific revolution. The jury is out.
The first scientist who can reasonably be called experimental, Alhazen, was a monotheist. The scientific revolution took place in a largely monotheist culture. China, despite an impressive tradition of natural philosophy, never had a scientific revolution. China was philosophically more advanced than Europe at almost every point up to the fifteenth century; by the end of the seventeenth century Jesuits earned a place in the Qing Emperors court by explaining Western astronomy.
Respectable academics have come up with post facto explanations of how monotheism contributed to this. Other academics disagree. Neither position would be considered cranky.
Yes, I think monotheism probably did contribute but I'm aware that although I think it's a side that the evidence supports it's not a side that the evidence compels; I'm picking the side for reasons beyond what the direct evidence compels it.

(*) The feature here is roughly that the universe is such as to be intellectually comprehensible, consistent and unified. This is obviously shared by the leading forms of scientific materialism, and AIUI by e.g. Chinese philosophy; but not by, say, Lovecraftian materialism.

quote:
Dafyd, the difference between Einstein and Archimedes is one of time. The scientific method is prescriptive, yes. So you can make the argument that Archy didn't use that. But his was one of making that first observation, that first leap. That he didn't stick the landing is a secondary issue to the exploration of the how of universe that is the basis of science.
I am not sure what you are saying here nor what reasons you think you're giving that I should agree with you.
 
Posted by SvitlanaV2 (# 16967) on :
 
And would we have had capitalism without the Protestant work ethic?
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
Do you think monotheism is important to scientific discovery?

I don't think it is now (although intellectual environments that don't share a couple of deep features with monotheism may not be conducive to it).(*)
(*) The feature here is roughly that the universe is such as to be intellectually comprehensible, consistent and unified.

Seriously? God created everything in six days: boom. That? That you think is intellectually stimulating for science? Or were you meaning other monotheistic religions than Christianity, Judaism and Islam?

quote:

Do I think monotheism was important to the birth and early development of the sixteenth/seventeenth century scientific revolution. The jury is out.

No jury necessary. Those who think this is a factor are confusing stability and natural progress with influence from religion.
IMO, monotheism is neither inherently boon nor bane to scientific progress.
quote:

The first scientist who can reasonably be called experimental, Alhazen, was a monotheist.

Ibn al-Haytham. But anyway, he is the father of the scientific method, not science.
quote:

The scientific revolution took place in a largely monotheist culture.

In a culture that happened to be monotheistic during a time when people were making scientific progress.

quote:

China, despite an impressive tradition of natural philosophy, never had a scientific revolution. China was philosophically more advanced than Europe at almost every point up to the fifteenth century; by the end of the seventeenth century Jesuits earned a place in the Qing Emperors court by explaining Western astronomy.

When China was in decline. But no, it must have been the Christians.
 
Posted by Stetson (# 9597) on :
 
lilbuddha wrote:

quote:
Seriously? God created everything in six days: boom. That? That you think is intellectually stimulating for science? Or were you meaning other monotheistic religions than Christianity, Judaism and Islam?
I don't think the point was that everything about monotheism automatically leads to rigorous application of the scientific method. Rather, it's that monotheism contains within itself the ideas that eventually give rise to the scientific method.

Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but I don't think you can refute the argument simply by pointing out instances of monotheists, even in their sacred texts, making unscientific claims.

[ 04. July 2017, 01:05: Message edited by: Stetson ]
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Stetson:
lilbuddha wrote:

quote:
Seriously? God created everything in six days: boom. That? That you think is intellectually stimulating for science? Or were you meaning other monotheistic religions than Christianity, Judaism and Islam?
I don't think the point was that everything about monotheism automatically leads to rigorous application of the scientific method. Rather, it's that monotheism contains within itself the ideas that eventually give rise to the scientific method.

Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but I don't think you can refute the argument simply by pointing out instances of monotheists, even in their sacred texts, making unscientific claims.

So far, the only "proof" for monotheism has been coincidence. Still waiting for anything else.

[ 04. July 2017, 02:55: Message edited by: lilBuddha ]
 
Posted by Galloping Granny (# 13814) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by SvitlanaV2:
AFAIUI Islam owes a certain amount to Christianity and Judaism. Muhammad is believed to have had considerable contact with both Christians and Jews, and Jesus is revered as a prophet.

Ishmael was Abraham's first son, by Hagar, his wife's serving woman, and Sarah threw her and Ishmael out after Isaac was born, Muslims claim him as their forefather, the *eldest* son of Abraham and therefore senior to Isaac and his descendants.
I have an idea that they tell the story of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac, but with Ishmael as the son concerned.

GG
 
Posted by Ohher (# 18607) on :
 
I keep thinking that, with no Christianity, the governance and history of medieval Europe would have been so different, without a Church -- and celibacy -- to send all those best and brightest minds into . . .

Would there have been a lingua franca like Latin for scholars from different countries to confab in? That would have been a serious drag on scientific advancement . . .
 
Posted by Latchkey Kid (# 12444) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by SvitlanaV2:
quote:
Originally posted by Latchkey Kid:
I understand that Buddhism has a much more civilised approach to schisms than does Christianity.

PS. I don't think that (one type of) Christianity is the only inspired religion, but I can't change my spiritual heritage.

Yet people move on from their spiritual heritage all the time. New religions and religious movements wouldn't exist if that weren't the case. Christians are particularly prone to this, ISTM.

In what sense does Buddhism have a more civilised approach to schism than Christianity?

I have moved on in the sense that I have left a more exclusivist open brethren upbringing to a faith that looks more to interdenominational and interfaith dialogue and understanding and away from the Book of Rules and propositional and systematic theology. But icons, statues (whether of saints, Christ, Buddha, Bodhisattvas, etc) and grand architecture I find interesting, but not spiritually inspiring as others do.

And its been a long time, but I understand that within Buddhism there is a "law" of schism whereby if a disagreement that cannot be resolved occurs (I think in a monastery) then the smaller group should separate and form its own school. No heretic calling or persecution AFAIK.
 
Posted by Al Eluia (# 864) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ohher:
I keep thinking that, with no Christianity, the governance and history of medieval Europe would have been so different, without a Church -- and celibacy -- to send all those best and brightest minds into . . .

Would there have been a lingua franca like Latin for scholars from different countries to confab in? That would have been a serious drag on scientific advancement . . .

Presumably Latin would have continued to be the language of learned discourse in Western Europe after the fall of the Empire, Christian or not. Of course it's entirely a matter of conjecture what institutions would have continued to preserve classical learning.

I do enjoy "alternate history" fiction and am currently reading a series based on "What if the Roman Empire had never fallen." It's set in our 13th century and involves Roman contact with Native American cultures of the time. There is some mention of Christianity, but as one religion among several practiced in the Empire. Presumably there was never a Constantine and his successors to make it the official religion.
 
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Galloping Granny:
quote:
Originally posted by SvitlanaV2:
AFAIUI Islam owes a certain amount to Christianity and Judaism. Muhammad is believed to have had considerable contact with both Christians and Jews, and Jesus is revered as a prophet.

Ishmael was Abraham's first son, by Hagar, his wife's serving woman, and Sarah threw her and Ishmael out after Isaac was born, Muslims claim him as their forefather, the *eldest* son of Abraham and therefore senior to Isaac and his descendants.
I have an idea that they tell the story of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac, but with Ishmael as the son concerned.

GG

It is a fundamental alternative history for modern Muslims despite "it is estimated that 131 traditions say Isaac was the son, while 133 say Ishmael [ancestor of the Arabs]." because the Qu'ran does not name the son.

The great Eid, Eid al-Adha, the feast of sacrifice is the most sacred.

[ 04. July 2017, 09:08: Message edited by: Martin60 ]
 
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 
Sorry, the greater: Eid al-Kabir, "the Greater Eid".
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
Do you think monotheism is important to scientific discovery?

I don't think it is now (although intellectual environments that don't share a couple of deep features with monotheism may not be conducive to it).(*)
(*) The feature here is roughly that the universe is such as to be intellectually comprehensible, consistent and unified.

Seriously? God created everything in six days: boom. That? That you think is intellectually stimulating for science?
Yes. (Not the six days bit obviously.)
The argument goes that Greek philosophers believed that the cosmos was either eternally existing or that it was created according to the operations of logical principles. Logical principles are necessary and sufficient to determine the nature of the universe. As a result it was in principle possible to deduce the laws governing the universe from first principles.
Monotheists believe that logical and rational principles are insufficient to constrain God. Logical principles are necessary but not sufficient to determine the laws of the universe. God was free to make the universe otherwise if God had so chosen, to pass other laws. As a result you can't determine the laws of nature from first principles. You have to work out what they are by observation.
Seventeenth century writers arguing for the new learning repeatedly accused the ancients (and by extension their contemporary opponents) of pride in thinking they could understand God's creation merely out of their own heads without the humble effort of empirical research.
In passing: the phrase 'laws of nature' was not originally a metaphor. It was a direct analogy that the universe was governed by laws passed by God. A culture that wasn't monotheistic would probably not have come up with the concept of laws governing nature.

quote:
quote:

Do I think monotheism was important to the birth and early development of the sixteenth/seventeenth century scientific revolution. The jury is out.

No jury necessary. Those who think this is a factor are confusing stability and natural progress with influence from religion.
And you think you're able to generalise about people who disagree with you because?

quote:
quote:

The first scientist who can reasonably be called experimental, Alhazen, was a monotheist.

Ibn al-Haytham. But anyway, he is the father of the scientific method, not science.
If you routinely refer to Aristoteles and Platon, and never talk about Averroes and Avicenna, sure.

It seems to me that if we're talking about science in any kind of privileged sense that distinguishes it from other branches of human knowledge then we're talking about the use of the scientific method.

quote:
quote:

China, despite an impressive tradition of natural philosophy, never had a scientific revolution. China was philosophically more advanced than Europe at almost every point up to the fifteenth century; by the end of the seventeenth century Jesuits earned a place in the Qing Emperors court by explaining Western astronomy.

When China was in decline. But no, it must have been the Christians.
I do not see any reason to suppose that China was any more in decline during the early years of the Qing than during the early years of the Ming or Song or Tang.

[ 04. July 2017, 10:44: Message edited by: Dafyd ]
 
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 
Fascinating. Robust as ever. So C17th monotheists (Galileo, Bacon, Kepler and predominantly subsequent British Protestant luminaries) gave us empiricism as the theory bound scholasticism of the previous half millennium of Catholic monotheists gave out? Simplistically isn't the scientific revolution an immediate, superficial product of the liberation in the Reformation? A common enough trope. But we wouldn't have had the latter without the former? Surely the (similarly old) proposition is that we would? Vastly earlier. What am I missing in my dotage? Did Islamic monotheism give us empiricism through Alhazen, Avicenna and Averroes over half a millennium earlier? Monotheism is still the key?
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
A culture that wasn't monotheistic would probably not have come up with the concept of laws governing nature.

The counter to that is "God makes it happen, nothing further needed." That is a more logical following of the text.
ISTM, what you are describing is more projection than proof.

quote:
And you think you're able to generalise about people who disagree with you because?
Because there is no proof. Nothing to test, therefore it must not be right.

quote:

It seems to me that if we're talking about science in any kind of privileged sense that distinguishes it from other branches of human knowledge then we're talking about the use of the scientific method.

Science evolved from other branches of thought. There is no clean dividing line, even today.

quote:
I do not see any reason to suppose that China was any more in decline during the early years of the Qing than during the early years of the Ming or Song or Tang.
It would take a secondary tangent on the history and stability of China at various points to work this out. And I think this tangent is way to big anyway.
Stability, freedom and time are the necessary ingredients to feed curiosity and progress. This leads to science becoming more rigorous, not God.
 
Posted by wabale (# 18715) on :
 
The development of the Scientific method seems as much to do with the cross-fertilisation of ideas among different cultures as it is to do with monotheism.

I do wonder if the idea that the scientific method required monotheism is an historical misunderstanding that arose out of our perception of the colonial experience in Africa in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Even great places of learning like Timbuctu found themselves hundreds of years behind the times, and much of Africa had to learn European languages and culture before they could learn ‘modern’ science. But this is the sort of adjustment that comes about throughout history, when any people find themselves out of synch. with the newest technology.

Earlier this year students at the School of African and Oriental Studies demanded to be taught a more global perspective on history; or, as the Daily Telegraph put it: “University students demand philosophers such as Plato and Kant are removed from syllabus because they are white”. In ‘The argumentative Indian’ Amartya Sen argues that Indians invented the Socratic method hundreds of years before the Greeks did, and many advances were made in mathematics and many other branches of science that arose out of their argumentative tradition. The invention of the zero in the subcontinent, for example, may have owed something to Babylon, but it certainly didn’t owe anything to monotheism.
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
What am I missing in my dotage?

The Renaissance.
 
Posted by Russ (# 120) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:

Do you think monotheism is important to scientific discovery?

Not as such.

I suspect the important thing is rejecting animism, the view that everything happens because of spirits. As long as you're thinking of natural phenomena as quasi-persons to be influenced by prayer and sacrifice, you're not going to get very far with cause-and-effect reasoning, which is one of the elements of science.

So I incline to the view that, whether or not you count the acievements of the ancient Greeks as being science, they could have gone further in that direction, because their polytheism had the Gods sufficiently far away (the top of Mount Olympus) from everyday reality most of the time, for it to be possible to study that reality as sonething impersonal, something outside of religion.
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
A culture that wasn't monotheistic would probably not have come up with the concept of laws governing nature.

The counter to that is "God makes it happen, nothing further needed." That is a more logical following of the text.
Some monotheists have thought that way. That's irrelevant to whether other monotheists thought another way. Monotheists have been known to disagree among themselves.

You want to believe it is a more logical following of the text (which text? have you been taking stylistic tips from Aijalon's posts?). What you want to believe is nothing to do with what people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries actually believed.

That the phrase 'laws of nature' was directly due to monotheism is not a projection. It is a fact.
From the Oxford English Dictionary, under 'law':
quote:
The ‘laws of nature’, by those who first used the term in this sense, were viewed as commands imposed by the Deity upon matter
quote:
quote:
And you think you're able to generalise about people who disagree with you because?
Because there is no proof. Nothing to test, therefore it must not be right.
This is blatantly untrue.
Pretty much the entirety of history (the subject) is made up of statements for which there is no proof and which can't be tested any more than the thesis about monotheism and the scientific method can. That doesn't mean none of the statements can be right.
Your post is entirely made up of statements for which there is no proof and cannot be tested.

In mathematics, let alone less provable subjects, there's actually a mathematical proof that there are statements that cannot be proven or tested and yet are right.

quote:
quote:

It seems to me that if we're talking about science in any kind of privileged sense that distinguishes it from other branches of human knowledge then we're talking about the use of the scientific method.

Science evolved from other branches of thought. There is no clean dividing line, even today.
This is true, but not relevant.

quote:
quote:
I do not see any reason to suppose that China was any more in decline during the early years of the Qing than during the early years of the Ming or Song or Tang.
It would take a secondary tangent on the history and stability of China at various points to work this out. And I think this tangent is way to big anyway.
Stability, freedom and time are the necessary ingredients to feed curiosity and progress. This leads to science becoming more rigorous, not God.

Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries managed to feed curiosity and progress. It wasn't obviously more stable or free than any other period of European history.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:

You want to believe it is a more logical following of the text (which text?

The Bible. Nothing in it implicitly encourages scientific exploration.
quote:

have you been taking stylistic tips from Aijalon's posts?).

Really cute.
quote:

Your post is entirely made up of statements for which there is no proof and cannot be tested.

As are yours.

quote:

Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries managed to feed curiosity and progress. It wasn't obviously more stable or free than any other period of European history.

Link to stability and scientific progress.

You want to make a case for monotheism being the best thing for scientific advance. All I see is temporal coincidence.

Polytheistic societies managed astronomy, invention, massive construction, etc. that required experiment, observation, maths, etc. All long before anything in the monotheistic world.
Both Christendom and Islam built on Greek discovery. It is as reasonable to say without polytheism, monotheistic science would have never developed as it did as it is to say that monotheism built what polytheism could not.
 
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 
So, if you put the Queen Mary in a close fitting tea cup, rivets and all, but not so close that Van der Waal's forces, viscosity and what not affected displacement, wouldn't the vertical displacement by the ship's great mass go all the way up the sides on to the deck and if piped in to the tea cup to supply demand, sink her? And wouldn't that happen due to viscosity anyway if thin enough?

In C17th Protestant Britain you had the necessary freedom that was lost in Islam and Catholic Europe. Simplistic I know as it was Aquinas that gave us Aristotle back after a thousand years.

[ 05. July 2017, 09:28: Message edited by: Martin60 ]
 
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
What am I missing in my dotage?

The Renaissance.
How so Sir? Do I not agree with my betters here who deny that we have Christianity as a whole to thank for modern science? On the contrary? Or, more nuanced, it delayed it by a thousand years and then rapidly facilitated it, an analogy being a dynamic chemical reaction which exponentially tilts? But the swing, though rapid and sufficient, cannot give us back the time that was lost? Probably half a millennium at least?

[ 05. July 2017, 09:39: Message edited by: Martin60 ]
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
All I see is temporal coincidence.

Do you have any evidence for that?
 
Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :
 
I do this all the time. So I will just note:

1. You will never get a definitive answer to these questions. It's impossible to tease out the threads chance happenings (the butterfly-wings theory) with the drive of history, AKA the will of God. Proof? Consider a smaller canvas, your own life, let us say. How did you meet your spouse? How large an element of chance was in that meeting? Could it have worked out differently, she looked left instead of right, sat beside some other guy at the prayer service, accepted admission at some other school?

2. But, not to worry! Quantum physics has determined that we live in one of what is very possibly an infinite number of universes. (Would anything less be satisfactory, to an infinite God?) Infinity is a neat concept, because any subset of infinity is also infinite. So: there are an infinite number of universes different from this one. But there are an infinite number of universe exactly like this one. There are an infinite number of universes in which you are sitting here irritably reading this post. And, blessedly, there are universes where you can go and look at all the possibilities generated upthread. What happens if there was no Christianity? No Islam? No Pythagoras? That universe in which William Shakespeare's mother miscarried in the third month? Yes, let's go see!

How, you say? Ah! That's the difficult part. I just did my bit. I did it with words and a keyboard. Some boffin has to go and do theirs, if we want to see it in the physical world.
 
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 
The history of ideas narrative is deterministic.

How does God's will drive history? Backwards?

Whatever drives the Godlessly necessary infinity of universes, it isn't quantum mechanics. Unless you are running amok with the analogy of electrons being everywhere between source and target. Which is a tad imparsimonious.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
All I see is temporal coincidence.

Do you have any evidence for that?
sigh
Science progresses with time. As our understanding builds it moves forward. The coincidence is the rise of powers that happen to be monotheistic occurred relatively recently, after huge amounts of the basic building blocks of science were laid.
Proof? There can be no proof. I am going with the more logical, less exceptional interpretation.
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
All I see is temporal coincidence.

Do you have any evidence for that?
sigh
Science progresses with time. As our understanding builds it moves forward. The coincidence is the rise of powers that happen to be monotheistic occurred relatively recently, after huge amounts of the basic building blocks of science were laid.
Proof? There can be no proof. I am going with the more logical, less exceptional interpretation.

ISTM, what you are describing is more projection than proof.
Because there is no proof. Nothing to test, therefore it must not be right.
sigh

[ 05. July 2017, 15:58: Message edited by: Dafyd ]
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
And what you are doing is projection as well.
I have faith in human curiousity and you appear to have faith in faith.
 
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
A culture that wasn't monotheistic would probably not have come up with the concept of laws governing nature.

The counter to that is "God makes it happen, nothing further needed." That is a more logical following of the text.
Some monotheists have thought that way. That's irrelevant to whether other monotheists thought another way. Monotheists have been known to disagree among themselves.
First off, it should be noted that a polytheist like Archimedes was able to derive "laws governing nature" like the principles of buoyancy or leverage, so the concept obviously isn't completely alien to non-monotheists. In fact, I've heard it argued that because Greek religion was such a non-explanatory hodge-podge it actually encouraged the search for answers or patterns in non-religious ways. I'm not sure I buy that particular argument, but it's at least as plausible as saying that non-monotheists are incapable of recognizing and analyzing patterns in nature.

At any rate, from an historical perspective Goddidit seems to be the predominant answer monotheists come up with when faced with unanswered questions and get quite upset when alternative explanations are proposed. Opposition to heliocentrism is an a well-known and obvious example, but it extends even to fields we'd consider non-scientific, such as political science.

quote:
In the pre-modern world, a firestorm of accusations of atheism and wickedness awaited anyone who raised a powerful and persuasive alternate answer to some question whose traditional answer depended on God. This firestorm fell even if the author in question never made any atheist arguments, which, generally, they didn’t. It happened often, and fiercely.

Thomas Hobbes awoke one such firestorm when his Leviathan suggested that savage man, living in a state of terror and war in his caves and trees, might through reason and self-interest alone come together and develop society and government. Until that time, Europe had no explanation for how government came to be other than that God instituted it; no explanation for kings other than that God raised them to glory; no explanation for what glue should hold men together, loyal to the law, other than fear of divine punishment. Hobbes’ alternative does not say “There is no God,” but it says, “Government and society arose without God’s participation,” a political theory which an atheist and a theist might equally use. It gives the atheist an answer, and thereby so terrified England that she passed law after law against “atheism” specifically and personally targeting Hobbes and banning him from publishing in genre after genre, until he spent his final years producing bad translations of Homer and filling them with not-so-subtle Hobbesian political notions one can spot between the lines.


 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
Allow me to humbly point out that heliocentrism, for all the RCC defended it, was not a Christian invention. We inherited it from the Greeks, specifically Ptolemy I believe. It is not a "goddidit" explanation.
 
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
Allow me to humbly point out that heliocentrism, for all the RCC defended it, was not a Christian invention. We inherited it from the Greeks, specifically Ptolemy I believe. It is not a "goddidit" explanation.

I think you mean "geocentrism".

The main objection to heliocentrism from the point of view of a seventeenth century Christian is that it contradicts several Biblical passages stating that the Earth is fixed and does not move. The idea that the Earth wasn't the center of the Universe, while troubling, was considered a second order problem to the idea that the Earth was actually in motion.
 
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on :
 
I think that's geocentrism.

My impression is that many of those associated with advances in understanding were individualist in matters of faith as well as science. I don't think many of them were typical monotheists or polytheists or whatever the aggregate of their neighbours is thought to have been. They thought for themselves in science and in faith and in politics, and were often unhappy in their times because of it.
 
Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
Allow me to humbly point out that heliocentrism, for all the RCC defended it, was not a Christian invention. We inherited it from the Greeks, specifically Ptolemy I believe. It is not a "goddidit" explanation.

I think you mean "geocentrism".
Right you are. Apologies.

quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
The main objection to heliocentrism from the point of view of a seventeenth century Christian is that it contradicts several Biblical passages stating that the Earth is fixed and does not move. The idea that the Earth wasn't the center of the Universe, while troubling, was considered a second order problem to the idea that the Earth was actually in motion.

It also plainly contradicts the evidence of the eyes. Anybody, scientist or moron, can see that the sun moves across the sky. To accept heliocentrism is to give up what is obvious for a theoretical construct which is invisible. It's the ultimate in trusting the math over the evidence. The chief argument for it was that it makes a more elegant and mathematically simple system of equations and diagrams. It's Occam's Razor in spite of the evidence of everyone's eyes. It's an amazing leap. The term "Copernican Revolution" has become something of a cliché (and of course a pun) but at the time it really was a revolution. A huge leap.
 
Posted by hatless (# 3365) on :
 
You could say that Plato's Cave is an allegory to show how what is obvious to everyone may turn out to be mere shadow play when compared to the truth, and to encourage us to look for other examples where the truth is surprising, wonderful and liberating.

I'm really not persuaded by the significance of monotheism. Shouldn't there be evidence of particular patterns of thought, if it were true?
 
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
The main objection to heliocentrism from the point of view of a seventeenth century Christian is that it contradicts several Biblical passages stating that the Earth is fixed and does not move. The idea that the Earth wasn't the center of the Universe, while troubling, was considered a second order problem to the idea that the Earth was actually in motion.

It also plainly contradicts the evidence of the eyes. Anybody, scientist or moron, can see that the sun moves across the sky. To accept heliocentrism is to give up what is obvious for a theoretical construct which is invisible. It's the ultimate in trusting the math over the evidence.
There were other, more complicated pragmatic arguments against the idea that the apparent motion of the Sun was actually the rotation of the Earth (e.g. if the Earth was spinning a man who leapt into the air in Athens would land somewhere in near Corinth, the Earth having spun away while he was aloft), but none of these were actually cited by the Church at Galileo's trial.
 
Posted by Ohher (# 18607) on :
 
Leaving aside the whole science argument for a moment, here's a different take:

If there were no Christianity, there would now be no dividing line between the era we used to call Before Christ (or now, Before the Common Era) and the era we’re in now: Anno Domini, or (now) C.E.

What is now the Common Era 2017 might instead be dated from the dissolution of the Roman Empire in 1453, so it would now be the year 564. Or possibly it would now be 1541, since we could be dating the current era from the collapse of ancient Rome in 476.

Since Judaism doesn’t actively proselytize, it’s likely that religious group would have remained relatively small. After the Romans destroyed the Second Temple on the 9th of Av in the Hebrew year 3830, the Diaspora would have further diminished this group’s influence. The Roman pantheon, with the current Caesar as high priest / god, would have become the dominant religion up until ancient Rome fell. A kind of amalgam of assorted Northern pagan traditions and Roman beliefs/practices including both animal and human sacrifice would have held sway until Islam, founded in the early (CE) 600s, began to spread westward.

As the Middle Eastern Islamic peoples , with better-organized societies and more advanced technologies, worked their way into southern and central Europe, they easily defeated the pagan tribes and converted these. Assuming the introduction of a more sensible calendar by the mathematically more-sophisticated Islamic scholars, who might date this era Post Mohammed from, say, the year of Mohammed’s revelations in (CE) 610, we would now probably be mostly bi-lingual (Arabic and national language) Muslim followers, living in the Islamic year 1407.

So, no, I don't think Latin would have hung on as long as it did absent the Church to keep it burbling along, though it might have survived alongside Arabic for the sake of preserving texts in the sciences and mathematics.
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
A culture that wasn't monotheistic would probably not have come up with the concept of laws governing nature.

The counter to that is "God makes it happen, nothing further needed." That is a more logical following of the text.
Some monotheists have thought that way. That's irrelevant to whether other monotheists thought another way. Monotheists have been known to disagree among themselves.
First off, it should be noted that a polytheist like Archimedes was able to derive "laws governing nature" like the principles of buoyancy or leverage, so the concept obviously isn't completely alien to non-monotheists. In fact, I've heard it argued that because Greek religion was such a non-explanatory hodge-podge it actually encouraged the search for answers or patterns in non-religious ways. I'm not sure I buy that particular argument, but it's at least as plausible as saying that non-monotheists are incapable of recognizing and analyzing patterns in nature.
Archimedes called his principles postulates, as Euclid calls the theorems in his book. He didn't call them laws. He doesn't use a metaphor of anything governing anything. So Archimedes is conceptually grouping the theory of floating bodies with Pythagoras' theorem and he is not likening his theories to laws. I think that in order for someone to have the same concept as we do it has to cover roughly the same sort of conceptual space. A postulate is something that you prove from axioms without reference to empirical observation as Archimedes proved his principles. A law of nature is not.
Not all recognising and analysing patterns in nature uses the same conceptual tools. The writer of Genesis 1 was capable of recognising patterns in nature such as the distinction between animals and plants; it would be a brave person who said that this showed they had the concept of the tree of life.

quote:
At any rate, from an historical perspective Goddidit seems to be the predominant answer monotheists come up with when faced with unanswered questions and get quite upset when alternative explanations are proposed.
I'm not aware of any monotheists who gave the answer 'Goddidit' to any question. I've never seen the word used except by an atheist and I don't think before the internet.
Oh, you mean metaphorically not literally? I note that if someone were inclined to run a No True Scotsman argument or the reverse fallacy (No True non-Porridge Eater) it would be much harder to pin the fallacy down if they can strategically expand and contract the metaphor rather than be constrained by a concept with a literal definition. But I'm sure such dishonesty couldn't be further from your mind.
'Predominant' could also be a weasel word. No matter how many counterexamples one piles up one can always say, yes, but it's still the predominant answer. How exactly without a methodical survey would one show or assert that a particular example is predominant?

I think by any criterion by which 'Goddidit' could be reasonably said to be a predominant answer among monotheists it could also be reasonably said to be a predominant answer among members of the Hellenistic culture.

In any case, if someone claims that all animals above 100 tons are mammals this claim is not refuted by the observation that predominantly mammals weigh less than a kilogram.

quote:
Opposition to heliocentrism is an a well-known and obvious example, but it extends even to fields we'd consider non-scientific, such as political science.
quote:
Until that time, Europe had no explanation for how government came to be other than that God instituted it; no explanation for kings other than that God raised them to glory; no explanation for what glue should hold men together, loyal to the law, other than fear of divine punishment.
This would seem to be an exaggeration.
Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity:
quote:
But forasmuch as we are not by ourselves sufficient to furnish ourselves with competent store of things needful for such a life as our nature doth desire, a life fit for the dignity of man; therefore to supply those defects and imperfections which are in us living single and solely by ourselves, we are naturally induced to seek communion and fellowship with others. This was the cause of men’s uniting themselves at the first in politic Societies, which societies could not be without Government, nor Government without a distinct kind of Law from that which hath been already declared.
Book 1, Chapter 10.1
quote:
To take away all such mutual grievances, injuries, and wrongs, there was no way but only by growing unto composition and agreement amongst themselves, by ordaining some kind of government public, and by yielding themselves subject thereunto; that unto whom they granted authority to rule and govern, by them the peace, tranquillity, and happy estate of the rest might be procured. Men always knew that when force and injury was offered they might be defenders of themselves; they knew that howsoever men may seek their own commodity, yet if this were done with injury unto others it was not to be suffered, but by all men and by all good means to be withstood; finally they knew that no man might in reason take upon him to determine his own right, and according to his own determination proceed in maintenance thereof, inasmuch as every man is towards himself and them whom he greatly affecteth partial; and therefore that strifes and troubles would be endless, except they gave their common consent all to be ordered by some whom they should agree upon: without which consent there were no reason that one man should take upon him to be lord or judge over another; because, although there be according to the opinion of some very great and judicious men a kind of natural right in the noble, wise, and virtuous, to govern them which are of servile disposition1; nevertheless for manifestation of this their right, and men’s more peaceable contentment on both sides, the assent of them who are to be governed seemeth necessary.
Book I, Chapter 10, 4.
Yes, Hooker does think God ordained positive laws for the Jews and he talks about that in some of the sections I've omitted. But he here seems quite clearly to have explanations that don't require God and to put them forward.

Hobbes had other commitments that made him unpopular. He believed that justice was merely the fulfilment of explicit contract and an advocate of the absolute power of the monarch.
 
Posted by Nick Tamen (# 15164) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ohher:
Since Judaism doesn’t actively proselytize, it’s likely that religious group would have remained relatively small. After the Romans destroyed the Second Temple on the 9th of Av in the Hebrew year 3830, the Diaspora would have further diminished this group’s influence. The Roman pantheon, with the current Caesar as high priest / god, would have become the dominant religion up until ancient Rome fell. A kind of amalgam of assorted Northern pagan traditions and Roman beliefs/practices including both animal and human sacrifice would have held sway until Islam, founded in the early (CE) 600s, began to spread westward.

But with a vastly diminished Judaism and no Christianity, would there have been an Islam, at least in a form anything like the Islam that actually developed?
 
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Ohher:
If there were no Christianity, there would now be no dividing line between the era we used to call Before Christ (or now, Before the Common Era) and the era we’re in now: Anno Domini, or (now) C.E.

What is now the Common Era 2017 might instead be dated from the dissolution of the Roman Empire in 1453, so it would now be the year 564. Or possibly it would now be 1541, since we could be dating the current era from the collapse of ancient Rome in 476.

Maybe we'd simply have continued on dating ab urbe condita, making this the year 2770 AUC.

quote:
Originally posted by Ohher:
Since Judaism doesn’t actively proselytize, it’s likely that religious group would have remained relatively small. After the Romans destroyed the Second Temple on the 9th of Av in the Hebrew year 3830, the Diaspora would have further diminished this group’s influence.

"Relative" to what? The massive number of Jews in the world today? (Slightly less than 0.2% of the global population.) An alternative view is that the Jews might be doing a lot better in the absence of nearly two millennia of Christian pogroms, expulsions, and forced conversions. Quite frankly I'm not seeing any evidence that the existence of Christianity was anything other than a hindrance to Jewish survival for most of the period since the destruction of the Second Temple.

quote:
Originally posted by Ohher:
A kind of amalgam of assorted Northern pagan traditions and Roman beliefs/practices including both animal and human sacrifice would have held sway until Islam, founded in the early (CE) 600s, began to spread westward.

As the Middle Eastern Islamic peoples, with better-organized societies and more advanced technologies, worked their way into southern and central Europe, they easily defeated the pagan tribes and converted these.

First off, given the syncretic influence of Christianity on Islam, I'm not sure you can postulate its development in exactly the same way in a world without Christianity.

Leaving that aside, you seem to be conflating the "better-organized societies [with] more advanced technologies" of the Muslims from (approximately) the tenth or eleventh century through the sixteenth, with the relatively primitive Arab society of Muhammad and his immediate successors. Pre-Islamic Arab society was kind of backwards compared to their Roman and Persian neighbors. In a lot of ways they resembled the Mongols; a divided people who honed their military skills as mercenaries for their more settled and technologically advanced neighbors. Eventually all it took for them to expand at the expense of their neighbors was a unifying leader happening along at a time of relative division amongst those neighbors. And like the Mongols and other "barbaric" people who find themselves in control of more technologically advanced civilizations, they learned fast from their new subjects.

At any rate, I don't think you can postulate a post-Roman Europe of primitive "pagan tribes" and an advanced Islamic society.

An interesting theory I've heard about one of the reasons Islamic learning outstripped that of the former Roman Empire in the Middle Ages is the Hajj. The annual pilgrimage to Mecca was kind of the Internet of its age, bringing together a whole bunch of people who could then share ideas. So if someone invents an astrolabe in Cordoba one year, the next year they're sharing that idea with fellow pilgrims in Mecca, and the year after that the idea could have traveled to Sumatra.
 
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Archimedes called his principles postulates, as Euclid calls the theorems in his book. He didn't call them laws. He doesn't use a metaphor of anything governing anything. So Archimedes is conceptually grouping the theory of floating bodies with Pythagoras' theorem and he is not likening his theories to laws. I think that in order for someone to have the same concept as we do it has to cover roughly the same sort of conceptual space. A postulate is something that you prove from axioms without reference to empirical observation as Archimedes proved his principles. A law of nature is not.

Interestingly this puts special and general relativity outside the category of "laws of nature". They were rather famously derived from postulates rather than empirical observation.
 
Posted by Ohher (# 18607) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Nick Tamen:
But with a vastly diminished Judaism and no Christianity, would there have been an Islam, at least in a form anything like the Islam that actually developed?

Diminished doesn't mean vanished. And the Jews historically -- even though relatively few in numbers -- have nearly always attracted the attentions of those whom they lived among. Their devotion to their traditions and understanding of themselves as The Chosen People, their maintaining their scriptural language, practices and worship, observance of their Sabbath, etc. have always set them apart. As we know, this notice has often proved deadly.

As the Jews, like the Arabs, began as middle-eastern Semitic people, it seems inevitable that pre-Mohammed Arabs would naturally have encountered the Jews of their time and place; it seems likely that the Judaic scriptures would have been known to and would have informed the theologically-inclined literati of the Arab world. No doubt this accounts for the similarities we find between the Torah and the Koran.

Issa, or Jesus, would not have figured in the Koran, but Islam, of course, is a proselytizing religion.

[ 05. July 2017, 23:27: Message edited by: Ohher ]
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:A postulate is something that you prove from axioms without reference to empirical observation as Archimedes proved his principles. A law of nature is not.
Interestingly this puts special and general relativity outside the category of "laws of nature". They were rather famously derived from postulates rather than empirical observation.
As I understand it the postulate in question was an interpretation of the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment (namely that light travels at a constant speed relative to an observer regardless of the observer's motion). I wouldn't really call that an axiom.
More broadly, Einstein would have expected his results to be accepted by the scientific community because any predictions they made were borne out by experiments rather than solely because he'd done his mathematics correctly. It is rather a great man theory of science to not count experimental observations performed by other people.
 
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:A postulate is something that you prove from axioms without reference to empirical observation as Archimedes proved his principles. A law of nature is not.
Interestingly this puts special and general relativity outside the category of "laws of nature". They were rather famously derived from postulates rather than empirical observation.
As I understand it the postulate in question was an interpretation of the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment (namely that light travels at a constant speed relative to an observer regardless of the observer's motion). I wouldn't really call that an axiom.
It seems to be an artificial distinction to claim that Einstein's use of observations by Michelson & Morley doesn't count as an axiom but that Archimedes claim that "a solid lighter* than a fluid will, if immersed in it, not be completely submerged, but part of it will project above the surface" does. Both seem equally amenable to observation, though different levels of technical sophistication may be required.

Still, this seems rather like moving the goalposts from your original assertion connecting monotheism to the idea that "the universe is such as to be intellectually comprehensible, consistent and unified". Archimedes certainly didn't think that buoyancy was incomprehensible, or that leverage was a purely localized phenomenon. Then you shift to add a requirement that "the universe is intellectually comprehensible, consistent, and unified as decreed by the will of some external being". I'm not sure that the modifier is necessarily beneficial to understanding the physical universe. It might even be harmful, as there is no reason beyond personal prejudice to assume that such an external being's decrees would necessarily be comprehensible, consistent, or unified.

I take a different tack. People don't just arbitrarily assume that the universe is "intellectually comprehensible, consistent, and unified", they notice that it is so, which would seem to be as much of an observation of physical reality as the Michaelson-Morley experiment.


--------------------
*Archimedes means "less dense" rather than "lighter" here, but chooses not to use the term for density from a previous proposition which he expressed as "solids which, size for size, are of equal weight with a fluid". I expect the decision was made in the interests of brevity.
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
It seems to be an artificial distinction to claim that Einstein's use of observations by Michelson & Morley doesn't count as an axiom but that Archimedes claim that "a solid lighter* than a fluid will, if immersed in it, not be completely submerged, but part of it will project above the surface" does. Both seem equally amenable to observation, though different levels of technical sophistication may be required.

Archimedes Proposition 4 is not an axiom because Archimedes deduces it from earlier propositions and from his postulate 1 (which is an axiom).
On your account Archimedes decided to deduce the thing that was amenable to observation, whereas postulate 1 'Let it be supposed that a fluid is of such a character etc.' which appears rather less amenable to observation is just supposed. That appears odd.
What is also odd is that you presumably know what an axiom is and what is meant by prove from axioms and yet you talk about a view that Proposition 4 is an axiom. It's as if you're deliberately misrepresenting the argument.

quote:
Still, this seems rather like moving the goalposts from your original assertion connecting monotheism to the idea that "the universe is such as to be intellectually comprehensible, consistent and unified". Archimedes certainly didn't think that buoyancy was incomprehensible, or that leverage was a purely localized phenomenon.
Oddly my 'original' assertion connected that idea to non-monotheistic systems as well. But you don't mention that. So either you innocently misunderstood the post, which is possible or you've deliberately misunderstood the post, which is equally possible.

The rest of your post continues to look like deliberate misrepresentation.

quote:
People don't just arbitrarily assume that the universe is "intellectually comprehensible, consistent, and unified", they notice that it is so, which would seem to be as much of an observation of physical reality as the Michaelson-Morley experiment.
Some aspects of the universe appear comprehensible, consistent and unified and some do not. The weather for example appears neither comprehensible, consistent, nor unified. Diseases do not appear comprehensible, consistent or unified. Inductive reasoning works sometimes and fails to work other times.
There are appearances of consistency too. But you don't just notice that the appearances of consistency are guides to the underlying nature of the world, and that the appearances of inconsistency are misleading.
In order to notice that the world is consistent, comprehensible and unified you have to use inductive reasoning. But inductive reasoning is notoriously not rationally founded; in order to consider it reliable you have to have a prior assumption that the world is consistent and unified enough for inductive reasoning to work.
 
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 
What if Archimedes had never existed?

Would Van der Waals still sink the Queen Mary?
 
Posted by rolyn (# 16840) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
What if Archimedes had never existed?

We would not have had the old schoolyard joke about you-reeker
 
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :
 
Dafyd wrote:

quote:
Some aspects of the universe appear comprehensible, consistent and unified and some do not. The weather for example appears neither comprehensible, consistent, nor unified. Diseases do not appear comprehensible, consistent or unified. Inductive reasoning works sometimes and fails to work other times.
There are appearances of consistency too. But you don't just notice that the appearances of consistency are guides to the underlying nature of the world, and that the appearances of inconsistency are misleading.
In order to notice that the world is consistent, comprehensible and unified you have to use inductive reasoning. But inductive reasoning is notoriously not rationally founded; in order to consider it reliable you have to have a prior assumption that the world is consistent and unified enough for inductive reasoning to work.

Terrific stuff. I think that observing and noticing are not raw experiences; in other words, they are shrouded by assumptions, or if you like, undercurrents which are guesses.

This reminds me of arguments with Buddhist friends, who argue that 'neither I nor the world' exist, and where I have got to, is an instrumental position. In other words, I don't know if I or the world exist, but it is useful to guess that they do.

In fact, you could say that scientists don't observe reality, but appearances. For some reason, this cheers me immensely.
 
Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by rolyn:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
What if Archimedes had never existed?

We would not have had the old schoolyard joke about you-reeker
That stinks.
 
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :
 
Sorry, that should be 'neither I nor the world exist'.
 
Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :
 
duplicate.

[ 07. July 2017, 14:55: Message edited by: quetzalcoatl ]
 
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
It seems to be an artificial distinction to claim that Einstein's use of observations by Michelson & Morley doesn't count as an axiom but that Archimedes claim that "a solid lighter* than a fluid will, if immersed in it, not be completely submerged, but part of it will project above the surface" does. Both seem equally amenable to observation, though different levels of technical sophistication may be required.

Archimedes Proposition 4 is not an axiom because Archimedes deduces it from earlier propositions and from his postulate 1 (which is an axiom).
On your account Archimedes decided to deduce the thing that was amenable to observation, whereas postulate 1 'Let it be supposed that a fluid is of such a character etc.' which appears rather less amenable to observation is just supposed.

In whole, Archimedes' Postulate 1 from On Floating Bodies is translated into English as something like:

quote:
Let it be supposed that a fluid is of such a character that, its parts lying evenly and being continuous, that part which is thrust the less is driven along by that which is thrust the more; and that each of its parts is thrust by the fluid which is above it in a perpendicular direction if the fluid be sunk in anything and compressed by anything else.
The Greeks regarded postulates slightly differently than we do. We treat them as "things which are assumed but cannot be directly proven". They considered them more along the lines of "things which are so inherently obvious that proof is unnecessary."

At any rate, Archimedes' Postulate 1 seems more a definition of what is meant by "fluid" than anything else. It consists of two properties which, in less rigidly technical language would seem to boil down to "if you push on a fluid it will get out of your way and redistribute itself to places where you're not pushing on it" (the bit before the semi-colon) and "the lower bits of a body of fluid are pressed down by the bits of fluid above it". It also seems like something which not only can be observed, the first half of Postulate 1 is the subject of the second-most famous (though likely apocryphal*) observation of physical phenomena in history. People who know nothing else about Archimedes of Syracuse are familiar with Vitruvius' account of his bath. So our options here are either that the events happened as Vitruvius described and Archimedes observed Postulate 1 in action, or Vitruvius made it up to add a bit of color to Archimedes' own rather dry and technical style, which shows that an observable demonstration of Postulate 1 in action was immediately obvious to Vitruvius, who was much less technically proficient than Archimedes. Either way, Postulate 1 seems very amenable to observation.

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
Still, this seems rather like moving the goalposts from your original assertion connecting monotheism to the idea that "the universe is such as to be intellectually comprehensible, consistent and unified". Archimedes certainly didn't think that buoyancy was incomprehensible, or that leverage was a purely localized phenomenon.
Oddly my 'original' assertion connected that idea to non-monotheistic systems as well. But you don't mention that.
Your assertion was "I don't think it is now", in response to the question of whether monotheism is important to scientific discovery. You then went on to speculate that monotheism was critical to scientific discovery in the past, because monotheism supposedly has certain inherent properties, such as:

quote:
The feature here is roughly that the universe is such as to be intellectually comprehensible, consistent and unified. This is obviously shared by the leading forms of scientific materialism, and AIUI by e.g. Chinese philosophy; but not by, say, Lovecraftian materialism.
The obvious test here is whether someone operating not just in a non-monotheist milieu but a pre-monotheist one would or could treat "the universe [as] intellectually comprehensible, consistent and unified". Archimedes would seem to qualify. Arguably others would as well.

To go a bit further the concept of an ordered universe doesn't seem like a necessary characteristic of monotheism. It's just as easy to imagine that a universe which only operates by the whim of a single omnipotent being might be chaotic and unpredictable.


--------------------
*It's likely apocryphal because we can gather from his description of Archimedes test of the crown described by Vitruvius likely would not have worked and does not show an understanding of the principle of buoyancy described by Archimedes in On Floating Bodies.

[ 10. July 2017, 15:50: Message edited by: Crœsos ]
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Archimedes Proposition 4 is not an axiom because Archimedes deduces it from earlier propositions and from his postulate 1 (which is an axiom).
On your account Archimedes decided to deduce the thing that was amenable to observation, whereas postulate 1 'Let it be supposed that a fluid is of such a character etc.' which appears rather less amenable to observation is just supposed.

In whole, Archimedes' Postulate 1 from On Floating Bodies is translated into English as something like:

quote:
Let it be supposed that a fluid is of such a character that, its parts lying evenly and being continuous, that part which is thrust the less is driven along by that which is thrust the more; and that each of its parts is thrust by the fluid which is above it in a perpendicular direction if the fluid be sunk in anything and compressed by anything else.
The Greeks regarded postulates slightly differently than we do. We treat them as "things which are assumed but cannot be directly proven". They considered them more along the lines of "things which are so inherently obvious that proof is unnecessary."

I think the idea that floating bodies less dense than water stick out of the water might qualify under that definition. Yet Archimedes decides to prove that in Proposition 4.

The change in the view of axioms that you describe is I believe attributable to the consideration of Euclid's Fifth Postulate. Euclid's Fifth Postulate (wikipedia calls it the Parallel Postulate) was for a long time thought not quite so inherently obvious that proof was unnecessary. And finally it was realised that it is something assumed but which cannot be directly proven (since in non-Euclidean geometries it isn't necessarily true).
So it would seem that Euclid was rather closer to the modern definition than to ours.

quote:
At any rate, Archimedes' Postulate 1 seems more a definition of what is meant by "fluid" than anything else. It consists of two properties which, in less rigidly technical language would seem to boil down to "if you push on a fluid it will get out of your way and redistribute itself to places where you're not pushing on it" (the bit before the semi-colon) and "the lower bits of a body of fluid are pressed down by the bits of fluid above it".
To be pedantic, the second half says that the lower bits of a fluid are pressed to the side by the bits of fluid (or other material) above it.

I think your proposed restatement of the first half is not directly equivalent. In particular, the first half talks about the fluid pressing on itself. You can probably deduce your statement from Archimedes' postulate (although I'm not sure - you may need additional premises about the conservation of volume). This is important because Archimedes is going to be aiming to show that in the situations he considers two parts of the liquid must be pushing on each other equally.

As Dave W was at pains to insist Archimedes nowhere talks about water levels changing in response to bodies immersed in them.

quote:
It also seems like something which not only can be observed, the first half of Postulate 1 is the subject of the second-most famous (though likely apocryphal*) observation of physical phenomena in history. People who know nothing else about Archimedes of Syracuse are familiar with Vitruvius' account of his bath. So our options here are either that the events happened as Vitruvius described and Archimedes observed Postulate 1 in action, or Vitruvius made it up to add a bit of color to Archimedes' own rather dry and technical style, which shows that an observable demonstration of Postulate 1 in action was immediately obvious to Vitruvius, who was much less technically proficient than Archimedes.
Either way, Postulate 1 seems very amenable to observation.

Your restatement of postulate one seems to be amenable to observation. However, as I noted it's not Archimedes' statement. I don't think one could easily observe that the fluid is pushing on itself internally. One could probably deduce it, but Archimedes doesn't. Again, one could probably deduce from observations that the lower parts of the fluid are pushed sideways but Archimedes doesn't.

We will note in any case that what you mean by 'dry and technical style' here is a style that doesn't mention any observations.

A word more about the role of observation here. Kekule allegedly realised the structure of benzene in a dream. However, modern science does not accept 'I saw it in a dream' as reliable grounds for knowledge. So Kekule, however he came by his insight, established the structure of benzene by showing that it agreed with all the observations.

Archimedes may have deduced that fluid pushes the fluid below it sideways by observing holes in barrels. However, he does not appear to regard 'observing holes in barrels' as a reliable ground for knowledge any more than he appears to regard 'observing objects less dense than water floating in water' as a reliable ground for knowledge. Instead he regards deduction from premises either the result of prior deduction or taken as supposed as reliable grounds for knowledge.

Even under modern experimental science 'I observed this while in my bath' would be regarded as not sufficiently rigourous (anecdotes are not data).

quote:
quote:

quote:
Still, this seems rather like moving the goalposts from your original assertion connecting monotheism to the idea that "the universe is such as to be intellectually comprehensible, consistent and unified". Archimedes certainly didn't think that buoyancy was incomprehensible, or that leverage was a purely localized phenomenon.
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Oddly my 'original' assertion connected that idea to non-monotheistic systems as well. But you don't mention that.

Your assertion was "I don't think it is now", in response to the question of whether monotheism is important to scientific discovery. You then went on to speculate that monotheism was critical to scientific discovery in the past, because monotheism supposedly has certain inherent properties, such as:

quote:
The feature here is roughly that the universe is such as to be intellectually comprehensible, consistent and unified. This is obviously shared by the leading forms of scientific materialism, and AIUI by e.g. Chinese philosophy; but not by, say, Lovecraftian materialism.
The obvious test here is whether someone operating not just in a non-monotheist milieu but a pre-monotheist one would or could treat "the universe [as] intellectually comprehensible, consistent and unified". Archimedes would seem to qualify. Arguably others would as well.

I'm not sure by what criteria Chinese philosophy isn't pre-monotheist and Archimedes is pre-monotheist. I can't think of any that are relevant. You could point out that Greek philosophy is causally contributory to philosophical monotheism, but I don't think that supports your argument.

Yes, Archimedes does qualify as operating in an worldview that took the world to be 'intellectually comprehensible, consistent, and unified' and that therefore would have supported experimental science if it had counterfactually been aware of experimental science.

quote:
To go a bit further the concept of an ordered universe doesn't seem like a necessary characteristic of monotheism. It's just as easy to imagine that a universe which only operates by the whim of a single omnipotent being might be chaotic and unpredictable.
Actual historically existing monotheists have usually claimed that God does not operate on whim.

As I think I said before the argument is not that monotheism is sufficient for the scientific revolution, but that it was necessary. (Or to be less stringent certain aspects of monotheism were causally contributory.) That some imaginable forms that we would describe as monotheism would not be causally contributory is not therefore an objection.

I'll go further to meet your objections. The form of monotheism prevalent among the educated population in central and western Europe in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth century was a philosophical monotheism that owed as much to Plato and Aristotle as to Isaiah. I'm quite happy to assert that the Greek philosophy component was just as necessary as the Jewish prophet component.
 
Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
The Greeks regarded postulates slightly differently than we do. We treat them as "things which are assumed but cannot be directly proven". They considered them more along the lines of "things which are so inherently obvious that proof is unnecessary."

I think the idea that floating bodies less dense than water stick out of the water might qualify under that definition. Yet Archimedes decides to prove that in Proposition 4.

The change in the view of axioms that you describe is I believe attributable to the consideration of Euclid's Fifth Postulate. Euclid's Fifth Postulate (wikipedia calls it the Parallel Postulate) was for a long time thought not quite so inherently obvious that proof was unnecessary. And finally it was realised that it is something assumed but which cannot be directly proven (since in non-Euclidean geometries it isn't necessarily true).
So it would seem that Euclid was rather closer to the modern definition than to ours.

The highlighted bit would seem to be just as true of any of Euclid's postulates.

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Your restatement of postulate one seems to be amenable to observation. However, as I noted it's not Archimedes' statement. I don't think one could easily observe that the fluid is pushing on itself internally. One could probably deduce it, but Archimedes doesn't. Again, one could probably deduce from observations that the lower parts of the fluid are pushed sideways but Archimedes doesn't.

Fluid flowing would seem to be the obviously observable (as well as etymologically obvious) example of fluid pushing sideways on itself internally. As I said earlier, postulate 1 seems to be more along the lines of Archimedes defining what he means by "fluid".

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
To go a bit further the concept of an ordered universe doesn't seem like a necessary characteristic of monotheism. It's just as easy to imagine that a universe which only operates by the whim of a single omnipotent being might be chaotic and unpredictable.
Actual historically existing monotheists have usually claimed that God does not operate on whim.
And yet they're always going on about "mysterious ways", which would seem to violate the "intellectually comprehensible" part of your formulation. You can't go around calling something 'ineffable' and then claim you can eff it.

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
As I think I said before the argument is not that monotheism is sufficient for the scientific revolution, but that it was necessary. (Or to be less stringent certain aspects of monotheism were causally contributory.)

I think a more interesting question is not whether monotheism is necessary for the scientific revolution (i.e. history unfolding as it did), but rather whether it's necessary for any scientific revolution (i.e. any reasonably possible history). This is, by necessity, a lot more speculative, but the fact that the putative contributions made by monotheism to the scientific revolution (comprehensible universe, etc.) were 'on offer' elsewhere would seem to answer the question in the negative.
 
Posted by Callan (# 525) on :
 
Originally posted by Croesus:

quote:
I think a more interesting question is not whether monotheism is necessary for the scientific revolution (i.e. history unfolding as it did), but rather whether it's necessary for any scientific revolution (i.e. any reasonably possible history). This is, by necessity, a lot more speculative, but the fact that the putative contributions made by monotheism to the scientific revolution (comprehensible universe, etc.) were 'on offer' elsewhere would seem to answer the question in the negative.
To an historian the question of "what happened, and why did it happen?" is infinitely more interesting than the question "what might have happened." If only on the grounds that the former admits the possibility of an answer.

More generally I think that large assertions about the nature of monotheism are a bit pointless. Lesek Kolakowski wrote a book entitled "Religion" and joked in the preface that the only book with a broader subject matter was Sartre's 'Being and Nothingness'. Monotheism is clearly narrower than that, but a category which embraces Akhenaten, Xenophanes, the author of 'Joshua', Judas Maccabeus, Jesus Christ, Paul, Tertulllian, Augustine, Mohammed, Maimonides, Averroes, Aquinas, both Torquemadas, Luther, Bossuet, Locke,Newton, Voltaire, Jefferson, Robespierre, Chateaubriand, Kierkegaard, Pio Nono, Hitler, Bonhoeffer, Pope John XXIII, C. S. Lewis, Gustavo Gutierrez, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Emmanuel Levinas, Rabbi Kahane, Osama Bin Laden and Simon Conway Morris is problematic when one considers the question as to whether or not the category 'monotheism' tallies with 'is favourable towards science'.

It's a bit like asking whether or not science best flourishes in a monarchy or a republic without specifying whether or not the monarchy is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or the United Kingdom and whether or not the Republic is France during the Great Terror "The Republic has no need of scientists" or France under M. Macron.

Science emerged under the tutelage of one lot of monotheists, whilst another lot were trying to suppress it in order to protect the philosophy of Aristotle and whilst yet others were generally indifferent. This leads me, as a monotheist who is in favour of scientific enquiry, to conclude that there is not a necessary relationship between the two. I incline to the view that the same is true of other iterations of the Great Perhaps.
 
Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
You can't go around calling something 'ineffable' and then claim you can eff it.

Oh, I think they can eff it. It is yet another special case construction.
 
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
quote:
Originally posted by Crœsos:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
And finally it was realised that it is something assumed but which cannot be directly proven (since in non-Euclidean geometries it isn't necessarily true).

The highlighted bit would seem to be just as true of any of Euclid's postulates.
Yes.

quote:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I don't think one could easily observe that the fluid is pushing on itself internally. One could probably deduce it, but Archimedes doesn't. Again, one could probably deduce from observations that the lower parts of the fluid are pushed sideways but Archimedes doesn't.

Fluid flowing would seem to be the obviously observable (as well as etymologically obvious) example of fluid pushing sideways on itself internally.
It's an obvervable effect of fluid pushing on itself internally. There is a difference between an observable effect and an explanation in terms of what is going on within the fluid. Any division of the fluid into parts that push against each other is arbitrary. (That is, until you assume atoms (or molecules); but Archimedes goes on to talk about larger arbitrary volumes.

quote:
As I said earlier, postulate 1 seems to be more along the lines of Archimedes defining what he means by "fluid".
I am not convinced - he doesn't use the word 'defined', nor does he say that a fluid is a type of material substance - but the distinction may be merely performative. I don't see anything in the postulate that isn't true of a malleable solid.

quote:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Actual historically existing monotheists have usually claimed that God does not operate on whim.

And yet they're always going on about "mysterious ways", which would seem to violate the "intellectually comprehensible" part of your formulation. You can't go around calling something 'ineffable' and then claim you can eff it.[/QB]
'Always'? The degree to which monotheists go on about it varies from monotheist to monotheist.

The argument is that a certain dash of ineffability is needed to get experimental science started. You need to assume that laws can't just be read off the universe by generalising off one or two observations or by arguing from basic axioms taken as obvious.

As I've said before even if one lot of monotheists are busy asserting that human reason cannot explain anything (monotheism is not sufficient) that doesn't address whether or not another lot of monotheists might be needed to get the scientific endeavour started.

quote:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
As I think I said before the argument is not that monotheism is sufficient for the scientific revolution, but that it was necessary.

This is, by necessity, a lot more speculative, but the fact that the putative contributions made by monotheism to the scientific revolution (comprehensible universe, etc.) were 'on offer' elsewhere would seem to answer the question in the negative.
I'll note that the putative contributions that you're talking about, that are on offer elsewhere, are those that I said were required to keep the scientific revolution going; not the additional contributions specific to (appropriate variants of) monotheism that I said in the second post were required to get it started.
 
Posted by Grec Man (# 18813) on :
 
Without Jesus, people would have continued their idol worship without the chance to worship something far better. Like they do now...
 


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