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11,000-Year-Old Temple Found In Turkey
Ralph Spoilsport writes "In Southeast Turkey, the archaeologist Klaus Schmidt has discovered an 11,000-year-old temple. Established civilization theory suggests that agriculture created cities, and cities created monuments. This discovery suggests just the opposite — people got together to build a huge monument to their religion, and in order to sustain it, communities were formed and agriculture (already in development) quickly followed on to sustain the population. Truly a startling find with significant implications."
I'm not sure who to attribute it to, but one of the QOTDs on the bottom (Quote of the Moments, maybe? they change more often than daily, but I digress) said something along the lines of, "Science and religion are not incompatible, but science and faith are."
"Trying to pick out symbolism from prehistoric context is an exercise in futility."
We've known about the rings at Stonehenge for how long? What do we know about them? Not much.
The simple fact is that we are still discovering evidence of what man did before inventing writing of any sort. I'm continually amazed at the apparent opinion of many that what science knows now is all there is to know, or that it is not possible that it is not quite right.
Alluding to an earlier post, massive drastic evolutionary changes just don't make sense to me. There has to be more history in the dirt than we know about. Chances of us finding it... meh!
I don't think that the curve of knowledge acquisition of the last 500 years is a linear projection of the millions of years before them. I think this whole gain in knowledge is rather logarithmic in nature. Meaning that the first several thousand centuries passed without writing, without lasting evidence to show we had been there. Stonehenge, the Sphinx... how many others? They all stand there with no written account of who or why they were erected. We are still arguing about how the great pyramids at Giza were built. (they made them of concrete).
Point is, this should not be surprising. What should be is that it has taken this long to find it, never mind any other corroborating evidence of early man's efforts to create. What the temple could mean in terms of sociology or religion is pittance compared to what it means to evolution IMO. The technology and effort used to create it means a lot. Guesses about agriculture and social groupings are just that. I have a sneaking suspicion that socially, mankind evolved from pack/clan culture early on. There are so many similarities to that, but we just don't see it in modern society, or ignore it. sheeple anyone? They need a pack leader, right?
Anyway, I hope that further study/excavation shows us something more meaningful than what has been found. We, as a species, need it to fully recognize where we came from, for that is how you understand what direction to go. Just an opinion.
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How do you jump from finding one very old temple to deciding that the motivation for all civilization starting and people getting together being religion?
Sounds to me like someone with religion is trying to justify their bad habit.
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But wait, is there anything in that bible that says God's days are different? Or any other examples of God-units being different than man-units?
I don't recall that there are, but my reference is only the inevitable spillover of surrounding culture; I had a pleasant agnostic upbringing. So it's a sincere question.
Without such examples, we'd have to assume any units mentioned are meant to be the same whether for God or man.
Of course we'd have to go back to the original language, and also understand that language well enough to understand what a "day" was meant to be in all occurances. It could be pretty flexible, just like we have cultures that don't have much of a number system, and just use their version of "many" pretty early in discussing quantity.
Actually, if you think about it, it doesn't even f-ing make any sense:
1. You can't have a city _before_ you have a stable source of food that doesn't move around.
2. Agriculture depended on a mutation in a species of grass, that made it have bigger grains. It first started with wild Rye, actually, but the mutation of emmer wheat was what really kicked things into gear. It's a tetraploid plant, meaning that at some point it acquired _two_ sets of chromosomes, and that mutation survived.
You can't cause a mutation by simply building a city or a temple.
3. The only major invention that happened in that time for agriculture was irrigation. At some point some guys in Egypt for example discovered that if you plant your seeds in the wet earth after the Nile's flood is over, you get a lot of grain to eat. I don't know how it happened in Messopotamia, and it could have been independent, but that's literally what they did: imitate a flood. They'd literally flood their fields with water from a river, later from a canal bringing water farther from a river, then close the gates and let the water dry, then plant grain.
That's it. That's the only change that happened to agriculture in thousands of years.
So how did cities and monuments drive it? It's not like any change happened to agriculture because of those cities. People still sowed and reaped in the exact same way as their ancestors did, and the only change was needing more and more land to feed more and more people. That's it.
4. By contrast it's easier to see the effects of agriculture on the cities. E.g., the rise to power and importance of priesthood in Egypt because they could tell you when the next flood starts, or of those who controlled the canals in Messopotamia, is a direct effect of agriculture. Or on religion? Well, Egypt had some half a dozen deities connected in some way with agriculture, and that's just off the top of my head.
Heck, even the fact that those cities grew walls and codes of laws and standing armies, is an effect of not being able to move freely in response to threats and invasions. You _had_ to stay there near the river you irrigated your crops with, no matter what, and you had to live with each other because there was nowhere else to go if half the tribe doesn't like the other half.
If you look at the tribes which didn't practice agriculture (e.g., northern Europe until very late), they were a lot more inclined to just pack their shit and move when they overpopulated. While we tend to draw an age of migrations around the age when the Roman Empire started getting shafted by them, they moved around a lot before that too. E.g., Caesar's eventual conquest of Gaul started when the Helvetii just packed their shit and wanted to pass through and plunder the territory of the Allobroges which were clients of Rome. E.g., the Teutons and Cimbri migrated through the whole f-ing Europe, before being stopped by the Romans in 101 BC and 102 BC. E.g., while everyone remembers the spanking that the Goths gave to the Byzantines, how do you think the Goths ended up in Dacia when starting from Scandinavia in the first place?
It's only when they got into agriculture that they started trying to build stone forts and defend their plots of land. Sure, some had to migrate later anyway, when someone else displaced them, but you can see the abrupt change in attitude before and after agriculture anyway. After agriculture it's no longer about some space to live in, but about the land itself. The very place you're in becomes worth defending.
Again, it's damn impossible to see an effect the other way around. Building a stone fort or a temple doesn't make your fields suddenly grow grain, or anything. Discovering a plant you can grow, or a plough that can work on your type of soil does. (The latter was what changed the situation in Europe, btw.)
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I refer you to Albert Einstein's quote, "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind," and so religion at least can co-exist with science. You certainly don't have to accept either one!
Just because Albert Einstein said it, does not make it true. I find that many faithful people will often use the tactic of quote mining to make their points. They will point to the fact that Isaac Newton was a devout Christian and fail to mention that he also believed that transmutation of the elements was possible with chemical reactions.
The basic thought process I see at work is faith. People hear something from someone and simply accept it without hearing the rationale behind the argument. Whether you believe the Bible or believe your science book, both are acts of faith unless you ask "why".
So I ask you, why is science without religion lame?
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A myth is not a false fact, it is a metaphor - a metaphor open to transcendence, to use Joseph Campbell's definition. A true myth is truer than a true fact, because it explains that which goes beyond the facts, allows you to relate to it. If you think the Truth is not a larger notion than the facts, you should check with Godel, Heisenberg, Bohr, Einstein, etc...
1. Well, if you aim that low with "city" and "temple", then it really doesn't say much.
There are hunter-gatherer tribes with more members than that, and they do have some huts/tents/etc somewhere. It doesn't really make it a city, but ok. They all have some totem pole, or sacred heap o' rocks, or some sacred tree or grove somewhere. You can probably find such tribal villages all the way to the first homo sapiens, 200,000 years ago, and the Neanderthals before built them too.
Humans were _never_ lone individuals, like, say, tigers are. There'd always be groups of 10-15 (or for that matter 100-200) clustered together for mutual protection.
If those are the "cities" we're talking about, you simply can't draw a line and say "they appeared 11,000 years ago." Humans always lived in groups like that.
The cities we're usually talking about are larger things.
2. Can you correlate those groups of 10-15 humans with starting agriculture? I don't see how, beyond basically "well, they needed food." But humans and such groups of humans already needed food anyway. The need for a larger and more stable food source was there for 200,000 years, and in fact for the Neanderthals before them too. There is evidence that there were episodes of chronic stavation all along the way, so the drive would be there already.
So basically if you found a sorce of food, you'd _use_ it, with or without a temple and city. If you're a 15 people tribe and you find some plentiful berries, you settle there and start eating them. And if you find some nice grass which produces lots of edible seeds, you start using it one way or another. Just because you need food.
The growth of the city or tribe then comes from having that source of food, not the other way around. You can't make the right type of grass or berries or whatever appear just because you placed a city there. It's not Civilization.
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It also says that Jesus is a rock, and that he was good shepherd.
The thing about languages that are processed by transistors is that they tend to be literal, unlike languages we use. On the other hand, languages we use are ambiguous and as such, open to interpretation.
The bible is not a science book, and we don't get a definitive methodological account of creation. More importantly, people that believe it's true don't believe it's true because it proves itself scientifically.
Speaking for myself, the bible is true because of things that have happened in my own life that have compelled me beyond reason (and will) that God exists, and is the God the bible describes. As a consequence, the bible (being God's word) is absolute truth, although not always literal in writing style (for reasons mentioned).
I'm happy to admit that's bad scientific reasoning, I only mentioned it to try and show a train of thought. The funny thing though is that despite this, the scientific reasoning I try to rely on for everything else doesn't fly in the face of this lack of reason; rather it bolsters and compliments everything I read in the bible. Although for me that's no surprise.
I refer you to Albert Einstein's quote, "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind," and so religion at least can co-exist with science. You certainly don't have to accept either one!
You keep using those words, I do not think they mean what you think they mean. That was Einsteins summary of a talk he gave on the interplay between religion and science. Specifically, he said Religion aught to be concerned with how things should be, not with how they are.
More specifically, he said that Religion's job was to deal with issues relating to the emotions. He went on to say in the same speech:
"The main source of the present-day conflicts between the spheres of religion and of science lies in this concept of a personal God,"
You also seem to have gotten Pascal's wager wrong. Pascal said assuming that there's a 50-50 chance that God exists and that if you do not believe in God you will go to hell for all eternity, it is safer to believe in God. Because if you're wrong to believe in God, you don't lose anything.
It doesn't look like you read the article you linked, particularly the section entitled criticisms of Pascal's wager. He doesn't account for the cost of believing in the wrong God. And his supposition is only to be applied in the case where you can not determine through reason whether a god exists or not.
Of course, if you can not determine that a God exists, you can not know how such a God would want you to live, so you can never actually follow through on the wager.
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Actually, sad to say, what you do there isn't "science in support of faith", it's "bullshit fallacies in support of faith."
E.g.,
E.g., at some point the majority believed that the Earth is flat. It didn't make it so. It didn't even make it a safer bet. That belief is completely orthogonal to how reality actually is.
Plus, "the majority of humans alive today are religious" is mis-leading right there. Those people believe wildly different and mutually-incompatible religions. Which of those religions do you believe? Hinduism can't be true at the same time as Christianity, for example. So painting it all with a "they're religious" brush creates a false majority there.
Taking Christianity for example, it claims some 2 billion adherents worldwide, though that's got more to do with what you've been baptized to, than whether you're actually a devout christian. Well, that's less than a third of the world's population. A majority of the world isn't christian, so by your reasoning, it stands to reason that it's more likely that Christianity is false.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Nothing can be 11,000 years old. According to the Fundies, the entire universe is only about 6000 years old.
Actually, no. Not even close.
1. Pascal's wager, the way Pascal used it, is basically this:
- if you believe and you're right, there's an infinite reward
- if you don't believe and are right, well, whatever rewards you can possibly get are finite.
Ditto for penalties when you're wrong, could be added.
So basically it says _nothing_ about which is more probable to be right, and it has _nothing_ to do with . It just says that infinite is bigger than anything else. Even if the probability for christianity to be right were 0.00001% and the probability to be wrong were 99.99999%, infinite*0.00001% > anything_finite*99.99999%. So rewards times probabilities says that for an infinite jackpot, the best course of action is to bet on the jackpot.
2. Yes, the GP did claim that science supports faith. Re-read the message. It's right in there.
3. Even Pascal's use is, essentially, still a formalized way to use another classic fallacy: appeal to consequences.
4. The same infinite rewards and infinite penalties spiel can be used against it, because there is more than one religion, and virtually all promise that you only get the reward if you believe that one religion and nothing else.
E.g., what if judaism is right and christianity wrong? They do have several commandments against stuff ranging from worshipping other gods (prayed to Jesus lately?), to worshipping icons, to eating pork. On the other hand, most Christian denominations say (or used to, before we chose not to believe that any more) that you can _only_ be saved through Jesus. You have an incompatibility right there. So which of them do you choose? Both options A and B promise infinite rewards if you're right, and infinite penalties if you're wrong. Pascal's fancy maths stops working right there and then.
E.g., Norse religion promised you a place in Valhalla if you die attacking someone, or in Freya's halls if you die defending against an attack. Note that it doesn't say you have to be a good person. Pirates and mercenaries dead while assaulting some city to plunder it, would go to Valhalla just as well. Gangsters dead while having a shootout with the cops, would go to one of the two places too, just like the cops who died in the same shootout. The only criterion and goal there was proving to Odin that you're worthy of being a soldier in his Einherjar army, by having already fought to death once and not surrendering to save your life. On the other hand being a nice person and a peaceful death in your own bed, earns you a trip to the domain Loki's daughter. (Yep, you go to Hel;)
They had stuff like the Battle Of Bravalla, a monumental waste of human life, just so a king could go to Valhalla by getting an honourable death in battle... against his loyal vassal.
How do you reconcile that with Christianity? If the Norse were right, you should go die in a firefight, guns blazing, to get your reward. Go try to rob a police station if you're out of other ideas. If Christianity is right, you should be peaceful and love thy neighbour. Which do you choose? Again, Pascal's maths doesn't help you much there, because the consequences for choosing right or wrong are disproportionate for both choices.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I was immediately reminded of this article: "This Place Is Not A Place of Honor." If this ancient Turkish civilization were trying to give us a warning for some reason, we're not heeding it. Yet we think a future civilization will heed ours? As Gary Rollefson says in the article, "Trying to pick out symbolism from prehistoric context is an exercise in futility."