Slashdot Mirror
The Vatican Invites World's Leading Scientists To Discuss Cosmology (independent.co.uk)
In 2014, Pope Francis declared that God is not "a magician with a magic wand" and that evolution and the Big Bang theory are real. Now, the Vatican has sent an invitation to the world's leading scientists and cosmologists to try and understand the Big Bang. The Independent reports: Astrophysicists and other experts will attend the Vatican Observatory to discuss black holes, gravitational waves and space-time singularities as it honors the late Jesuit cosmologist considered one of the fathers of the idea that the universe began with a gigantic explosion. The conference honoring Monsignor George Lemaitre is being held at the Vatican Observatory, founded by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 to help correct the notion that the Roman Catholic Church was hostile to science. In 1927, Lemaitre was the first to explain that the receding of distant galaxies was the result of the expansion of the universe, a result he obtained by solving equations of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Lemaitre's theory was known as the "primeval atom," but it is more commonly known today as the big-bang theory. The head of the Vatican Observatory, Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, says Lemaitre's research proves that you can believe in God and the big-bang theory.
If you're going to be Christian and don't want to be a retard, Catholicism is where it's at.
"Lemaitre's theory was known as the "primeval atom," but it is more commonly known today as the big-bang theory."
I hope his heirs are getting paid. I understand that's a very popular TV show.
Because young earthers are generally not Catholic.
. .
Now that the Pope has lured them in, he should put them all on trial for heresy.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Not a terribly good argument. If Galileo was present today, I'd think he'd have a slightly easier time of it.
Give due where due is deserved. The Catholic church does appear to be trying to modernise. I say, good for them! They're a bit slow, but at least they are changing.
Sadly, the US Catholic church is mired in the 15th century.
The "Young Earth" theory of 6,000 years old planet is a relatively recent development, when people impressed by the advances in science and particularly physics and with too much time on their hands started looking for "clues" in the Bible for the Earth's age.
Reality is that Bible is completely unconcerned with "how old the Earth is" because at the time it was written the Earth's age was completely irrelevant to the lives of most people. (That's true today too.) The Bible and the sacred texts in other religions are only concerned with the psychological -- the idea being to guide you through making everyday decisions in your life. (Of course a lot of people pervert this principle -- the Young Earthers being one example -- but that's a different story.) The Bible is a catalog of archetypes and has no interest in knowledge of the objective universe for its own sake.
The originator of the Big Bang theory was in fact a Catholic priest, a Belgian I think, except he gave it a boring name, the British physicist who mocked him called his theory Big Bang, and the name stayed. It's nicely documented in the movie Hawking with Benedict Cumberbatch.
Giordano Bruno was also a Catholic monk, who advanced the "infinite universe" theory, and got burned at the stake by the Vatican for his trouble.
I take your point, however. The Catholic Church has been pretty good on most science - up and down- but you've got to be careful, because if Science starts to suggest something that makes the Vatican too uncomfortable, they might get slapped down pretty hard. Though Benedict seems a decent sort in that regard. The pope before him would have gladly started burning witches and homosexuals again if he could. And the days of the Church controlling Western academia are long gone.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Because young earthers are generally not Catholic.
Indeed. The fundamentalist protestants that believe in the Young Earth, and build replicas of Noah's ark, also believe that the pope is the antichrist. They are two completely different groups.
But to answer the original question: God put the fossils and other evidence for evolution on earth to test our faith. It is a trick to separate the true believers from the doubters that will be consumed in the Lake of Fire when the moment of Rapture arrives.
At least this is why my fundamentalist brother-in-law tells me.
Just give the Universe ID a GUID, Then, how you label the "was_created_by" field can then change at will, without affecting the fact that it IS.
Notice, it is an ID, not necessarily a UniqueID... "This is my universe. There are many like it, but this one is mine. It is my life."
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Ask Galileo how that worked out. Sounds like desperate actions of cult who's way past expiration date.
Not this again. I'm not Catholic, I disagree with a lot of the politics of the Catholic Church, and obviously most of its religious doctrine is hooey.
But anti-science? Nope. And the "Galileo affair" is a red herring, one of the very few episodes in the Catholic Church's long history where it comes across as anti-science -- although actually, it wasn't so much. Galileo himself was spouting off about stuff that didn't actually make sense according to the science of the time. That doesn't justify shutting him down or placing him under house arrest of course, but that's a free speech issue, not a suppression of SCIENCE issue.
Anyhow, I'm not going to bother describing the Catholic Church's long history of support of science, how a few 19th-century anti-Catholic revisionist historians basically trumped up the idea that the Church was anti-science, and how Galileo's case was a LOT more complicated than some stupid inaccurate portrayal you've heard from Neil deGrasse Tyson or whatever. You want to know more? I've explained it before here. You want to know more about the details of Galileo's theories and the problems? I've explained that here. I could go on, but hopefully that's at least enough to prove Pope Francis's point here: the Catholic Church throughout its history has rarely been hostile to science and in fact for most of the past thousand years has probably been the biggest and most consistent institution to support it over the longest period.
Is it anything like this one?
http://www.hwdyk.com/q/images/...
- Saint Augustine of Hippo
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Giordano Bruno was also a Catholic monk, who advanced the "infinite universe" theory, and got burned at the stake by the Vatican for his trouble.
Um, that was in the 16th century. A little bit of history has happened since then - including the fact that Benedict is no longer Pope (current guy is Francis).
Back in the 18th and 19th century many Americans were practising slavery, so perhaps you could let go of a Pope that lived in the 16th century. He, like the early Americans, was a creature of his times. It is time to get over it. We all have skeletons in the historical closet.
I am anarch of all I survey.
Slow by what metric?
They've been doing astronomy for over a century. They're hardly trying to look "hip" or "cool".
Bottom Line...
The Universe as we know it is based upon provable science, from our observation point... other than that we will *never* be able to describe the singularity... everything is rational and goes back to and evolved from the singularity... everything evolved from something.
Therefore, IF there is a "God" responsible for our Universe, something must in turn be responsible for that "God".
And IF there is no "God", then there must be "nothing", or "everything".
All three of which we as humans will *never* be able to comprehend, let alone describe... they're all turtles all the way down. It's simply out of our realm, and forever will be.
Therefore, in addition to religion being based on absolutely *NOTHING WHATSOEVER* (aka: faith / belief)... all these sciency religiousy debates are completely pointless.
Just ditch religion, research the science as far as you can, and write off the rest that you can't.
The world would be a whole lot friendlier and less murderous and less stone age if you did.
I just figured it out why the Pope has been so progressive: it's all been a lure for this moment! You see, when they arrive in the Vatican, the world's most prominent cosmologists will be put on trial for heresy. It's too bad this warning won't reach them in time because nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The system in motion is not limited by its current definition. God may or not need to use to "time" (motion) to change the rules.
Direction is irrelevant to a copy/paste function.
Deletion or alteration occur as well.
Just like math: the whole game can change with a simple plus one minus one. (on vs off for binary)
This does not encroach into the "can God do this?" area, since most computer scientists will agree that IF god exists, he very SIMPLY can change everything AS IF IT WERE MAGIC and probably with little effort.
provable science
You fail science.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Biblical numerology was never intended to be taken literally. You're supposed read the number of years and think, "oh, right. That doesn't really mean X years. That means Y alternate meaning."
e.g. The number 7 means completeness and perfection, and the number 40 means a period of testing.
When numbers are added or multiplied in the bible, you're not supposed to try to use algebra.
X plus Y means "both the meaning of X and the meaning of Y",
X times Y means something similar to addition, but it adds extra emphasis.
Anyone who believes in a literal 6000 year old earth because of the Bible needs to go take a required freshman Bible Studies class at a religious university ASAP. It doesn't matter which one you pick. They'll all tell you you're wrong if you think the Bible says the earth is 6000 years old, and then they'll teach you the context/meaning of all of those numbers.
Tell you what, when you have an alternative explanation for the CMBR (and its neutrino counterpart), nucleosynthesis (ratio of hydrogen, helium and lithium in the observable universe), and the red shift of distant galaxies, you let us know.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
everything evolved from something.
That's not clear at all. I suggest you read Lawrence M. Krauss' excellent book "A Universe From Nothing" for an easy read about this topic.
And also read a bit more about time. It's hard for us to conceptualize a beginning of time itself, as we always think there must be something before that. But the word "before" (and your "from something") implies that time is ticking, which was not necessarily the case at the Big Bang.
The problem with defending the Church's treatment of Galileo as being based on their view of science "at the time" is that science barely existed at the time, and Galileo is seen as one of the founders of modern science. The Ptolemaic model was not science, it was a complex mathematical model built to shoehorn in a whole pack of observations into a much older geocentric view of the universe. It sure the heck wasn't science, which is fine, because science as we know it didn't exist in the 2nd century AD, but by the 17th century and Copernicus's theory and Galileo's observations, there was no excuse at all, other than just an unfortunate episode of the Church not listening to the words of one of its greatest Doctors, Augustine of Hippo, who cautioned against exactly what the Church did.
And the Church has acknowledged its error and unjust way it treated Galileo, so I don't see any need to whitewash the Church's treatment of him.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The best part is that God only created the universe so that He could fake the moon landing.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
When was Galileo excommunicated? He was put under house arrest for the rest of his life, and most certainly his rejection of the Ptolemaic model played into his troubles, and he was criticized for insisting that the Copernican model was true.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Well except the fact that the debate with the church wasn't Ptolemaic vs Copernican but Tychonic. That and the fact Tychonic and Copernican are equivalent systems and literally make the same predictions. I mean sure if you have Newtonian mechanics then it's obvious Tychonic is wrong but they didn't have that because Newton wasn't around. That's why he went to such lengths to come up with a tidal mechanism since that would require a moving earth. Unfortunately that theory gets everything about tides wrong. Of course we could bring up that issue of no stellar parallax being a reason to think Tychonic was the way to go. Or the fact he really got in trouble because after his college buddy, the pope, suggest that he publish he did so. But instead of latin he did so in Italian and put a crack against catholic doctrine at the end of it.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
So long as you don't use a condom. But touching little boys is ok.
The main reason that there is so much pedophilia in Catholicism is because the Catholic church has created its own traditions which go against the teachings of the Bible. They do not allow priests or the pope to get married, yet Peter, the guy they claim to be the first pope was married. An example of one such passage that is ignored by the church is 1 Corinthians 7:
"Now concerning the things about which you wrote, it is good for a man not to touch a woman. But because of immoralities, each man is to have his own wife, and each woman is to have her own husband."
and
"But I say to the unmarried and to widows that it is good for them if they remain even as I. But if they do not have self-control, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn with passion."
If the Catholic church allowed its priests to follow the teachings of these scriptures there would be far less sexual immorality and abuse in the church.
It's a hopeless cause. Instilling faith in "the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven" hampers the ability to think logically.
Play Command HQ online
Penrose's Cycles of Time puts forward a really straightforward mechanism for the big bang. When the last massive particle pops and all the energy in the universe is massless photons, you have no mass, so no gravity and no time. Everything is simple, low entropy, dominated by photons and bingo you have something that looks (and is) identical to the state at start of the big bang.
It hard to see why it isn't true.
He's a smart fellow that Penrose.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
If you persecute scientists because they go against scientific thinking, you're about as anti-science as it gets. The renaissance broke a long period of violent inquisition into any deviations from official doctrine.
A whole lot of original thinkers ended up in prison or burned before they got around to Galileo, so don't give us this "Not this again." bullshit.
Play Command HQ online
God put the fossils and other evidence for evolution on earth to test our faith.
The majority of young earth creationists do not believe that God put the fossils there to test our faith. The majority of young earth creationists believe at least some of the following:
1) That the majority of fossils exist because many animals were buried in the flood and that the torrential flood caused the different rock layers (rather than millions of years)
2) That fossilization can happen much quicker than previously thought...in a matter of years rather than hundreds of thousands of years.
3) Because fossilization is relatively recent, long-range radiometric dating meant to measure millions of years is not suitable and gives inaccurate results. Much the same way as doing long-range radiometric dating on recent volcanic rocks yields incorrect results.
4) That recently discovered dinosaur DNA either confirms the young earth creationist model or at the very least shows that secular scientists are wrong about how long DNA can really last.
Ptolemaic system was scientific they tried to create a model that better fit their observations. What's anti-scientific is defending it violence.
Play Command HQ online
Actually, the church's involvement in astronomy predates modernism. From the time of the late Roman Empire the Catholic Church managed the calendar for Europe, a tasks that was made complicated by the Computus -- the calculation of the date of Easter, which unlike other feast days is not tied to a specific date in the calendar.
Easter is supposed to fall on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Note the combination cycles: solar, lunar, and day of week. Up until the late 1700s the first day of the new calendar year was March 21 in most places, not January 1, because March 21 was reckoned as the date of the vernal equinox and the start of spring.
Now Easter is a springtime festival and is supposed to occur soon after the start of the season, but over the years people began to notice that it was often falling in the middle of spring. This was because while the vernal equinox did occur on the conventional March 21 date back in 49 BC when the Julian calendar was established, by 1582 AD procession of the Earth's axis shifted the actual date of the equinox to March 9. Eventually this process would move Easter into the summer months.
This prompted the adoption of the more accurate Gregorian Calendar, with it's elaborate leap year mechanism. The Gregorian Calendar adoption also reset the equinox to March 21 by skipping the dates October 5, 1582 -- October 14 1582.
This was cutting edge applied astronomy at the time, and coincidentally occurred while Galileo Galilei was a student at university.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The head of the Vatican Observatory, Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, says Lemaitre's research proves that you can believe in God and the big-bang theory.
It sounds like Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno is experiencing some cognitive dissonance. He has to believe in God to keep his job, but he has to also believe in the Big Bang theory to be a real astronomer.
I imagine it's a pretty sweet gig, but there are other jobs out there.
Does a God need it?
You (and the creationist idiots for different reasons) are looking at things the wrong way IMHO. As I see it science and religion are orthogonal unless it's dumbed down Christianity-Lite that sees science as a direct threat to it's very financial business model.
Mendel was quite happy working out a few things about genetics as well as being a monk, they didn't conflict. In geology four out of the five that disproved the "Noah's flood" theory of fossils were ordained. They didn't have so narrow an idea of religion that reality could get in the way.
Giordano Bruno was also a Catholic monk, who advanced the "infinite universe" theory, and got burned at the stake by the Vatican for his trouble.
Correlation is not causation. He was heretical on quite a few issues and if his only heresy would have been his scientific work, my guess would be that he would have lived a lot longer. Case in point — how many did the Church burn because of scientific work? I am not aware of any such definite case.
I take your point, however. The Catholic Church has been pretty good on most science - up and down- but you've got to be careful, because if Science starts to suggest something that makes the Vatican too uncomfortable, they might get slapped down pretty hard. Though Benedict seems a decent sort in that regard.
Well, right now Catholic Church is very uncomfortable with embryonic research. I don't see the hammer falling.
The pope before him would have gladly started burning witches and homosexuals again if he could.
This is a good reason not to ever trust any group of people. If you think well of scientists, look up Tuskegee syphilis experiment. For a wide scale corruption of science, look up Nazi Germany.
I heard a quantum astro physicist speak on this recently. It was interesting that what he said the requirements for the big bang would be just happened to match up to some things outside of physics.
You mentioned:
> It all comes down to relativity: If the universe started as a single dimensionless point, then the gravity would have been so strong that time didn't exist. If time didn't exist
If time didn't exist within that point, if the gravity was so strong nothing could escape, then *nothing* could happen, within a basic understanding of relatively. For anything to happen, for the big bang to happen, you need either something outside pf physics (something meta-physical) or certain laws of quantum physics must be present in a very particular way.
Biblically, when God is asked who he is, the answer is basically "I am what it timeless" or "I am what has always been and always will be" (English doesn't have exactly the right words because we give several meanings to the word "is/am" Spanish comes closer with es vs esta). Also "I am the truth". So God states he is, essentially, timeless truth. Whatever has always been true, that's God.
And the physicists say that *before* the big bang can happen, quantum physics must *already* be true. Quantum physics must be timeless truth in order to get the big bang, or else the big bang has to be caused by something beyond physics, something meta-physical.
Therefore reading the plain words, the laws pf physics are timeless truth that must have existed before the big bang, and that's what God is - timeless truth that existed before the big bang. The founders of the US would then have been correct to call the laws of nature the laws of God, acts of nature are called acts of God. They are one and the same. They are timeless truth.
You are conflating Catholics with "all Christians." Generally speaking, Catholics do not generally use the term intelligent design, nor do they believe that arose over time out of causality is in conflict with the concept of a universe created by God.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Breakfast served all day!
Except all "discoveries" of dinosaur DNA are generally believed to be caused by contamination. One, for example, turned out to be a human Y chromosome. To date, AFAIK, they haven't been able to extract nontrivial fragments of DNA from any samples that are more than a few hundred thousand years old, if that.
Current models suggest the complete destruction of DNA after about 6.8 million years, which is approximately an order of magnitude shorter than the time that has passed since dinosaurs last walked the earth. So unless the young Earth folks are correct, I suspect that recovering actual dinosaur DNA would take some as-yet undiscovered, spectacularly unlikely chemical reaction that replaces the base pairs uniquely with some other mineral or something. It just doesn't seem very likely to find DNA from anything not warm-blooded, i.e. from any animal that couldn't live far enough north or south to get frozen after its death. It is probably not possible even then, but it isn't entirely impossible, because the half-life of short fragments goes up dramatically as the storage temperature drops.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Not by much. Very publicly calling a major political figure with an autocratic streak a mile wide an idiot (simplicio) doesn't tend to go down well in any era.
The Ptolemaic model was not science, it was a complex mathematical model built to shoehorn in a whole pack of observations into a much older geocentric view of the universe. It sure the heck wasn't science
Well, the history of science has been filled with shoehorning.
The "science" that preceded relativity started as a complex mathematical model built to shoehorn in a whole pack of observations into a much older non-relativistic (aether) view of the universe.
The "science" that preceded quantum mechanics started as a complex mathematical model built to shoehorn in a whole pack of observation into a much older non-quantum (deterministic) view of the universe.
It often takes quite a while for views of our universe to change and not everyone goes along quietly. Simply dismissing the stuff that came before as "sure the heck wasn't science" doesn't really honor the scientific method at all. We'd be pretty arrogant to think that 100 years from now, all the "science" we have come up with today won't be looked at with derision and dismissiveness.
Even Einstein (who came up with relativity and won a Nobel prize for the quantum mechanical photo-electric effect) spent years trying to dismiss the currently accepted quantum view of the universe (the probabilistic view, aka god does not play dice) and many think never fully accepted it. I don't think he's the only one either...
As I wrote elsewhere it really came down to politics and calling the Pope an idiot in print. Others had been discussing the Copernican model before Galileo (and Galileo for two decades before his trial), but they did not depict a character that was obviously the Pope and obviously an idiot in their discussions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair
Makes about as much sense.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Edgar Allan Poe suggested something similar (and more) in 1848 in his prose poem Eureka, shortly before his death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Admitedly Poe's ideas are highly questionable, however they're very inspirational. I wonder if Lemaitre read Poe before he did his remarkable works...
I take your point, however. The Catholic Church has been pretty good on most science - up and down- but you've got to be careful, because if Science starts to suggest something that makes the Vatican too uncomfortable, they might get slapped down pretty hard. Though Benedict seems a decent sort in that regard.
Well, right now Catholic Church is very uncomfortable with embryonic research. I don't see the hammer falling.
Because they understand that political lobbying is much more effective that excommunication nowadays.
Can you get federal funding for stem cell research in 2017? Mostly no, because "research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death" (so, most of the really useful research) is prohibited. And they didn't need to burn anyone at the stake.
Because they understand that political lobbying is much more effective that excommunication nowadays. Can you get federal funding for stem cell research in 2017? Mostly no, [...]. And they didn't need to burn anyone at the stake.
Please don't move the goalposts. PopeRatzo was clearly stated that the Church would “slap down pretty hard”, which indicates direct use of power. John Oliver exercises much more “slapping power” than the Catholic Church in the USA. Even the lobbying wasn't that effective since human embryo research is still allowed, just not the federal funding.
The 16th Century might have been a long time ago, but the whole point of the Bible and the continuum of Popes (as the voice of God on earth), is that it is supposed to be eternally true. ( P. J. Toner, Infallibility, Catholic Encyclopedia, 1910).
The Pope is supposed to be infallible, "when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church"
So it doesn't matter if it was in the 16th Century on the 21st Century, the Pope is supposed to be infallible.
Giordano Bruno was also a Catholic monk, who advanced the "infinite universe" theory, and got burned at the stake by the Vatican for his trouble.
Um, that was in the 16th century. A little bit of history has happened since then - including the fact that Benedict is no longer Pope (current guy is Francis).
Back in the 18th and 19th century many Americans were practising slavery, so perhaps you could let go of a Pope that lived in the 16th century. He, like the early Americans, was a creature of his times. It is time to get over it. We all have skeletons in the historical closet.
Of course it is real. You need to be a complete idiot to deny that such a theory exists.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The Vatican has maintained an astronomy office since 1774: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... .
In 1993 the Vatican Observatory saw first light on one of the world's premier large telescopes on Mt. Graham in Arizona (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_Advanced_Technology_Telescope), a project which was almost killed off by the same Greens who are trying to prevent the Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii from being built, on the same excuse of "sacred to my people" that is being used now in Hawaii.
The fuck?
You are aware quantum physics involves actual tests that can - and have been performed . Quantum electro-dynamics produces results that are so accurate they have lead many to call it the most precisely tested theory in the history of science
'Causality' is not ignored, it's just a matter of fact that observable evidence from quantum physics demonstrates that there are in fact acausal events on the quantum scale. Just because you - and most people - don't understand the physics involved using common sense does not mean the theory fails.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
But that is still an opinion. Protestants protested against the teachings of the Catholic Church. The existence of Protestantism is the rejection of the teachings of the religious university. A young earth believer is a protestant who rejects the religious teachings that have another interpretation of the biblical numerology. You can't discus science with religious people.
I'm surrounded with Muslims who reject common science and even history. The newest alternative fact they want to force us to believe is that Columbus wasn't mistaken when he named the native Cubans Indians, but that he actually met Indians (from India). These Muslims claim that the Crusader's media (that's what they call the west ...) lie about the fact that Turks discovered America in the 12th century and build an Islamic caliphate. When Columbus arrived in the new world he visited a Mosque and met Indians who worked there under Turkish flag...
Now what kind of alternative fact is more dangerous? The earth is only 6000 years old can be simply refuted by logical thinking. But the revisionism that is spread on Islamic television? How can you proof history? These Turks are not only convinced that all other historians lie, they are also convinced that their revisionist history is the only truth. You can not prove that there was never a Turk in America in the 12th century. You can't even proof their claim that "Crusader's" destroyed all Islamic buildings and killed all Muslims in Cuba is false.
To be honest, I still prefer to live among those crazy protestants than with the Islam-fascist Turks who get brainwashed by their Turkish propaganda. Until now those Turks only destroyed the property of other Turks who didn't agree with them. But when will they become violent against Europeans? As an European civilian I'm not even allowed to be worried of these fascists because it is a hate crime to be afraid(=worried) of Muslims(=Turks).
That may be true, but then what happened to your ability?
Those telescopes will also find the film set for the faked moon landing. It was carried up to the dark side of the moon by Armstrong so no one would know the moon landing was faked.
Take a look at their bank accounts and other holdings.
That just means they are talented at scamming the credulous and are huge hypocrites. Take one look at Vatican City if you need proof that of their hypocrisy about "helping the poor". They are only interested in finding new angles to take advantage of people.
The church wanting to "talk" about cosmology is a waste of everyone's time because they have nothing useful to add to the discussion. Their idea of cosmology ends with the writings of primitive men who died thousands of years ago. The only interest the church has here is in hoodwinking idiots into thinking they are interested in something more than growing their flock and keeping their gravy train going. An organization which has based their interpretation of the world around a ridiculous fictional book isn't likely to be interested in a rational and evidence based discussion. They are just trying to figure out where the gaps are to continue their god of the gaps argument.
That's really where one religion (Quantum Mechanics) meets another religion (Big bang consmology).
Nope.
Quantum mechanics fails because it defies causality creating paradoxes they ignore
Defying causality is an interesting way of putting it.
Ignoring basic conflicts in reasoning to support a theory make QM a religion not a science.
There's no basic conflict in reasoning.
Equations do not make science, logic does.
Equations are logic. Valid ones, anyway. Equations that describe reality such that they make predictions are science.
Quantum Mechanics makes accurate predictions about reality that no other theory of similar or lesser complexity makes, and does not make inaccurate predictions within its broad domain.
Pure logic divorced from this is philosophy, which is a superset of science.
Why not two big bangs, or three or 33?
That's like saying that gravitational theory fails because why is the gravitational constant G ~= 6.674 * 10^-11 m^3/(kg * s^2). Why isn't it 2G or 3G or 33G?
We observed G. We observe a reality consistent with an expanding universe that does not meaningfully have multiple origin points or topographies.
But certainly the Big Bang theory is a looser theory than QM -- we don't make electronics out of predictions stemming from Big Bang theory. But we detect Neutrinos and background radiation first predicted by Big Bang theory.
And invents magic to support a broken model (e.g. inflation theory magically stopping, time not existing before big bang etc.)
There's no magic in inflationary theory or the time origin thing. They are, however, a product of extrapolation through to a state we can't directly investigate.
Christianity hangs onto the religious fringes of science here.
I don't know what this means.
It's the same since Earth was at the center of the universe (because Religion decided God made us special), and there were massive pointless equations describing the weird loop-the-loop motion of the planets....Equations do not make science, logic does, those equations indeed predicted the motion of the planets as if the earth was at the center of it all.... but they were simply wrong.
This is a common misinterpretation. Those equations describing epicycles were not wrong. They were overcomplicated. It's nonsensical to say an equation consistently gives accurate predictions but is still wrong. They were perfectly logical. We chose heliocentrism for our planetary models due to Occam's Razor when a simpler model was proposed that put the origin at the sun. Our current model is a bit more complicated than that but only because it buys us more accuracy than either of the old methods, and for many purposes we do stick to heliocentrism because it's just as true within the bounds of accuracy.
The Bible is a catalog of archetypes and has no interest in knowledge of the objective universe for its own sake.
But I imagine most Christians would be offended if you described the Bible as purely a work of fiction like Ovid's Metamorphoses or Aesop's Fables..
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
As I see it science and religion are orthogonal unless it's dumbed down Christianity-Lite that sees science as a direct threat to it's very financial business model.
They are not orthogonal unfortunately because for religions to work they have to manipulate how people think. Science is really nothing more than a rigorous method of thinking and it routinely comes into conflict with religions on this point. Islam, Christianity and the rest are also methods of thinking primarily used to control people by received "wisdom". To accomplish this they insist that followers believe certain tenets which are routinely in direct conflict with scientific methods, objective evidence and rational thinking.
Furthermore Islam and Christianity in particular are enthusiastic about trying to add followers, sometimes literally at the point of a sword. Objective rational thinking is a direct threat to this "business model" as you so rightly put it. They prey on the credulous and science is a clear and present danger to their ability to do this.
So no, religion and science are not orthogonal and cannot be as long as religion continues to attempt to tell people what to think about the world around them. For them to be orthogonal religion would have to be considerably more withdrawn from the material world than they are.
Big Bang is a "socially accepted theory" just like the geocentric model or spontaneous generation used to be.
Next generation telescopes launched in the next 10 years will determine the Big Bang is false, just another human-friendly creationist theory dressed up in 20th century scifi.
And that will be science doing what it's supposed to do. Coming up with theories of how things work and testing them all the time, trying to disprove them. When something is found not to work, new evidence is used to come up with a better model.
Contrast with religion.
If time didn't exist within that point, if the gravity was so strong nothing could escape, then *nothing* could happen, within a basic understanding of relatively. For anything to happen, for the big bang to happen, you need either something outside pf physics (something meta-physical) or certain laws of quantum physics must be present in a very particular way.
Sigh... Just because you don't understand the physics of something doesn't mean that you need to invoke a deity to explain it. You are thinking of the big bang like a conventional explosion. It isn't. This is well trodden ground by physicists and no meta-physics is required.
Biblically, when God is asked who he is, the answer is basically "I am what it timeless" or "I am what has always been and always will be" (English doesn't have exactly the right words because we give several meanings to the word "is/am" Spanish comes closer with es vs esta). Also "I am the truth". So God states he is, essentially, timeless truth. Whatever has always been true, that's God.
So you are making a god of the gaps argument. Whatever we cannot explain currently must be god. Curious how "truth" from religions only seems to come in the form of 2000 year old holy books full of preposterous stories.
And the physicists say that *before* the big bang can happen, quantum physics must *already* be true.
No physicist I've ever met has said anything of the sort, at least in the sense you are implying. Not one of them pretends to know what the laws of physics were prior to the big bang or even for some short duration after. That is currently beyond our ability to model and predict. Quantum physics as we understand it likely would have no meaning prior to the big bang and we certainly have no testable models to evaluate.
Quantum physics must be timeless truth in order to get the big bang, or else the big bang has to be caused by something beyond physics, something meta-physical.
Wrong again. Quantum physics is a mathematical model of what we observe about the world around us. A well tested model but a model all the same. It is not some "timeless truth" especially given that it is an incomplete model and it certainly doesn't imply the existence of anything meta-physical. You are talking the sort of nonsense that sounds convincing to the uneducated and credulous but is easily debunked by anyone who actually has studied the topic.
Wait, they don't believe in the moon landing either? Why not? That one doesn't seem to violate anything bible-related.
Religion and science go together wonderfully as long as the other doesn't try to diletantly invade the domain of the other.
They do not go together wonderfully because religion cannot help but attempt to instruct people about the world around them. There is no way to entirely separate the claims religion makes regarding the material world around us and the human experience from those that science makes. This is why religion continues to try to limit scientific thinking because it reduces the ability of organized religions to dole out made up explanations for how the world works. Their "business model" depends on it. The problem religions have is that you don't actually need religion for dealing with "why" questions or the "how". Religion has nothing useful to contribute there. All religion has are farcical fables rather than actual answers. And they are desperately trying to keep the credulous from understanding this reality.
For religion to not intrude on science, religion would have to withdraw so far from daily human reality as to no longer be a meaningful part of human life. Religions had evolutionary utility at one point because they helped people organize into tribes which were useful for survival. The evolutionary utility has long since passed but it's hard to get rid of religion at this point because of our obvious predisposition towards it.
Total speculation, but you don't need a warm-blooded animal to live in freezing climate. Starting from winter hibernation, to heat generation from muscles or internal organs (which is more easy for large animals). It is more problematic to find a spot that was frozen for the whole 70 million years.
Deities have to be timeless - at least I won't settle for anything less. If an entity has apparent super powers, but is still subject to the passage of time (and thereby to the second law of thermodynamics), it is merely technologically more advanced.
Time, to a deity, has as much meaning as page numbers in a book. Or CPU clock cycles to a programmer who is able to observe, preserve and set every single state of the machine, thereby being essentially able to "turn back time" from the CPUs point of view.
Proof of divine power is as simple as showing a perpetuum mobile (preferably first or second kind, but I'll settle for third kind).
Never met a young earther in my years of doing public science outreach but I've found tons of morons who think they understand science because they like the Jurassic Park movies.
You guys are worried about the wrong things.
Hahaha... I have to echo the same sentiment. The number of people I witness using their limited/misguided knowledge of science as a "weapon" to prove they're smarter than everyone else is a little distasteful. Really wish there was more *real* exposure to proper science instead of just Hollywood-type flashiness. It's worse than the almost-true "based on real events" movies that fictionalize history and just confuse people for the sake of money and entertainment. What can we do? Well, at least each of the last few Catholic popes have been becoming more vocal in their support of science so that's a step in the right direction. A very small step. I wish all the other less enlightened religious communities would follow their example. It's not hard.
...I would still advise that you read the Liturgy.
Liturgy is ritual rather than a bit of writing but I'll assume you are talking about the various catholic holy texts. I've read more of it than I care to admit. And it was largely preposterous crap meant to impress the credulous. The only value in reading it is so you can understand something about what the poor deluded followers of the church are rambling on about.
Some of the best writing ever came from the Catholic church. Even if they can't live by their own rules, it doesn't invalidate the rules.
It's impossible to actually exist by the rules of the church because they are illogical and self-contradictory and reflect values of people from a different time and place.
I also disagree you your assertion of the quality of the writing but that's not an objective critique on my part, more of an aesthetic judgement. The content of the liturgy on the other hand is objectively crap. Mostly made up fables that con men are trying with all their might to justify in order to gain power over the credulous.
I always love when the response to a hard a fence question is ignorant gibberish.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Curious how they interpret genesis then. If the big bang theory is accurate, then a god simply cannot have created the universe. It all comes down to relativity: If the universe started as a single dimensionless point, then the gravity would have been so strong that time didn't exist. If time didn't exist, then there was no time for a god to create the universe.
It is unlikely that the big bang presents any sort of theological problem for the church. The theory was put forward by a Catholic priest teaching at a Catholic university after all.
Keep in mind that communications between two parties needs to be a least common denominator sort of thing. An all powerful God has to use concepts that humans can understand. The pre-scientific farmers and shepherds of the bible's day needed something a bit simplified compared to a modern astrophysicist. Perhaps if God were to explain things today we might have a genesis where our universe is created out of a multiverse. That would be closer to what I think the church argues, that God is beyond the universe, outside of it. Not simply in a different geographical part of it. Hence the ability to create space, time and the universe.
Clearly, that's from when Jesus took his dad's car for a joyride on the moon. The scamp!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Indeed. The fundamentalist protestants that believe in the Young Earth, and build replicas of Noah's ark, also believe that the pope is the antichrist. They are two completely different groups.
Right-o. Don't forget that Evangelicals and Pentecostals speak n tongues, build compounds with guns, sometimes have multiple wives, some think they hear "God's voice" in their head and declaring themselves prophets with the ability to amend the Bible. My favorite is the 7th Day Adventists whose beliefs are based on Ellen White's ramblings because she was mentally ill from sustaining head trauma when she was younger. She predicted the end of the world that didn't happen. None of it could possibly be delusional craziness could it?
My favorite part of this:
Hear God's voice in your head? Yay, you had a major blessed spiritual experience
Hear the voice of Elvis in your head? It's off to the funny farm to be heavily sedated for the rest of your life
We'll make great pets
At least this is why my fundamentalist brother-in-law tells me.
Don't worry some day Ken Ham, Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort will all share a padded room together. They can all speak in tongues to each other. Should be a grand time.
We'll make great pets
You're absolutely right. Bruno's greatest crime was that he was a huge pain in the ass and wouldn't take yes for an answer. Right up to the day of his one-man barbecue, the Vatican was trying to give him a way out. All he had to do was apologize and he would have lived. He basically told the Church to go screw themselves because he was one of those guys who didn't suffer fools gladly and knew (quite correctly) that he was the smartest guy in the room. Anybody who's ever worked in academia knows such people.
I mean, he'd already been excommunicated from three different religions (including one that he'd never joined).
The Tuskegee experiments and Nazi Germany don't really represent scientists as a whole. You could say we have a lot more reason not to ever trust the Catholic Church (and religionists generally).
You are welcome on my lawn.
God forbid someone grab a telescope and point out the fucking rover tracks on the moon...
You can only see the rover tracks because the telescope makers are in on the hoax.
While I agree that less crazy is better than crazy - it's still crazy.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
QM is one of the most highly confirmed physical theories ever developed. And no, it doesn't violate causality, so you're just talking out your ass.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'm quite sure JP2 did much the same. He endorsed the Big Bang specifically because it implied a 'moment of creation'. Of course, it doesn't support in any way the ramblings of a bunch of bronze age goat-herders (aka the Bible) - but some people seem to think it does, and I much prefer them over literalists anyway. You have to be basically insane to be a literalist.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Intelligent Design and creationism is more associated with Evangelicals. The crazy dickheads you have over there in the states. I went to a catholic school, and we were taught evolution, big bang theory, and accretion theory of Earth formation. In other words, reality over fantasy.
The catholic church has done a lot of bad stuff, but at least it's smart enough to adapt to science and culture rather than attempt to force the opposite.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Intergalactic hydrogen. It's always plasma (no electrons) --- which means it doesn't emit light (aka dark matter). It isn't a coincidence there are intergallactic hydrogen gas trails --- it is where matter is formed and eventually clumps up give time. Vacuum reduces slightly the energy levels of photons over long distances, hence the red shift and the vacuum energy combined with expansion produces matter occasionally in the form of protons.
Which is why really old galaxies are seen very far away.
The Big Bang is stupid, everything super-far away is supposed to be quasars. And nothing close is supposed to be quasars. Yet we have quasars nearby (oops!) and far away we see well-formed galaxies in what is supposed to be the "young universe".
Do you seriously think future more advanced space telescopes will scan the skies and find nothing where we cannot see today?
Good luck with that!
They find stars older than the Big Bang all the time and it will just get worse as our technology improves.
lol. You're a fucking genius mate. Get Nature on the phone.
Seriously, avoid science. You're not cut out for it.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I've just checked and, yep, you're an idiot. Fuck off and let the grown ups talk. Cheers.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
We'd be pretty arrogant to think that 100 years from now, all the "science" we have come up with today won't be looked at with derision and dismissiveness.
We still teach Newtonian physics and it is still good enough to send probes to the outer solar system. A more than 300 year old physical theory. New discoveries don't have to toss out existing ones. They develop into covering a wider range of parameters and initial conditions, and their depth and explanatory power will increase (e.g. you can't explain Mercury's orbit without GR). Doesn't mean that quantum physics is to be viewed as derisory in a hundred years.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Today we learned that fred911 doesn't know what a 'cult' is. Thanks fred911. Galileo's dead btw.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Although I, like many in the western hemisphere, was expected to believe all this as a kid, I cannot honestly ever recall seeing a good reason to credit it any more than Snow White.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Yeah. The beginning is T=0. Talking about 'before' is like talking about heading north of the north pole. Outside of this context though, I cannot think of any good reason why the universe would be unique, or why this process would happen once and only once. That would be much, much more contrived than an infinity of such events.
Inflation, specifically eternal inflation, makes this kind of model inevitable, and strongly suggests that our universe is merely part of a wider universe in which inflation stopped, and in doing so created gigantic amounts of mass and energy by borrowing against gravitational potential energy. Inflation has critics and is not universally accepted, but it appears to be the best we have at the moment.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
The Bible is a catalog of archetypes and has no interest in knowledge of the objective universe for its own sake.
But I imagine most Christians would be offended if you described the Bible as purely a work of fiction like Ovid's Metamorphoses or Aesop's Fables..
It's sad that people have to be offended. But a lot of offending needs to be done. Time to grow up. This is the real world. Time to drop the fucking fairy tales.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I've heard that about Bruno as well. I cannot get my head around a guy who won't at least insincerely apologise, given that he is to be burned alive. Either he was afflicted by a weirdly impoverished imagination with respect to one particular thing (being burned to death) or he was a full-blown badass.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
> God has a moral component being either the source of moral goodness or its arbitrator (depending on your view)
The biblical God, from all I've read, *is* truth, not the arbiter of truth. "I am the way, the truth, and the light". (The word "am" here is the permanent "am"). Anywhere in that big old Bible does it say "I am the arbiter of morality? If so I haven't seen it.
To whatever extent morality is true, whatever moral laws are fixed and permanent, those are *part of* the biblical God because God *is* truth, according to the Bible. Whatever laws of physics are true, always true, are of course part of "I am the truth".
I haven't taken a survey of how "most people" understand things, but the biblical God is truth - all truth.
>There are also electrons, mass and gravity.
Not if you wait long enough.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
What this is, I suspect, is the Catholic leadership realizing that the window of ignorance is just about to close on their fingers, so they're scrambling a bit to retrench a little further outside of their normal run of indoctrination.
It seems inevitable if a particular branch of theism wishes to survive much longer outside of third-world countries. Not much room for superstition remains outside of the ever-shrinking classes of the susceptible.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I've read a lot about Bruno. A Jesuit teacher in high school taught me his "memory palace" technique and it sustained me throughout grad school.
He was definitely a bad-ass. But extremely prickly when it came to people he thought were his intellectual inferiors, which included just about everyone.
My favorite part of the Bruno story is that the reason they arrested him is because he was found to be reading "indecent" material. See, he liked to read on the crapper, like most people, and he kept a copy of the poems of Erasmus near his toilet. Well, it fell behind something and when they searched his room they found the book and accused him of trying to hide it. He told them that if they just had looked on the bookshelf in his room, they'd have found another edition.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The Tuskegee experiments and Nazi Germany don't really represent scientists as a whole. You could say we have a lot more reason not to ever trust the Catholic Church (and religionists generally).
I generally agree. The reason I brought in the problems with ethics in science was because [at least in /.] I have observed the sentiment that we can trust scientists to do the right thing. Sort of proof by comparison.
The Bible and the sacred texts in other religions are only concerned with the psychological -- the idea being to guide you through making everyday decisions in your life.
A pastor I know says, "The bible will not tell you how to fix your washing machine, but it will tell you how to live your life."
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Largely because not everything is going to turn into photons. Photons are not the only elementary particle
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'm not appealing for anyone to believe anything.I neither saying he's right nor wrong. The argument was very interesting and worth checking out.
The "== magic" thing was the scale free nature of the equations of photons leading them to be being conformally equal to the low entropy state at the start of the universe when there's no mass around. So more of a mathematical observation.
I guess we could just ignore all this stuff and live under a rock until someone declares science to be complete, but I find it interesting.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Others theorize that they were neither warm-blooded nor cold-blooded. Either way, apparently even the poles weren't permanently frozen during that era anyway, which pretty much destroys any chance of recovering frozen dinosaur remains.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I get you. I figure, we can trust scientists to do science. It's what people do with that science that has to be closely watched.
Regarding "fake science": I think there are enough scientists out there who would love to prove their colleagues wrong that they pretty much police themselves when it comes to weeding out the frauds. They didn't get PhDs and work for crappy wages just to have their profession sullied by flim-flam.
As far as ethical disasters like Tuskegee and Mengele, those need to be treated by society like any other atrocity. Think of the medical doctors and researchers who participated in torture during the Bush Administration.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I wouldn't describe the Bible as purely of work of fiction -- at the very least many anthropologists believe Jesus (Yeshua) was a real person who had followers and was crucified. The Old Testament contains instructions as to what to do when a person has a skin rash and whether they should be put in quarantine or wash or burn their clothes. Those were real things for the times. But I consider that angle irrelevant, I'd describe the Bible as a blueprint for the inner workings of human psyche. I certainly would not accept that planet Earth and all the species were created in 6 days. If that offends someone that's their problem. Apparently that doesn't offend the Catholic Church though.
Your example even if taken at face value shows the Catholic Church was not against science but against specific ideas which they thought could seriously threaten their position in society. But that is true of every human institution, from university departments and various bureaucracies all the way up to the government. Ignaz Semmelweis got slapped down pretty hard by the medical community of the time for saying doctors should wash hands between patients, or even after performing an autopsy and before examining the live patient after. They ridiculed him and thought asking doctors to wash hands was undignified. Even today's scientific institutions are not immune to that. Science is sometimes miserably wrong but self corrects in the long run, you could say the Church does the same.
Who is "defending the Church's treatment of Galileo"? I certainly did not and am not. But the issue there was one of freedom of speech/censorship (and Galileo was certainly not the only one to whom that applies at that point in history), not primarily an issue of scientific merit.
Galileo is seen as one of the founders of modern science.
I would never dispute Galileo's contributions to science. I would strongly dispute many of his claims about heliocentrism, though, which were based on incorrect assertions. Even a stopped clock is right twice per day. (Actually, that's a reference, which I assume you won't get because you obviously didn't read the links in my previous post where I explain that Galileo's ONLY proof of the earth's motion was a theory of tides that conflicted obviously with empirical evidence. If Galileo actually paid attention to empirical evidence about tides twice per day, he likely would have never promoted his heliocentrism book as strongly as he did.)
by the 17th century and Copernicus's theory and Galileo's observations, there was no excuse at all
READ THE LINKS I ALREADY PROVIDED. There were oodles of reasons to object to heliocentrism during Galileo's lifetime, particularly if you were using the circular models that Copernicus and Galileo advocated which didn't actually make the math that much simpler than the Ptolemaic model.
But if you need more details that I've already provided in the links, here's yet another explanation of several scientific objections people had against Galileo's theories at the time.
science barely existed at the time
Scientific reasoning was quite advanced at the time. Read some actual history of science. There were complex debates going on with Galileo about empirical physical phenomena. It wasn't just Galileo saying, "Well, obviously my model's better -- look!" and everyone else going, "We refuse to look. My Bible tells me different!" That's NOT what happened, no matter what you believe happened.
And the Church has acknowledged its error and unjust way it treated Galileo, so I don't see any need to whitewash the Church's treatment of him.
At no point do I wish to "whitewash" anything. The Church's treatment of Galileo was DEPLORABLE and unforgivable. But it was NOT a simplistic argument about "rational science" vs. "ignorant religious wackos." It was a lot more complicated than that.
But to get back on topic here -- throughout the rest of the past millennia or so, even if you want to target the Galileo affair as a bad mark on Catholic science, the Church has pretty much consistently been promoting scientific research and progress... it's only in the past century or so that its scientific perspective has lagged on some issues.
A whole lot of original thinkers ended up in prison or burned before they got around to Galileo, so don't give us this "Not this again." bullshit.
Citations, please. You have maybe the persecution of Galileo (which was complex and arguably mostly happened over personal insults to the pope, not the ideas he was promoting) and Bruno (who was tried for heretical doctrinal beliefs mostly, not any of his speculative "scientific" claims). I do NOT defend either one of these, but both were arguably disputes that happened not primarily over science (although the Galileo trial ended up dealing with that as a way of suppressing a guy who had publicly insulted another powerful other guy).
I think you'll have a lot of trouble finding other "scientists" who were persecuted, imprisoned, or burned over the past millennia by the Catholic Church, because they basically don't exist. Did they burn "heretics"? Yes. People who taught stuff like Jesus wasn't the Son of God or whatever. Yes, they persecuted those who had abstract doctrinal disputes over theological matters. Over "science" (or "natural philosophy")? Not really. See the list of prominent Catholic scientists supported by the church historically in my previous links.
By the way, the big clue that you don't know what you're talking about is that you think anyone was defending the Ptolemaic model at Galileo's trial. Nobody was. Galileo was still complaining about it, but the Catholic scientists had moved on to the Tychonic model, endorsed by Kepler's mentor. The argument was between the Copernican (supported by Galileo) and the Tychonic model, which were both ultimately wrong. The correct model had already been developed and explained by Kepler, but Galileo refused to follow various assertions of Kepler's, instead preferring his inaccurate and anti-empirical Copernican system.
Thanks for this link! I've never seen it before, but it's hilarious reading AND one of the best compilations of sources that goes through all of this mess.
Giordano Bruno was also a Catholic monk, who advanced the "infinite universe" theory, and got burned at the stake by the Vatican for his trouble.
Correlation is not causation. He was heretical on quite a few issues and if his only heresy would have been his scientific work, my guess would be that he would have lived a lot longer. Case in point — how many did the Church burn because of scientific work? I am not aware of any such definite case.
Someone pointed out another Catholic personality, a few years before Bruno, who taught an infinite universe, other worlds, likely inhabited... All the stuff that Bruno was supposedly burned at the stake for.
The Catholic Church made that guy a Cardinal.
As you said, Bruno's actual problem was those other "quite a few issues". He basically went through the Nicene Creed denying (in insulting terms) every single bit of it.
In Isaac Asimov's "Biographical Encyclopedia of Science", he describes Bruno as basically doing everything possible to ensure his own conviction. Give Bruno some steam engines and SuperScience, and he could be a character in "Girl Genius." (word balloons) "I am RIGHT you pathetic FOOLS! You are deluded about EVERYTHING!! Bow before my MAGNIFICENT INTELLECT!!"
Science has a built-in mechanism for correcting errors. Religion does not. Yes, the Church has moved on some issues, but very very slowly, and change is in no way certain.
In Science, self-correction is part of the process.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Both do, they are both successful human institutions. Had the church never stepped back from Spanish Inquisition people would have revolted and that would have been the end of it. The only difference is that of scale. Sciences that can do experiments massively and quickly are the fastest to correct. Quantum physics is faster to correct than astronomy. Notice that medical science is not that fast and authorities rule to a higher degree. Even slower with psychology. Church concerns the psychological and the spiritual -- and that's not abstract, it's how you go to work, how you talk to your kids, and so on -- and it takes the longest time to correct because the "measurements" of the outcomes are the hardest to make. But they happen, people act on them, and in principle it's the same kind of self-correction.
I don't know that Asimov book. Thank you my friend. I'll find a copy right now.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The head of the Vatican Observatory, Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, says Lemaitre's research proves that you can believe in God and the big-bang theory.
But I says that Occam's razor advises that you shouldn't (believe in God and the big-bang theory.)
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
It's a great book. Short bios of everybody known important to the history of science up until ... oh, the mid 1970s, I think. I know my copy was 1974-ish, and I think there was an edition after that. And with Asimov's uniquely entertaining narrative skill.
Photons are massless, so they don't create gravitational curvature.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Understanding science to a level that divests one of most or all superstitious victimization only requires three things:
1) Understanding that there are experts who do science
2) Understanding the scientific method
3) Understanding that technology is the arm that uses science
If you can wrap your head around those things, you'll be able to ignore superstition; worst case, a few minutes quick work on a search engine will reveal if there is peer-review science, or just blather, on any particular subject. And if related technology is on record or in play.
You don't have to be a scientist in, or be highly familiar with, any particular science, to realize that pretty much everything around you came about due to actual science, and was brought to useful levels by technology, science's strong arm of implementation. You just have to understand the process. 1, 2, 3 as above.
Unlike most of history, the information required to understand what is actually going on is now a few keystrokes away in developed countries. That's what is closing the window of ignorance so much faster.
I also suspect that in the relatively near future, historically speaking, we'll be able to produce kids that are not gullible, stupid, or lacking in the ability to employ critical thinking. At that point, producing another human being without these capacities will render them highly non-competitive right out of the... gate, and parents won't generally buy into that. It's hand-waving at this point, I fully admit, but it seems to me that the seeds of this are sprouting all around us.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Well, it's only taken them around 150 years to officially acknowledge evolution as true. Not exactly Speedy Gonzales there, but at least they're moving, quite unlike a cult.
Are you sure about that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
They never stated it wasn't true before now and they made contributions to the early development of the theory.
A single example (whether true or not) doesn't give a good indication of the Catholic Church's position on or contribution to science over time.
It had to become sentient to make sure we didn't detect the real Higgs. Duh.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
The 6K year estimate has been around for quite some time, as someone started with the birth of Jesus and traced the years back with the ages of ancestors. Back when the Bible was considered to be literally true, having not contradicted much science yet, people believed it. Then, for a while, almost nobody believed in it. Nowadays, it seems that some people have a reaction against science and find some nonsense derived from the Bible to believe instead.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Photons have energy, which creates gravitational curvature. E=mc^2 applies here.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Fair enough. I was wrong. https://physics.stackexchange....
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
There are thousands and thousands of scientific theories that are clear, understandable, explain some things, and have been proven wrong.
Not to mention that photons do have gravitational effects, I see no reason why everything in the Universe including electrons would decay into them, and anyone who believes Searle's Chinese Room idea can't be all that smart.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I consider that a fundamental oxymoron. This is an area where significant amounts of the "art" consist of fad-driven guesswork in the form of (often really bad) metaphor, and worse, one in which the fads change quite rapidly. The most reliable aspect of it is statistical behavioral analysis. The rest... religion, pretty much.
As to the future, and superstition's role in it: I will wait and see what actually happens. Within that context, I dare to hope that some of the self-inflicted delusion will go away. I could certainly be wrong. But that is my hope at this time.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Why would you think the lack of affirmation is the same as affirmation?
Why would you bring up "position on or contribution to science"? I'm not talking about that at all.
And the answer to my question is.....?
But, to politely answer yours.
"Why would you think the lack of affirmation is the same as affirmation?"
I don't think that - I never wrote or implied that. My point is that they weren't denying it (or affirming it) - probably because they aren't really required to give any position on it.
"Why would you bring up "position on or contribution to science"?"
Because contributing to it shows that at least some of them were key to the development of the theory - and therefore clearly affirming it by their actions.
Galileo will be as thrilled to learn of this as Adam Smith will be of a similar event for economists in half a millennium or so.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
This Pope has a science degree. Look it up. Science doesn't address much at all, think about it-- infinite knowledge vs science... we can't know it all. Plenty of room in there for beliefs.
Keep in mind I'm saying this as a person without a faith.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
To be fair, the church is unable to stop embryonic research, they might do it if they get the power to.
To be even fairer, they are not very uncomfortable with it because of the scientific part of it (they do not consider "unfaithful" to try to understand how embryonic development work) but because of the actual actions that are taken (they consider embryonic cells as "human beings in development" and so consider that these should not be treated as raw material), which is sort of a rational position if the premises are accepted - and there is no rational answer to "when does an embryo becomes a human being", everybody has to make up his own stance on it (and to quote an atheist scientific, Claude Levi-Strauss, "I'd rather accept the humanity of a stone than deny it to any human being").
False analogy...
Newton tried to observe the world and deduce how it works from his (and others) observations. And so did the scientists that followed, how mistaken they might have been at a point or another.
Aristotelician science was deducing how the world works from how it should work (and yes, "God doesn't play dice" is part of that tradition, note though that Einstein did not use that phrase to demonstrate that quantum mechanics was wrong, just that he felt that it had to be wrong somehow). While obviously they had to include some actual observations into their conceptions, still it's philosophy, not science.
Actually, Galileo's answer about some of his thought experiences that he needed not to carry them in the real world, as he already know the result, is vastly anti-scientific too... which is an argument on how he helped invented the scientific method (namely, if he invented it, it didn't entirely exist at his time).
Your question was ... am I sure about that? Sorry, I thought that was rhetorical.
Yes, I'm sure. I consider John Paul II to be the first leader of the church to properly acknowledge evolution. Sure, you could probably argue Pius XII as the first, but that was a very neutral statement on his part. No affirmation one way or the other.
You did imply lack of affirmation to be the same as affirmation. My statement: "only taken them around 150 years to officially acknowledge evolution as true". Your reply: "They never stated it wasn't true before now". If you were trying to correct my statement, it implies you believe "not stating it wasn't true before now" to be equal to "they stated it was true before now", the latter which would be necessary to prove my statement wrong, assuming the "now" occurred during that approx 150 year period.
Members of an organisation can have quite different opinions from the organisation itself. The only members that can set the beliefs of an organisation are its leaders. Hence, my statement still stands.
Well, hopefully my statement makes more sense to you now.
It does read as semi-rhetorical - my apologies. It was a genuine question.
"You did imply lack of affirmation to be the same as affirmation" relies on "If you were trying to correct my statement" - and the answer is no, I wasn't trying to correct you. I asked a question and then I added information. I.e. you wrote 'X did not confirm Y' - I wrote 'X did not deny Y'. It's an important point that they didn't deny evolution.
Your statement about Catholics being slow in regards to science was glib.
The topic at hand is their contributions to astronomy. They are leaders in this field. People of the Catholic faith and the Catholic Church have been very active in science for centuries. I think they are contemporary in the sciences (and not slow).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The only members that can set the beliefs of an organisation are its leaders" - no, beliefs are individual. The rules, policies, procedures, etc. are sometimes set by the leaders (and sometimes by the members voting).
Nice reply, thanks! Yes, I was being glib with that comment. It was in response to an openly hostile post, and I thought that was the best approach.
Interesting you say you weren't trying to correct me. Your question very much comes across as corrective; asking me to question my comment doesn't quite say "hey, here's some more information you may be interested in".
Belief is very much part of the organisation that is the Catholic church, or any religion, really. Their beliefs are set by their leaders and their founders, and taught by their clergy or denoted members. Of course, individuals also have beliefs, but they are generally guided by the organisation that they're a part of.
I'd actually argue that all organisations use belief in one way or another, and that a shared belief is often necessary for the construction of one.
Otherwise, definitely agree that Catholic, and Christian, people have had great influence over science. Being the dominant religion of the western world, it would have been very difficult for science history to progress otherwise.
You're welcome. Thank you for holding a civil discussion!
Such is the nature of writing that we may intend something with our writing, but when people read it they don't translate that particular meaning (through no fault of their own).
I think you're right about belief. We have our individual beliefs and then there may be beliefs that an organistion sets down that we are required to adhere to (whether one truly subscribes to the organisation's beliefs or not is probably only known in one's own head).