Posted on 02/14/2007 12:43:16 PM PST by steve-b
Hey! Leave the flat earther's out of this.
I'm an honorary member.
And besides some of might even be Jewish.
;-)
Tell you what - go read this and see if you can come up with the answers that eluded Aristotle and Ptolemy regarding a few pesky, annoying details like retrograde motion and varying brightness.
Foucault's pendulum would not...
It could indeed look EXACTLY the same. But we would not be able to explain the motor of what was running in on gravity and simple rotational motion. We would have to add epicycles and other jigs and jogs to our explanation. The universe COULD be revolving around the earth, exactly as everything appears. But if it is, then Newtonian (or Einsteinian) gravity is not what's running it. Something else out there in the ether, perhaps intelligent phlogiston, perhaps something else, makes the planets do celestial loop-de-loos, double back on themselves regularly, etc.
You're right that it wouldn't look exactly the same and the rest of our physics be right. But if we postulate the earth at the center of the universe, we certainly can mathematically describe the motion of everything else...just not with neat elliptical formulae, and we would have to invent a whole new physics to fit the model.
To use Rob't of Occam's language, we would have to propose entities, many, many entities, as drivers to explain why the planets and stars do what they do. It remains POSSIBLE that this is actually right. The Earth really COULD be the center of the universe, dead center, with everything else rotating above us. But if that's so, then physics goes right out the window once you get into the stars, even if it works brilliantly close in. Obviously the earth-centered universe would be far, far from the simplest explanation that fit the facts. Kepler certainly made everything easier to describe and understand, and with a scalable model to boot. But Kepler and Newton could be oversimplifying. It could be that the Earth is the center of everything and that an intelligent clockwork makes everything act in funny, non-standard ways, and that everything indeed would continue to look exactly the same.
It's certainly not the simplest explanation that fits the facts. It's certainly multiplying entities to a high degree. Robert of Occam would NOT be pleased, and I doubt it myself, but who knows?
See now THAT is a good question. One to which I don't know the answer. I think offering a broad overview and with parallels and differences would be helpful. Probably some sort of percentage reference as to approximately how much of the population adhere's to which theory would also be helpful.
Those annoying details COULD be the product of an intelligent clockwork driving the sky in ways that are not simply explicable. Obviously the gravitational model would be out, and Kepler's beautifully simple math would then merely be an accidental coincidence. It COULD be that this simple explanation which fits the facts: solar-centered planetary systems with elliptical motions driven by gravity, though elegant, is wrong, and the real fact is the Earth is at the center, and the planets move bizarrely from time to time because of a multiplication of entities and influences, possibly including intelligent interventions by greater-entities still. Similarly, it's possible that there isn't really any gravity, but that everything is getting BIGGER at the same rate, causing us to be accelerated upward and have the SENSE of gravity, without it being real other than relativistically.
It's all possible, and the world would look exactly the same. Our attempts to describe the world would not, and would be very messy and disjointed, and sometimes couldn't be expressed mathematically. Just because we can express more things relatively simply with Kepler and Newton (and Einstein) doesn't mean they're actually describing REALITY. Theirs is the simplest explanation that appears to fit the most facts. But that could be quite wrong. The retrograde motions of the planets could be directed by angels or other intelligences, with the Earth in the middle.
I doubt it, of course, but even the model we have, explicative as it is, starts to unravel when you really press out there.
Will we EVER know? Maybe, if there's a God and a Heaven when we die and He tells us. Of course if there IS, and we accept that there is, then we also have to accept that He could be driving the stars and planets to do funny things above an earth-centered universe. It's not a simple explanation, and it's not very satisfying, but it COULD be so. Nobody on this side of the grave knows. Nor does anybody on this side of the grave know if anybody on the other side of the grave knows either. As for myself, I prefer to believe that there is something on the other side of the grave that will answer these questions, because otherwise I will feel gypped.
Sure it would. So long as gravity wasn't really the driver and some other entity were driving it. The Physics are probably true. But it could be that there are really a whole panoply of smaller, speciated entities that drive individual phenomena, and that the sweeping Newtonian simplification, while it appears to fit all of the observable facts and is therefore the better theory, merely does so coincidentially, and REALLY there are 36,750 different, individuated forces that drive things separately but in concert. It is a postulate that the simplest explanation that fits the facts is the best, but that doesn't mean that it's literally true.
They certainly do. But the message is this: while Pharisaism as a school possesses much wisdom, followers of the school often go astray through pride.
Nicodemus the Pharisee does not come off looking bad at all.
They disagree of fundamental issues, like who should be proslytized to.
No they do not. Both the Pharisees and Jesus believed that non-Jews should be proselytized.
And the Pharisees claimed Jesus was doing the work of the devil when he was healing.
Some Pharisees did. Other Pharisees did not and reserved judgment or followed him.
The Pharisees were an informal religious movement within Judaism and the words of one Pharisee certainly did not indicate the attitude of all Pharisees - at the time of Jesus they were already split into various factions.
Barely any mention of Sadducees.
Any mention of Jewish priests or scribes in the New Testament is a reference to the Sadducees, since the Sadducees were the priestly party within Judaism. There are about 90 references to the Pharisees in the Gospels, about 15 references to the Sadducees by name and about 100 references to priests and scribes.
About even.
It was the Sadducees who actually put Jesus on trial for his life.
That's just the Trojan horse. His real agenda is to teach in schools that babies come from the cabbage patch.
(Cleveland, Georgia, Rep. Bridges' home town, is the birthplace of the Cabbage Patch Kids; Babyland General Hospital is its main tourist attraction.)
And that is, essentially, all that I suggested in my original post. Who says that creationism and evolution don't meet somewhere down the road? Why can't BOTH concepts be correct? Who was it that decreed that every few hundred years God has to return to his drawing board and redesign a few species here and there to keep up with changes in the environment? Why can't we believe that God originally created all living things and is clever enough to turn to evolution as a way to maintain various species and allow them to continue to survive in changing environments?
The impression I get is that everything has to be one OR the other, but both can't be correct. Why?
That's a false impression created by religious zealots on one side and Richard Dawkins on the other. In fact, the majority of scientists, and of Christians, are able to reconcile faith with science, and don't see any contradiction.
To break it up in Journalism 101 terms, Genesis lays out the who, what, and why; science addresses the when, where and how. They don't collide with each other, because they're answering different questions. That was good enough for Einstein and Gould, and it's good enough for the Vatican.
Interesting insight. Thanks for the info.
Agreed. They would've at least explained the relationship between the Loriciferans and Cnidarians.
A liberal by any other name would sound the same.
So.... you would consider a free marketer to be liberal? Adam Smith, for example? Or Milton Friedman?
Genesis lays out the who, what,why, where, when and how. Science supports it.
Fair enough. Or put another way, Genesis sketches the outline, and science shades in the details.
The question is, does it produce a Rembrandt, or a Picasso. Personally, I don't see the former as being manifest, and the latter, only serves to complicate...
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