I appreciate your "constructive criticism" by contrast with 180boo's dueling physicists. Although you have been influenced by the anti-design arguments, you remain open-minded to alternatives*1.180 Proof, for my money, has one gripe against your theory viz. the fact that it seems impossible to retain design (Enformy, teleology, etc.) without a designer implicit. So thought you try valiantly to distance yourself from religion, it comes off as incoherent at best or deception at worst.
Another thing, please take this as constructive criticism, your theory relies on controversy (dueling physicists) rather than solid facts - its home is in the darkness of our ignorance rather than the light of our knowledge. Given your caliber, I'm expecting a first class response from you. — Agent Smith
Science offers objective truth; religion offers comforting fictions. — Art48
The universe is an objective reality and science has converged to a worldview that mirrors that reality. Ask a physicist, chemist, or biologist in Italy, Iran, and India a question and you get the same answer. — Art48
But if God is an objective reality, then why haven’t religions converged? If we assume there is one universal reality, we would expect different people of different times in different countries to have insights which converge. Shouldn’t religions “done right” converge? But they don’t. Might the reason be their faulty “way of knowing,” their childlike epistemological method? — Art48
Read "the Presocratics", Plato's early-middle Socratic Dialogues, Aristotle, Epicurus, Sextus Empiricus, Lucretius, Epictetus ...In hindsight, at least in the Western tradition, philosophy concerns – began with – critiques of religion (i.e. magical thinking)
— 180 Proof
Why do you say this? I see little evidence for it. — Mikie
In hindsight, at least in the Western tradition, philosophy concerns – began with – critiques of religion (i.e. magical thinking) which, in effect, makes space for non-religious narratives and the defeasible, critical reasoning that underwrites the natural (& historical) sciences. — 180 Proof
I appreciate your "constructive criticism" by contrast with 180boo's dueling physicists. Although you have been influenced by the anti-design arguments, you remain open-minded to alternatives*1. — Gnomon
the exploration of alternatives to religious modes of understanding — busycuttingcrap
Don't worry. It's our little not-so-private running joke. This diabolical dialog has been going on for several years. 180 calls me by a slew of sarcastic names, and I indirectly return the favor with tongue-in-cheek, except that I'm not nearly as creative or prolific in my labels.Stop the name calling. You are more than capable of criticism without insults. Or ignoring them. — fdrake
The narrative that these men were essentially primitive scientists is unconvincing. — Mikie
Every one of the early Greeks were religious— all believed in the gods and spoke of such, all were educated in Homer. — Mikie
Exactly. :up:The other notable thing, which I believe is what 180 is highlighting, is this development of breaking away from understanding the world primarily in religious terms, and even in some instances of providing explicit critique of existing religious traditions or ideas, providing an alternative way of looking at the world that would eventually develop into what we now recognize as science, naturalism, atheism, and so forth. — busycuttingcrap
Most of them were at any rate. But they generally didn't invoke gods or spirits as (intellectually/rationally impenetrable) causes or explanations in their capacity as natural philosophers, — busycuttingcrap
or deliberately misread — 180 Proof
Certainly, they weren't scientists or atheists in the ordinary, contemporary sense of these words, but they were important in the eventual development of these things (and so hence the characterization as "proto-science"). — busycuttingcrap
this development of breaking away from understanding the world primarily in religious terms — busycuttingcrap
The gods were as natural to the Greeks as what we currently call natural, in my view. But who exactly fo you have in mind? Democritus? Thales? Parmenides? — Mikie
The range of Presocratic thought shows that the first philosophers were not merely physicists (although they were certainly that). Their interests extended to religious and ethical thought, the nature of perception and understanding, mathematics, meteorology, the nature of explanation, and the roles of matter, form, causal mechanisms, and structure in the world. Almost all the Presocratics seemed to have something to say about embryology, and fragments of Diogenes and Empedocles show a keen interest in the structures of the body; the overlap between ancient philosophy and ancient medicine is of growing interest to scholars of early Greek thought (Longrigg 1963, van der Eijk 2008). Recent discoveries, such as the Derveni Papyrus, show that interest in and knowledge of the early philosophers was not necessarily limited to a small audience of rationalistic intellectuals. They passed on many of what later became the basic concerns of philosophy to Plato and Aristotle, and ultimately to the whole tradition of Western philosophical thought.
Sure, there's some truth to that, but like I said, the difference was that they weren't invoking gods or spirits as causes for natural phenomena for the most part. — busycuttingcrap
They were important in the development of nearly everything in the West. Including Christianity. Should we call them proto-Christians? (Many have made that claim too.) — Mikie
I think the understanding of the world changed. I don’t think the characterization of going from “religious terms” (here apparently equated with superstitions on par with Santa Claus) to naturalistic ones (and hence proto-science) is accurate. I think that’s a story that’s been perpetuated without evidence, and gone mostly unquestioned. — Mikie
since I'm not patient enough to spoon feed you anymore that I already have. — 180 Proof
stop whining dogmatically — 180 Proof
That Apollo pulls the sun on his chariot or Eros causes desire through arrows isn’t really what was abandoned. Mostly because it never really existed in the sense we think— but even if it did, these “supernatural” phenomena continued on well after Thales. — Mikie
Every generalization*1 is imaginary -- including "Energy", as the invisible*2 cause of all physical effects -- because it is not an empirical observation, but a rationalization (abstraction) from many specific instances to a single holistic conceptualization*3. You won't find any wild Abstractions in the Natural world, because they are denizens of the philosophical Mind -- which is not a tangible thing, but an abstract concept.I believe your arch foe is William of Occam; metaphysics was always a bit superfluous.
What if I told you that Enformy is a phantasm, an illusion like e.g. the Wagon Wheel effect? How would you respond? — Agent Smith
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