On 22 Jan 2017, at 03:05, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 1/21/2017 5:33 PM, John Clark wrote:
I respect Greek mathematics but Greek physics was a joke, a very
bad joke that was held as dogma and kept physics from advancing
for nearly two thousand years. And NOTHING comes from Greek
theology or anybody else's theology either for that matter.
You shouldn't be so hard on Greek physics. It's Aristotle and
Plato's "physics" writings that happened to survive and could be
interpreted as compatible with Christianity got adopted by the early
Church. The school of Thales of Miletus was much better. His
followers had a lot of good ideas, and what's more they made
measurements and observations:
Anaximander speculated that lightning came, not from Zeus, but from
the collision of clouds. He made a map of the world. Anaximander
had a kind of evolutionary theory of the origin of life and of
mankind. He maintained that all dying things are returning to the
element from which they came. Pythagoras proved that the Earth was
a spehere by noting that only a sphere could cast a circular shadow
on the Moon for all alignments of the Sun, Earth, and Moon.
Aristarchus of Samos put the Sun at the center of the solar system.
He estimated the distance to the Sun and correctly inferred the
order of the known planets. He speculated that the stars were other
suns that were very far away. Democritus thought that the world
consisted of atoms and the void, empty space in which the atoms fall
down, but they didn't fall in perfectly straight lines – because
then they would never interact. He supposed that they “swerved”
slightly at random so they interacted. They had hooks and loops so
that they could form combinations and it was different combinations
that account for the variety we see around us. Eratosthenes of
Cyrene, a mathematician, geographer, poet, astronomer, and music
theorist. He was a man of learning, becoming the chief librarian at
the Library of Alexandria. He invented the discipline of geography,
including the terminology used today. He introduced the use of
parallels and meridians on maps. He's best known as the first
person to measure the size of the Earth and the tilt of the axis of
the Earth both to remarkable accuracy.
If these Greeks had their ideas promulgated by the Church, instead
of Aristotle and Plato's, physics would be 900yrs further advanced
now.
careful to say Aristotle and Plato, as on theology they are quite
opposite, and in theology, the early Jews (and Cabbala) like later the
early muslims around the alevi, bektashi, and around soufism, will
adopt Plato, or be very open to it.
But you are right, greeks were good in science, and very often some
best one are obscured by other best one. Sometimes we keep the entire
work, like with Plotinus, but sometimes we lost the entire work, and
get summary made by others, like with Moderatus of Gades.
The shame is just that theology, the scientific field, is still not
back at the academy of science. Theology is just the fundamental
science by definition, and its main vocation is to refute all positive
theologies, but then there has been a miracle: the existence of the
universal machine, which does explains anything, but she too, can
already refute any normative theory which other machine could try to do.
I might be OK with you about physics being 900years further advanced,
but the question is: in which theology.Still in Aristotle one, or in
Plato one? The idea that physics is the fundamental science come from
Aristotle (despite nuances can be made here 'course). With Plato, the
necessity of an ontological commitment for a Physical Reality is
questionned.
Bruno
Brent
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