On 10/18/2018 6:16 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 16 Oct 2018, at 03:50, Brent Meeker <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 10/15/2018 6:22 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 11 Oct 2018, at 19:26, John Clark <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Thu, Oct 11, 2018 at 12:15 PM Bruno Marchal <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>You can't do metaphysics with a scientific attitude, if you
could it wouldn't be metaphysics, it would just be
physics.Metaphysics means unscientific speculation about
physics.
/>That is why I prefer the term theology./
That's pretty silly, metaphysics is a vastly better word to use in
philosophical speculation. Both metaphysics and theology are
unscientific but theology necessarily implies God while metaphysics
doesn't.
That is an opinion of radical pseudo-religious people. There is no
scientific domain. There is only a scientific attitude, and this can
be applied in any domain.
The separation of religion from science is an invention by people
wanting to use religion to control people, and steal their money.
That's silly. Religion existed long before science was developed.
Religion was invented, and believed, by people who wanted to
understand and control their fate in the world. They understood
other people who had desires and motives and got angry and loved and
hated, so they inferred that the weather and seas and the volcano
were agents like people only bigger and more powerful. So they
sought to propitiate these gods and demons by offering them what was
precious; including the lives of their children. Shamans, priests,
and kings took advantage of this by pretending to be intermediaries
to the gods and experts in their propitiation. They invented prayers
and rituals and sacrifices.
The "separation" of science from religion was the invention of science
Not at all. Science is born with Plato,
No. Science was born with Thales of Miletus. The pre-Socratics were
limited by their technology, so they didn't experimentally test their
theories of the elements. But they did make measurements related to
astronomy and estimated the size of the Earth, the distance to the Sun
and Moon. They appreciated that the senses could be deceived and
Democritus warned that observation is uncertain and must be evaluated by
reason. Plato went even further. In his parable of the cave he taught
that perception was only of the shadow of reality. Reality was in the
realm of ideas and could only be grasped by the mind. This devaluing of
experience and more mystical approach to reality was congenial to
Christianity. The Church fathers, Augustine and Aquinas, merged the
ideas of Plato and Aristotle into theology. So ecclesiastical
education included the physics of Aristotle. The writings of the
pre-Socratics were not so congenial and were generally not preserved.
This and other factors caused a long pause in the advancement of science
after the fall of the Roman Empire. A pause we now call The Dark Ages.
who understood that for having a fundamental science, we must believe
in a reality, and that this need an act of faith. That reality is GOD,
the object of religion.
Exactly "the object of religion" which bases belief on faith; the
opposite of science which renounces faith as a basis knowledge.
Of course, the popular religion did have all sort of Gods, from
turtles all the way down, to very personalised sort of reality. Now,
when religion is done with the scientific attitude, which is what
Plato did, it is named theology, and for one millenium it was a
science. The Reality was mainly either Nature, or something else which
would be deeper and non natural (“supernatural”). Plato called it the
“world of ideas” (the Noùs). Plato’s world of idea was inspired by
Pythagorus who taught it as being “only number”.
Yes, ideas they believed on faith. Did they test their ideas? Did they
ever have a theory they tested and found to be false?
That theology has progressed and gave birth to Mathematics, which was
seen as the alternative of physics.
It was never "an alternative". It started as geometry...the measurement
of the Earth, now a branch of physics. And counting, which was just a
matter of enumerating similar objects, like sheep.
The (Neo)pythagorean and the (Neo)platonist will pursue that line
where the doubt was about the fundamental nature of reality was
immaterial/mathematical. You might read Plotinus' ennead “On number”,
to see how Plotinus foresaw Cantor, and the machine’s discourse. The
term “mathematician” was used at that time to mean “rationalist
sceptics about the fundamental nature of the physical reality”/ The
original doubt was between mathematics and physics as fundamental
science. Aristotle will side with Plato on this, but his interest in
Nature will make him to influence people to opt the idea that physics
might be directly about reality.
For example, in the year 400 Hypatia was teaching both the Mathematics
of Diophantus, and the theology of Plotinus. That was very common.
Are we supposed to take these early thinkers as definitive? I'm with
JKC on this. We've come a long way since Plotinus and his mystic
opinions are about as useful Grog the caveman's.
But, the christians will separated into intellectual, disputing if
Plato or Aristotle were right, and integrist or radicals which will
use religion to get power, and the history is that, despite Constantin
(Roman emperor converted to Christianity) was rather close to the
platonist intellectual, eventually the radicals will get the power.
After 529, when the emperor Justinian did close Plato’s Academy, the
Church will, by its action separate theology (the fundamental science
of the greek /per/ /definition/) from science.The result is that
science will be associated more and more with Aristotle: that is: the
belief in physical primary universe. Science itself became a
psedo-religion, with a sort of dogma: Matter, and this up to the point
that today, most people have completely forget that the original
debate was never on the existence of the ONE (god) but on the
existence of a primary (“physicalist”) Nature.
By separating religion-theology from science, religion will keep the
popular superstition, and buried a millenium of science.
Theology/religion will become more and more an instrument of politics
(of the non democratic kind, of course).
The first attempt to separate religion from the state and politics,
cale from religious people wanting to save religion/theology from
politics (not for saving politics from religion!: that will come later).
You seem to forget that religion went back far before Plato and
Aristotle and the Catholic Church. And it wasn't some scientific search
for truth in Babylon or Egypt. It was always an instrument of social
control, an origin story explaining why/*our */cultural practices we
approved by the universe. You should read Pascal Boyer, Scott Atran,
David Sloan Wilson, or someone who has actually studied religions,
instead of trying transfer a patina of ancient wisdom to your modal logic.
Superstition was just popular, in all sciences before the greeks. A
religion is only a conception of reality, and Plato understood that
the belief in a reality cannot be rational (exactly what the universal
machine explain all by themselves, by <>t -> ~[]<>t (<>t = consistency
= a reality exist, by Gödel’s COMPLETENESS theorem).
The first superstition were on the ONE thing responsible for all the
others, and it became, with Plato, the thing which we need to unify
all sciences. Theology gave quickly birth to mathematics and physics,
seen as alternative. In the 19th century, mathematical logic will born
from a dispute between unionists (mostly mathematicians) and
trinitarians (mostly clergyman, but still intellectual knowing well
Plato, to attack his immaterial and non personal conception of the
fundamental reality).
Todays science is superstitious or dogmatic (or both) in making
physics into the fundamental science,
Bullshit. Nobody, least of all physicist, worries about what science is
fundamental. They just formulate theories and try to test them...by any
means necessary.
despite there has never been a shadow of evidence for primary matter.
And yet physics has succeeded spectacularly in explaining the world.
Which points out that nobody cared what was "primary"; just what worked.
Indeed, we don’t even try to seek such evidences, contrary to the
ancient who tried at least to find one.
The only evidence that there can be for X being primary is that there's
a successful theory of everything and X is the ontology of that theory.
So far there is no theory of everything. Physics is a theory of lots of
stuff, but it's not even clear on what its ontology is...is it particles
or fields, is it strings or quantum loops or is it equations? When
there is some more successful theory, then we can worry about its ontology.
After 529, all those doubting the materialist dogma were banished or
killed. Neoplatonism (scientific theology will still continue up to
1258, where, unfortunately Islam will decide to submit Reason to the
Text (the Quran, then) against Averroes, who defended the idea that
the TEXT must be submitted (interpreted) to Reason (which will
influence the Renaissance).
as a way of knowing what was fact and what was superstition.
Read Plato. They discuss this in deep. Notably to explain that a fact,
as lived as fact, can be dreamed, and thus cannot be a criteria for
any ontology except a dreamer, but then what is that dreamer.
Mystic muddle. Dreams are not experience of facts. That's why they are
called "dreams".
Today at least we have a very good candidate (arithmetic). Church
thesis rehabilitates completely Pythagorus idea that only numbers
exists, and the physical universe is a superstition, unlike the
physical reality, which was the thing to be explained.
Except it doesn't explain anything about the world.
Science was testing beliefs and holding them only provisionally.
Exactly, and that attitude was the base of Plato’s theology, and even
Aristotle theology. To be sure, in his “metaphysics” Aristotle mocks
Plato, and clearly did not understood it, but eventually grasped the
point to conclude in a very platonist way.
So I insist on this: the institutionalisation of superstition has
been the result of the separation of science and theology.
Right. And the institutionalized superstition is religion.
Before this Plato already put the supersitituio away in the most
fundamental science theology. Read all neoplatonist, you will not see
anything supersititious in there.
Neither will I see anything useful there.
Brent
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics,
for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning
concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental
reasoning, concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then
to flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
--- David Hume
Brent
> /Of course I always mean “fundamental science”./
Theology isn't science, fundamental or otherwise.
As I said, I use the term theology in the original sense of those
who coined that term, and explain it. The god of Plato is the truth
that we search.
Theology is the fundamental science for anyone ready to assume that
there is a reality.
Since Gödel, we know that for rational machine, if there is a
reality satisfying their belief, then the proposition “there is a
reality satisfying my belief” makes them inconsistent.
For such machine “I am consistent” and “there isa reality satisfying
my beliefs” are synonymous. What I just alluded too is Gödel
incompleteness theorem: <>t, that is ~[]f is true IFF there is a
model satisfying t (and, as all models satisfy t, this is equivalent
with saying that such a model exist).
/> The original question of the greeks/[.........
Sorry, I didn't hear what you said after that, I fell asleep.
I guess you do that very often. There is no people more deaf than
those who does not want to listen.
But thanks for the collection of evidence that the non-agnostic
atheists are just radical christians in disguise.
Bruno
John K Clark
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