Millennie Al wrote: ↑Thu Apr 22, 2021 2:44 am
The earnestness is not in question, but reality cares only about results - not thinge like earnestness or effort.
Reality doesn't give a damn about anything because it's not sentient, look at who's anthropomorphising now... but seriously, I felt I needed to make that point because somebody, maybe even you, earlier on said that religion doesn't care about the truth or something similar. So earnestness is important if we want to evaluate people's
actions, of course not if it's about the results.
Millennie Al wrote: ↑Thu Apr 22, 2021 2:44 am
When some other community can cure lots of ailments, build a Channel tunnel, send satellites into space, invent mobile phones, and all the other things we do, then we can examine arguments over whether which community is more right. IFor a community lacking in such obvious and large scale effects in the real world, we can indeed dismiss their methods as laughable or obviously deficient just as we do for homeopathy.
Again, I never said these things aren't important in our decision making on what to believe and what not, I do feel you're sometimes arguing against a caricature that you made up, not what I said. I said science has figured out ways of getting at the truth better than other or previous attempts, hence channel tunnels, but we got to this point only by 400+ years of piecemeal improvements in how science is done; if it was easy we would have had mobile phones much earlier. As for other communities now, if they dismiss obvious scientific results I also think they are plain wrong (as to laughable, maybe, but laughing is not a good communication strategy, so I'd avoid that). If you read my posts I thought I'd been clear about that, but maybe not. However there are plenty of things religions believe that don't contradict any science (like resurrection as a one-off miracle, this is not something we can put to an experiment), which I, like you, may think are unlikely, but there's no point being an arse about it either. And as to how we evaluate whether this sort of thing is likely depends on our background assumptions (or priors if you will), so it's not necessarily laughable.
Millennie Al wrote: ↑Thu Apr 22, 2021 2:44 am
The difference is that if you see something with your eyes, I can also see it with mine, whereas if you have a vision I cannot share in it. [...]
How do we know that there is no privileged observer effect in eyesight? How did we know visions are not shared? How did we even figure out that all these things are important distinctions? As I'm scared I'll be misread again, I'm not saying this isn't the case, but there are plenty of assumptions you are making that are reasonable now, but needed to be reasoned out first, and that process wasn't easy or straightforward. You're still judging this from a position of hindsight.
I'm not sure why you wrote an essay about how the temperature problem can be solved, it obviously
was solved, only it took 200 years rather than 2 days because it's a more vexed problem than you give it credit for. Bigger minds than you or I have failed to find a quick resolution for it. If you're interested I can really only recommend Chang's book, he went through archives, personal correspondence, read 200 year old journal articles and even recreated experiments.
Millennie Al wrote: ↑Thu Apr 22, 2021 3:02 am
Yes, up to a point.
Hooray, we agree on something! I did not argue that the suppression was justified.
Millennie Al wrote: ↑Thu Apr 22, 2021 3:02 am
But the critical factor which makes me condemn the Church is that they wer not interested in finding out the truth.
Ah there we are, it was you... well you see, I don't think it's reasonable to conclude that - the suppression was clearly bad and misguided, but we can't conclude from that that they were uninterested in the truth - rather they thought they were defending it, however unreasonable that defence was. Not that I think we can't condemn them for being unreasonable, as you write, so we only partially disagree here. But also it's not that they ignored the evidence from telescopes, it's that they didn't trust the evidence from telescopes, and wanted to see some evidence that the telescope really does portray what Galileo claimed they portray. It's possible that Galileo saw artifacts that resulted from the telescope itself, rather than real things out there. In order to really adjudicate on this, we'd need a further developed theory of optics and sh.t that just wasn't available at the time (now Galileo had, with hindsight maybe, the better arguments on this, I agree, because he could point the instrument to a church tower to demonstrate that it really does enlarge rather than invent things, but the debate revolved around whether objects on earth really do compare to objects in the heavens, and on this point the at the time firmly established Aristotelian physics claimed they can't. Since Galileo went against established knowledge, he had the higher burden of proof, in modern parlance). Again, it was not so much a church vs Galileo thing, but more a one set of scientists against another set of scientists, where the church just happened to take a particular side (and then of course unreasonably stuck to it for far too long).
This may be a bit of a tangent, but this thread is already far off anyway. The Aristotelian/Ptolemaic system was, as I already wrote, on the face of it quite incompatible with scripture, and the church for the whole of the middle ages was absolutely fine with it. In fact, they canonised scholars, like Aquinas, who popularised it and wrote long tracts on how scientific (as it was then) knowledge can be accommodated with scripture. Why did things work out differently this time round? Most likely this was at least partly a consequence of the different social and political position the Church was in at the time, with the reformation raging in Europe at the time and the Turks threatening to overrun the Balkans and god knows where they'd stop. Catholicism was in a very precarious position and we only know with hindsight that they managed to hold on and thrive. As we know with almost all petty nationalism, in times of threat we retreat into dogmatism; the Tory flag waving and Churchill worshipping for example is a sure sign that all is not well in Britain. Added to that the church did in fact go to great lengths (considering their circumstances) to accommodate Galileo as a scientific contribution and differentiate it from the doctrinal - it was Galileo's refusal to take this olive branch that led to the trial. Maffeo Barberini, or pope Urban VIII, was in his pre-pope days a friend and supporter of Galileo so there was an element of personal betrayal involved, particularly when Galileo presented his opponent's views through an intentionally dumb character called "Simplicius" in his
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.