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The Bible and its fallacies and contradictions
#29
RE: The Bible and its fallacies and contradictions
(May 27, 2010 at 3:04 pm)fr0d0 Wrote: If anything Arcanus seems to always go further. I'm surprised that you sum up Arcanus's output as 'pretty bad'. Have you had discussions with him before?

No. I've just read some of what he's written on the Aristophrenium site. Example of what I mean by 'pretty bad':

In a recent article that tavarish critiqued, he claimed that christianity is to science like a battery is to a flashlight. He went on to say that post-Darwin, the link between flashlight and battery had been broken. This, he claimed, was a bad thing for science.

For starters, this is an incredibly misleading metaphor. If you take the battery out of a flashlight, the flashlight simply stops working. But since Darwin, science has gone from strength to strength. The loss of the 'battery' has had no apparent effect at all on the working of the 'flashlight'.

There is also a bit of historical revisionism here that borders on the grotesque. We Europeans are the heirs to 2 major cultural traditions- the Judaeo-Christian and the Classical. Science is very much part of the latter heritage, not the former. Mathematics, which underpins all of Science (and perhaps constitutes the real battery for the scientific flashlight), is a discipline that was developed by the Greeks (Pythagoras, Euclid etc). Modern Science also has as its precursor the work of the hellenistic scientists; to what extent the scientific revolution of the 15-17th centuries drew on hellenistic work is a matter of historical debate. And philosophically, the dominant influence on the renaissance scientists was Aristotle.

There is also at least one glaring inconsistency in the same article. Arcanus states that science is not a worldview- its a set of tools for investigating the world. This is generally accepted, and imo very sound. But then he goes on to say that science makes certain metaphysical assumptions.

Now if those assumptions really were metaphysical, rather than just working assumptions based on repeated observations, then that would make science a sort of worldview. Which, as he says himself, it isn't. As a matter of historical record, the fundamental assumptions of science have been repeatedly revised. For example:
Darwin: immutable species -> mutable species
Einstein: linear time -> space-time
Quantum Mechanics: everything has a deterministic cause ('clockwork universe) -> microphysical events are not determinant
Interestingly enough, the assumption of uniformity is now being questioned; there is some evidence that the value of g may have varied in the past.
All of which points towards the obvious: there are no metaphysical assumptions with science, just working assumptions based on observation.

So the article is a load of tosh, based on misleading metaphor, falsified history and philosophical confusion. Am I supposed to find that impressive?
He who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.
Mikhail Bakunin

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything
Friedrich Nietzsche
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Messages In This Thread
RE: The Bible and its fallacies and contradictions - by Caecilian - May 27, 2010 at 4:37 pm

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