[Serious] Criticism of Aquinas' First Way or of the Proof of God from Motion.

[The Grand Nudger]

He very much was, ofc.  People like to hem and haw about how other people were doing other science - but the thing of utmost importance to the church, with respect to science, was that it be subservient.  That it refrain from saying things even when everyone and their brother already knew them, until the church had spun some hilarious way to declare that they had always been at war with eastasia.  It wasn't that the things he said were cutting edge. What was controversial, was that he dare utter those things they already privately knew but bilked the mob over nevertheless.

Go crawl back up the ass of a church.

[Peebothuhlu]

At work.

*Reads BellAqua's post*

*Reads post again...... A lot slower..... Carefully parsing the words.....*


(0_o) What, the actual, fek?

[Belacqua]

At work.

 *Reads BellAqua's post*

 *Reads post again...... A lot slower..... Carefully parsing the words.....*


   (0_o)    What, the actual, fek?

What specifically lacked actual fek?

[Peebothuhlu]

At work.

My mind is still so full of fek at the moment I fear I'll need a longer time between shifts to set things into coherant words.

[vulcanlogician]

I don't think anybody here is arguing that Galileo deserved punishment.

I just want to be clear about what he was punished for. He wasn't punished for doing science. 

It just occurred to me that he was a forerunner of Krauss, Dawkins, etc., in that he thought that his knowledge of science also made him qualified to pass judgment on non-science topics. In those days talking out of your field could bring censure, while these days it gets you a book contract.

What made him "not qualified to pass judgment"? Who IS qualified to make such judgments while others are not?

I think he was punished for doing science. It's just that it's not as simple as that. There were other aspects of Galileo's work and character with which the church took issue.

I like how you offer counterpoints that defend the Church concerning specific issues. But I disagree with you here. Maybe I'm not clear what your position is.

---

We owe an enormous debt to the Greeks for laying the groundwork for math and science as we know them today. These things didn't appear out of thin air in the 1700s. True, ancient postulates are ill-informed compared to modern scientific theories... but there is a reason so many of the scientific terms we use today are Greek words.

And Belaqua made an excellent point. Some of the ancients were way smarter than we take them to be. I used to think of ancients like ignorant children who hadn't discovered science yet. Then I read some of what they wrote and learned that I was the ignorant child.

Humans have been as 'smart' as they are now since Homo sapiens sapiens appeared on the scene. The difference is how and how fast we have accumulated knowledge.

The ancient Greek philosophers were incredibly smart people. They were attempting to understand the universe around them using limited tools and were the first to make a concerted effort to do so across several areas of knowledge.

But the concepts they used are NOT the modern concepts. For example, the notions of causality used by Aristotle are very different than what we would label 'causes' today. For example, the formal cause is not at all something most people today would call a cause at all.

Also, the notion of movement was much, much more general. ANY change was seen as being a movement, not just a change of position in space. So, a chameleon changing colors would have been considered a type of movement.

But, being the first to investigate a subject means that it is likely you will be wrong in many, even most, of your conclusions. That doesn't make you stupid. It simply means you are un-informed or ill-informed. And that is almost inevitable at the beginning of any study.

So, Aristotle was wrong in many, many ways. That doesn't make him stupid. it just makes him wrong. But making the first attempt was a crucial step.

I have always been impressed how Lucretius used the way dust moves in a beam of sunlight to argue for the existence of atoms. His argument was in many ways similar to the much later use of Brownian motion to show atoms exist.

I pretty much agree with all that. And I'm also pretty impressed with Lucretius's proto-discovery of Brownian motion.

I do think the Greeks gave us a foundation for knowledge that we still use today. And it's worthwhile to examine how they discovered this foundation. From Thales onward...

Theists like to abuse the Aristotelian perspective, because it grants them just enough obscurity to advance their claims. I don't condone this. But, at the same time, Aristotle's perspective is worth studying. Even moderners can learn a great deal from him (despite his wrongness).

[Belacqua]

What made him "not qualified to pass judgment"? Who IS qualified to make such judgments while others are not?

Obviously modern people who don't believe theological arguments think that no one is qualified, or that everyone can make up his own mind. 

In most fields, people are considered qualified if they know what they're talking about. Every field has gatekeepers, for better or worse. In Galileo's time theological issues were decided by a committee of people who were considered experts, and amateur opinions were weighed and judged by these experts. 

In the case of modern scientists, like Krauss, Sagan, Tyson, Hawking, etc., we see them writing confidently about history or philosophy and displaying that they aren't qualified because what they say is silly. Krauss's chapter on philosophy is laughable, and Sagan made numerous errors of fact when he tried to talk about history. So they demonstrate they are not qualified because they show they don't know what they're talking about. Just because science is considered the modern arbiter of truth doesn't mean they can make shit up in other fields.  

I think he was punished for doing science. It's just that it's not as simple as that. There were other aspects of Galileo's work and character with which the church took issue. 

Granted, it's not simple. If he had published all his theories and observations as theory or thought experiments, with no reference to how this affected Bible interpretation, he probably would have avoided trouble. Pope Urban had been a friend and supporter and was willing to listen to reason, until Galileo's public challenges made this impolitic. From our modern point of view of course he should not have had to worry about politics -- science should be pure! -- but every era has its authorities which it is not wise to provoke. 

Let's put it this way: he could have done his science if he had done so in a more diplomatic way. This might have entailed more disclaimers or pretending that he was just thinking out loud. I agree that scientists shouldn't have to be skilled at diplomacy, but to get an audience and a hearing, they have to know the ropes, then and now. A modern scientist who insulted the people who employ and fund him might find himself out of a job fairly fast. Modern science depends on for-profit journals and funding from corporations and the Pentagon. These people may be better gatekeepers than the Vatican, but they show that science is not and never has been pure.

There's a historian called Jeffrey Kripal who does research on unexplained or mystical phenomena, and how these have affected religion. He describes how apparently similar phenomena appear through history but get explained differently depending on the time and place. So a fast-moving ball of light might be called an angel in one culture and a UFO in another, but such things occur with some regularity throughout history. Visits from recently dead people and good advice from strange visitors seem to be surprisingly consistent things through history. He is carefully agnostic on saying what causes these things, whether they are hallucinations to which we are prone, or any other theory of origin. 

As he has published on these things, and given lectures at different universities, he says that he has been contacted by hundreds and hundreds of people who have similar experiences but keep them quiet. He is an academic who writes academic books, so he is hearing from other educated people, including STEM people who are skeptics and atheists. In some cases hard scientific research has begun due to personal mystical inspiration. He says that although these experiences are surprisingly common, nearly everyone keeps them private because they know that speaking up about them would be rejected by the professional consensus. In other words, science is self-censoring due to a fear of straying from the majority view of what MUST be true. There are no professional inquisitors, but there is a real chance of losing your credibility and your job. 

Anyway, I should have known better than to bring up Galileo because such discussions always end the same way. He is FAR too important as an ideological symbol and martyr for us to expect a careful assessment of history on a forum like this one.

[Angrboda]

I'm not familiar enough with the Galileo controversy to say, but it sounds more like the theologists, and the bible, were opining outside their areas of expertise in making contrary assertions about the world and scientific fact than that Galileo was opining outside his area. If the bible makes claims that are subject to science, it's the bible and theologians that are outside their bailiwick.

[Deesse23]

It was already known and accepted by experts* at the time that Galileo was correct. What pissed the churhc off was not that Galileo claimed the Sun being in the center of our solar system, but quite publicly adressign it, foring the papacy to comment.
It was not about knowledge, methods how to gain it, science or religion, it was all about authority. Galileo publicy undermined the authority of the papacy/church. This could not be tolerated!

What Belaqua posted....meh, mostly irrelevant and strawmen. His usual modus operandi. Boooring



* Those experts were mostly part of the clergy, since mostly clergy had the ability to get some advanced education back then.

[The Grand Nudger]

I'm not familiar enough with the Galileo controversy to say, but it sounds more like the theologists, and the bible, were opining outside their areas of expertise in making contrary assertions about the world and scientific fact than that Galileo was opining outside his area.  If the bible makes claims that are subject to science, it's the bible and theologians that are outside their bailiwick.

-and that, right there, was what the church took issue with.  Not just with galileo, with anyone.  They had interpreted passages of magic book to mean so and so and such and such testable claims, and they declared it taboo and heresy to say that the world was otherwise.  Not otherwise than some specific thing, but otherwise than whatever they happened to be saying at the time. End of.

[Nay_Sayer]

This is my point. That co worker was trying to claim that Aquinus had modern knowledge bact then. 

"Metaphisical" is a fucking bullshit superstitious word. It is nothing more than retrofiting after the fact.

Metaphisical isn't even a word.

Metamorpho, however, Is a great Batman villian.