emotional

Bravo, Blu! Continue this way into pantheism, which with luck you'll blend together with the worldview that nature is all there is, and you will have become a fully-fledged atheist like most of the infidels are! Keep going!

lpetrich

I think that geocentrism is a fairly reasonable starting position if one is starting to investigate the Universe -- note the "starting" part.

However, as one's knowledge expands, that assessment has had to be revised. Here's an approximate history:

Sometime around 2300 years ago, Aristarchus of Samos worked out how to measure the sizes of the Moon and the Sun relative to the Earth's size with the help of geometry and eclipses, and he found that the Sun was much larger than the Earth. He also concluded that the Earth moves around the Sun, perhaps for that reason.

However, that conclusion seemed counter to common sense, and there was no sign of the expected stellar parallaxes. And the Stoic philosopher Cleanthes fulminated that Aristarchus ought to be tried for impiety.

Ptolemy, in his summation of astronomy, accounted for the planets' departures from perfect circular motion with epicycles -- circles upon circles. Later astronomers were forced to multiply these epicycles to fit, and in the early 1500's, a certain Nicolaus Copernicus revived heliocentrism and found that not nearly as many epicycles were needed to get a good fit.

Despite his book containing a disclaimer that it was only a speculative hypothesis, the theologians reacted in Cleanthes-like fashion. Both Catholic and Protestant theologians agreed that heliocentrism was contrary to the Bible; as Martin Luther pointed out, Joshua told the Sun to stop moving rather than the Earth, and as John Calvin pointed out, the Bible states that the Earth is stationary and unmovable.

However, the Church did not object much more than that for almost 70 years; in the early 1600's, Galileo started making observations with his telescope, and started seeing lots of interesting things. The Moon had mountains, Venus had phases, Jupiter had moons, Saturn had ... something, and the Sun had spots. Venus's had the phases expected of an object that moved around the Sun, and Galileo became a convert to heliocentrism.

However, he had the habit of making sarcastic comments about his critics, something that did not make him many friends. And some of the enemies he made were in the Vatican, and he was forced to recant. And the Church decreed that heliocentrism was a no-no. However, Protestants had less powerful churches in their lands, which meant that the theologians were less trouble.

Sir Isaac Newton capped off the Copernican revolution with Newtonian mechanics and his Law of Gravity; it was then possible to calculate how much the planets and their satellites perturbed each others' orbits -- and do so with great success. Einsteinian mechanics, despie some important differences, is essentially a superset of Newtonian mechanics.

Galileo's planetary discoveries have only been expanded on by spacecraft sent to the rest of the Solar System -- the Earth is not fundamentally different from the other Solar System objects.

Moving on beyond the Solar System, we find lots and lots of stars. And very little that's distinctive about the Sun -- it's one of several billion stars which live in a disk-shaped region of stars and interstellar gas. The center of that disk is also the center of the distribution of globular clusters, many of which are far away from that disk. But the Sun is far away from that center, being at more than half the disk's radius.

Examining certain "nebulae", we find that they are giant collections of stars much like the Milky Way, which is why they've been named galaxies. And the MW is a rather typical sort of spiral galaxy.

Galaxies are organized into clusters and superclusters, but the Universe is effectively homogeneous beyond a certain length scale (about 1 gigaparsec). And there is nothing special about the distribution of galaxies around the MW.

Fortunately, since Galileo, the theologians have not tried to get in scientists' way, other than to try to claim credit for the Big Bang.

In summary:

We live on a planet that is not fundamentally different from the other planets, though it does have some distinctive features, like Plate Tectonics.

This planet orbits the Sun, like all the others; the Sun does not orbit it.

The Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, alongside billions of other stars -- stars that the Sun does not stand out from.

And the Milky Way is does not stand out from other galaxies, and it does not appear specially placed.

whouprog

Getting back to the original topic, I always liked Vonnegut's take on this question in The Sirens of Titan . . . The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, if I remember correctly. The whole religion was built around the idea that to presume that God actually gives a rat's about anything that happens on this insignificant little speck of etc. etc. was in fact the worst imaginable blasphemy, and their rituals were sort of Catholicized humiliation-game show stuff (its been awhile since I last read the book) intended to demonstrate the futility of expecting otherwise.

Another interesting perspective: says Hank Parnell, whose <a href="http://www.thetexasmercury.com/articles/parnell/HP20020217a.html" target="_blank">article</a> is well worth reading even if you take issue with some of his points.

Edited for spelling and to note that lpetrich's excellent post wasn't there when I sent mine.

[ March 04, 2002: Message edited by: whouprog ]</p>

Amos

Nice post Ipetrich and if we could only look at myth as myth there would be no confusion at all. If anyone is to blame for this confusion it is the mythmakers who tied the myth to the physical universe which has everybody looking up towards to the sky and back into history for evidence. That, I think, was really a nasty thing to do. But hey, it worked and in the end that is what counts. The problem we have is that we should not be killing each other because we understand it wrong.

My point here was that before we deny that God created the Universe we must be careful and first understand the concept God, what we mean by the Universe, and we must also know what creation entails. So if we see a tree and I say that God created that tree I should add that more than God was needed for that tree to be there. However, it still is true that God created the essence of that particular tree.

Thanks for your exposition.

lpetrich

Maybe I was being a bit too hard on Amos earlier. But there are parts of the Bible that are best viewed as mythology and allegory rather than literal history.

Dr. Isaac Asimov once wrote an essay, "Lost in Non-Translation" about this theme, discussing certain parts of the Bible.

The Book of Ruth was an effort to demonstrate that Moabites were not absolutely wicked, presenting an ancestor of King David as a Moabite.

The Book of Jonah was an effort to demonstrate that even wicked people like Assyrians are not beyond redemption, and that they should not all be written off. Getting the Assyrians to repent of their sins is mentioned nowhere else in the Bible, and nowhere in Assyrian records, despite it being an obvious triumph. Dr. A made the analogy of a Jew going to Berlin in the 1930's to get Germany's leaders to repent.

All the discussion of the sea monster that had swallowed Jonah is essentially beside the point; I call it a "sea monster" because that is a convenient, noncommittal term for it, and it is not described in any detail.

And in the New Testament, the story of the Good Samaritan has the same sort of message, that Samaritans were not absolutely wicked. This was because the Samaritans were viewed as heretics by the other Jews, because they recognized only part of the Bible that the rest of the Jewish community had done.

lpetrich

I think that the case of Galileo is worth a bit more comment. He had considered himself a good Catholic, and his views on science and religion were a form of Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA) that is nowadays common among non-Fundies; "The Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go," or some variant. But the Church at the time had a more fundamentalist view, though it strongly rejected heliocentrism only after Galileo had gotten Pope Urban VIII's goat.

Galileo had made lots of cruel comments about his critics. About someone who had recently died, he commented that that fellow will get to see all the extra heavenly bodies on his way to Heaven. When someone dismissed Jupiter's moons as telescope artifacts, Galileo offered a big reward for a telescope that only makes such artifacts around Jupiter. And when someone claimed that there was some invisible material that fills the Moon's valleys, making it spherical, Galileo commented that such a material could also form mountains ten times the size of those that he saw.

After Pope Urban VIII said that it was OK for Galileo to write about heliocentrism as long as it was presented as "just a theory", Galileo published a dialogue between a heliocentrist and a geocentrist in which the geocentrist was made to look silly. That Pope felt very wronged by that, and forced him to recant heliocentrism.

TheBewilderedHerd

Look at myth as myth, there would be no confusion... you display the very essence of confusion with that sentence, as well as the rest of your post, which I will dissect in the following.
(1) Blame the mythmakers for attaching god to evidence? First, why BLAME anyone? Doesn’t it seem logical for people to question and look for evidence in order to prove/disprove the existence thereof? Of course evidence needs to be present or else what would anyone's beliefs be based on? If I told you there was an invisible pink unicorn hovering in my backyard, you could not see it, you would just need to believe me that its there; don’t ask for proof, don’t try to attach the pink unicorn to anything physical, do not look for evidence. Simply believe like a blind goat.
(2) A NASTY thing to do? I recommend an alternate choice of diction. What is so nasty about finding proof for ideological beliefs? Isn’t it rather nasty when people DONT look for evidence when it comes to religion and god? After all, belief in god does alter people's entire lifestyle in every aspect imaginable: ignorance, denial, xenophobia, ignorance, hate, closed-mindedness, and ignorance. It worked out in the end and that’s what counts? ... Do you think before you type?
(3) Ohhh! Okay, so we shouldn’t be killing each other because we understand it (myths) wrong? Logically, in order to understand something correctly, some kind of an examination would have to be held as to understand myths better. That is the very opposite of what you are trying to point out through your blurred emotion-based "logic," yet that is the center of your confusion and contradiction (a concept abundant throughout any religion and it's texts).
(4) We must be careful? Or else god will smite us with his fist? (God will "smite the heathen" with a plague. Zechariah 14:18) should we be careful that our religious ideology would actually be challenged? Should we be careful that we might actually learn something? That we might find evidence, or the LACK thereof? dont be frightened of the thought, it is the path to free thought (uninhibited by indoctrination or community) and open-mindedness.
(5) Very witty of you to mention creation, the anti-thesis of logic and evidence. Your statement follows the theme of your mindset, proclaiming that there is no evidence for the creation of the universe (I am sure you will argue there is plenty of evidence in your bible, a myth I might address later), yet why take the easy way out, simply stop asking questions, stop looking for evidence and say god created the earth, the universe, period. A simplistic, Neanderthal-like approach.
(6) More than god for the creation of a tree? Be careful, you are going against many absent-minded followers of god, your peers. Moreover, be careful not to actually trace the tree's existence to millions of years of evolution, since that might offend your "don’t question" mentality and will only give you a hissy fit.
So its "still true" that god created the essence of the tree? We’ll I’ll be damned! Thanks for sliding your misguided erroneous emotion-driven attempt at a formula into the message boards! Welcome to real life, here is how things work: a+b=c. if anywhere in that formula you substitute an unproven theory, be CAREFUL, the outcome will be utterly wrong.
(7) How kind of you to thank Ipetrich in such a condescending manner. Do you have all of the answers to any possible questions, therefore making everyone else’s opinions simply weightless comments? Be mindful while contaminating the air with your mindless baseless babble, especially when the person you are attempting to degrade actually has some meaningful and thought out things to say.
Hopefully this post will be used to help clear up certain issues and fallacies presented in religion, yet to some people, this post was made in vain: [9] Speak not in the ears of a fool: for he will despise the wisdom of thy words. (Prov.23)

<img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

Amos

So now why do you insist that some parts are not myth or allegory.

The book of Jonah is all myth and the Assyrians may have been used to demonstrate this (if you say so) but the entire book is a living legend and has nothing to do with a whale, or water, or a boat or anything like that.

Each and every Christian must recognize the sign of Jonah in his or her own life as the tumultuous emotions of the salvation event because it is the only sign that will be given. If the sign is not recognized salvation did not come about. It is as simple as that. The sign of Jonah just describes a journey that takes place in the mind of the undergoer of the event.

Amos

Thanks for the effort (I am somewhat familar with the argument), but from my perspective the Church always knew that the earth was not the physical center of the universe but since in metaphysics (reality) we are the centre of the universe their teachings must be along that line because when Realization occurs and we become the centre of the Universe they can not afford to be wrong because that would shake their entire claim to truth.

Amos

Thanks and welcome TheBewilderedHerd. Are you trying to tell me something or is this just your grand introduction?