Evolution (Redefined)

[kurto]

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Dr Lienhard a professor of mechanical engineering explains more about the credibility of Newton's apple story.

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Aaah. Then it no doubt accurate. (though some versions have him getting hit on the head... some he just witnesses an apple.)

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Sorry you can't enjoy parallels Kurto.

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I do enjoy parrallels. Didn't you see the parallels I posted? Snow White, American Pie and the Bible all had some interesting parallels.

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I never said it proved anything.

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You seemed to hint at these parallels as being indicative of the divine.

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...though it did raise the question of divine providence in my mind.


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It would appear that everything, no matter how insignificant, reinforces want you want to believe. More indicative of your ability to reinforce you beliefs despite the evidence then anything else.

[Justin A]

Newton wasted much of his professional life on alchemy.

[einbert]

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Scientists haven't necessarily examined the evidence any better than non-scientists.

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They've certainly examined it more, and from a more educated position. I'm talking about the natural world of course. How could you possibly argue otherwise?

If Newton lived today instead of when he did, I very much doubt he would have had the same theistical views. For the same reasons, I don't believe he would have gotten quite so caught up in alchemy.

[tame_deuces]

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Well the funny thing is that it seems everyone makes leaps not just people of faith. The idea of a hypothesis one can argue is a leap that one then tries to prove.

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This is uncommon. Usually you attempt to disprove it, and if you fail to do so you assume the hypothesis to be valid to model your case. Finding proof of a hypothesis is mostly something you would do in a pre-research state (for example by case studies) to try and guess if it is worth your time to test the hypothesis.

Going about finding 'proof' of stuff is largely uninteresting when you come to that stage, finding proof of stuff is easy - just look at the video you linked, its only interest is to show you stuff that verifies it, falsification isn't given a single thought.

Critical thinking, falsification, proper _testing_ of your theory - testing NOT proving, do you see the difference? Not seeing if it can be true, but checking if it can be untrue.

Someone with some veteran status here should really, really write that scientific method FAQ, this is getting silly.

[Metric]

Trivial.

[Subfallen]

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Sorry if you find my questions irritating Tom. I must have a little too much of the Socratic in my nature. I also like to make leaps. Apparently that's something that all kinds of people do.

Imagine if Helen Keller couldn't make a leap in her deaf, dumb and blind mind. She would never have been able to communicate with her teacher.

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There was another German philosopher who exposed the psychology of Kantian "leaps." Let's see, who was that? Nietzsche perhaps?

"Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds." (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans Kaufmann, emphasis mine.)

Braver souls eschew such shallow consolations.

[Splendour]

Was Nietzsche concerned with science when he said this?

quote from the bio cited above:

quote from Paul Johnson's book, The Birth of the Modern:

"The 18th century had failed to solve the problem of how heat, light, magnetism and electrical power fitted into the laws of motion and attraction Isaac Newton had set out in his Principia (1687). But Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and still more in his Metaphisical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), had produced an inspirational insight. He was concerned not so much with science as with God. Was there a duality, of spirit and matter? Newton had been concerned only with matter -- and with the advance of science, this pointed to a materialistic world and led to atheism. Kant wanted to bridge the gulf between spirit and matter and harmonize the physical and moral laws. As he saw it, space and time were purely mental intuitions which made our grasp of external reality possible. The substance of thing-in-itself, Ding an sich, was hidden from human reason -- reality was perceived, rather than led an independent existence. We perceive reality only through the forces, of attraction and repulsion, which work in space. Hence Kant dismissed the dualism of spirit and matter, replacing it by forces. The universe consisted, then, not of matter but of forces. Electricity, magnetism or any other observable effects were governed by laws of attraction and repulsion within a unified theory of forces, all of which were convertible into one another.
"It is doubtful if the physical scientists could have proceeded as fast as they did in the early 19th century without this essentially metaphysical intuition.

[Subfallen]

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Was Nietzsche concerned with science when he said this?

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Um, obviously not? He was talking about the reification of subjective morality into "God's Law."

Sure, Kant's repudiation of dualism was one of the great accomplishments of the 19th century, but his "leap" of asserting the categorical imperative was something quite different. You seem to be confusing the two.

[Splendour]

Actually I think you're the one who jumped tracks here Subfallen. tame_deuces and I were talking about the metaphysical leap that Kant made that allowed him to switch from the Newtonian idea of materialism to the Kantian idea of forces in science not theology/philosophy.

[Subfallen]

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Actually I think you're the one who jumped tracks here Subfallen. tame_deuces and I were talking about the metaphysical leap that Kant made that allowed him to switch from the Newtonian idea of materialism to the Kantian idea of forces in science not theology/philosophy.

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Repudiating dualism was not a metaphysical "leap" of the sort you're claiming; it was more like the repudiation of such a leap!