Vitruvius wrote: ↑Sun Aug 08, 2021 11:42 pmThe fact Newton had to petition the King to excuse him from Holy Orders, suggests that religion was very much a part of university life in late 17th century England.
uwot wrote: ↑Mon Aug 09, 2021 8:24 amPerhaps, but that is very different to your claim that Newton was required to believe.
Newton was required to believe - hence the dispensation from the King. For lesser mortals, there was no dispensation.
Vitruvius wrote: ↑Sun Aug 08, 2021 7:12 pmFather, son and holy spirit. The trinity! Newton was anti-trinitarian, and had to hide his beliefs.
uwot wrote: ↑Mon Aug 09, 2021 8:24 amI'm always happy to bash organised religion, but its affect on science has been exaggerated. King Charles II, head of the Church of England signed the charter founding the Royal Society, which published Newton's Principia, and was perhaps the pivotal moment that saw science become the empirical, mathematical discipline it has been since.
I'm not out to bash organised religion. It was the central coordinating mechanism of civilisation for two thousand years; and could very well be pointing to something real for all I know.
I'm seeking to correct an error; buried in our philosophical history, that stands in the way of addressing climate change. I'm trying to show the significance of a scientific understanding of reality - to people indoctrinated with 400 years of culturally ingrained, anti-science propaganda - who believe "the real world" is described in ideological terms. I cannot even communicate the difference between science as a tool, and science as an understanding of reality. It just doesn't stick.
You think it's an exaggeration because you're still on the wrong side of the fence, but if you accept that science is a means to establish factually valid knowledge of reality, then that knowledge, by rights, owns the natural authority of truth, and it has not been granted that status in the past 400 years. i.e. Trump digs coal.
Had the Church welcomed Galileo - rather than putting him on trial for his life, and welcomed science as the means to decode to word of God made manifest in Creation, the subsequent history of philosophy, politics, economics, technology, and the environment - would have been very different, and quite likely sustainable. There'd no "subjectivism" - because Descartes would not have been terrorised into writing something, clever, but that he could not really have believed was methodologically valid. In any case, science and technology would occur as proof of God's favour, so there'd be no need to write around the enormous truth value of a burgeoning scientific understanding of reality. Scientific truth would be incorporated into politics - and Hume, for example, would not have been so dismayed to observe:
"In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not."
Because, if science is true, that's exactly where human reason, and politics should be - poised between the is and the ought, knowing what's true, and doing what's morally right in terms of what's scientifically true. In face of the threat of climate and ecological disaster, it's imperative that we correct this error, by looking beyond our ideological conventions, identities and purposes, to the bare facts, and acting accordingly.
I submit, the facts suggest developing magma energy - because it is close and vastly vast, can be developed quickly, to meet and exceed global energy demand from clean energy. Used to sequester carbon, desalinate, irrigate and recycle - it gives future generations the best chance of a prosperous sustainable future! If we don't, we're dead - our species will be rendered extinct, like 99% of the species that have ever existed, because we were (intellectually) mal-adapted to the reality of the environment. Evolution is cruel - if you're wrong, you're gone!
