Philosophy Now Forum

Sam26. Please offer an example of objective evidence, i.e. evidence which does not need to be interpreted by a human mind.

Obvious Leo wrote:

HexHammer wrote:Obvious Leo why are you intentionally skipping my answer to you?

Because you're a fuckwit.

That's funny, I make sound arguments, and you dare call me fuck wit? ..when it's you who pull garbage straight out of your ass?

Come now, show that you can step up your skills!

Why Christianity Fails in Terms of the Evidence

In view of the book of Revelation and "The Ouzo Prophecy," I would consider Christianity a rousing success!

Obvious Leo wrote:Sam26. Please offer an example of objective evidence, i.e. evidence which does not need to be interpreted by a human mind.

For some reason you haven't understood a word I've said, so there is no need for me to explain any further.

Sam26 wrote:

Obvious Leo wrote:Sam26. Please offer an example of objective evidence, i.e. evidence which does not need to be interpreted by a human mind.

For some reason you haven't understood a word I've said, so there is no need for me to explain any further.

Does this mean that you can't think of an example or does it mean that you've gone into a sulk because I dared to ask for one.

Why Christianity Fails in Terms of the Evidence

So what? So does gravity.

The Inglorious One wrote:

Why Christianity Fails in Terms of the Evidence

So what? So does gravity.

This needs a bit of unpacking. Presumably you mean some theory or belief about gravity, because to say that gravity fails in terms of the evidence is meaningless nonsense. Whereas if we assume the term Christianity to mean any of a range of beliefs predicated on the common faith that Jesus, in some literal sense, was 'the son of God', that fails because all the evidence is hearsay. Compare the following:
1. Wonderful news! Christ was born to save your immortal soul.
2. Wonderful news! There is a force that will dash your pint against the floor, should you let go.

uwot wrote: There is a force that will dash your pint against the floor, should you let go.

It seems to be fairly unanimously agreed nowadays that modelling gravity as a "force" is a wrong-headed way to think the world. However I agree with you that this doesn't mean that gravity fails on the evidence. It merely means that that way we try to understand gravity fails on the evidence.

Of course it fails on the evidence. Does the obvious have to be repeated over and over again! It's a religion because one substitutes belief for evidence. Hardly enlightening or profound. Religions get propagated by branding its dogma beginning with the earliest years of one's existence. This in a way causes belief itself to be no longer necessary since anything so insidiously inflected becomes a forgone conclusion. They no-longer believe! They know! Religions are in their own way a form of insanity because they depend on a purposely induced continuously active complex to keep operating.

What is evidenced is its success!

Obvious Leo wrote:It seems to be fairly unanimously agreed nowadays that modelling gravity as a "force" is a wrong-headed way to think the world.

That's news to me. Who among the seemingly fair unanimity models gravity as anything other than a force?

Dubious wrote:Of course it fails on the evidence. Does the obvious have to be repeated over and over again! It's a religion because one substitutes belief for evidence.

Yup. The myths of that time and place were quite interchangeable, eg. the flood and resurrection, albeit with different locales and characters. If you take the manipulative addons after the fact, theist texts do speak of a kind of truth - the truth as observed through innocent eyes that could possibly not know what we do today.

For instance, the creation myth. It's actually a brilliant insight from a deep thinking person at a time when the Earth was believed to be a flat disc, covered by a dome (the firmament) suspended in space while an enormous humanoid being looks down at the events on this disc with relentless attention, aware of everything that happens. First light, then the sky, then the oceans and land masses, then vegetation, "creeping things" etc. Not so far off, if short on detail.

It's a beautiful allegory using the only analytical tools the ancients had available - metaphor. It's just a problem that people keep taking these texts literally, especially with all the atavistic, sadistic, amoral, manipulative and temporally and culturally irrelevant passages amongst the genuine insights. The ancients would surely laugh if they knew some of the hare-brained interpretations of their mythical allegories made by modern people with so much information at their disposal.

uwot, bear in mind that Leo challenges the veracity of the standard model. Almost daily, in fact :) It should be said that many physicists today are questioning the way we view gravity.

uwot wrote:

Obvious Leo wrote:It seems to be fairly unanimously agreed nowadays that modelling gravity as a "force" is a wrong-headed way to think the world.

That's news to me. Who among the seemingly fair unanimity models gravity as anything other than a force?

Nobody models gravity as anything, remember. There IS NO model for gravity. Gravity just IS and unfortunately the models which physics is using are unable to tell us WHAT gravity is. However Einstein succeeded in figuring it out in spite of these ridiculous models. The elephant in the room of GR is that gravity is just an alternative expression of time, and time as we all know is merely a convenient metric for the rate of change in a physical system. Time is NOT a spatial dimension.

Greta wrote: Leo challenges the veracity of the standard model.

On a point of order, Mr Chairman. Leo challenges the ontological validity of the spacetime paradigm on which the standard model is predicated.

Obvious Leo wrote:

Greta wrote: Leo challenges the veracity of the standard model.

On a point of order, Mr Chairman. Leo challenges the ontological validity of the spacetime paradigm on which the standard model is predicated.

Ha! Madame Chairwoman to you, young man :P . I otherwise stand corrected.

Greta wrote: uwot, bear in mind that Leo challenges the veracity of the standard model. Almost daily, in fact It should be said that many physicists today are questioning the way we view gravity.

I think you, Leo and Inglorious are conflating the fact and the reason. You are right that different physicists propose different reasons, but nobody challenges the fact that things fall to Earth.

Obvious Leo wrote:Nobody models gravity as anything, remember. There IS NO model for gravity.

Newton couldn't come up with a reason for gravity, and as I may have mentioned, in the General Scholium, an essay he added to the second edition of the Principia, he admitted that he couldn't work out how gravity works, but that for the purposes of natural philosophy (physics to you and me) it doesn't matter; that instrumentalist approach became the dominant methodology. Here's a link http://isaac-newton.org/general-scholium/ If you bother to read it, the theory of Vortices it refers to was Descartes'; he felt it necessary to explain how gravity works, which is part of the reason that he is remembered as a philosopher rather than a physicist.

Obvious Leo wrote:Gravity just IS and unfortunately the models which physics is using are unable to tell us WHAT gravity is. However Einstein succeeded in figuring it out in spite of these ridiculous models.

Not so, Leo. I have already shown you the text of the lecture he gave at Leiden in which he expressed his belief that GR was an explanation of what gravity is: "according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether" Here is the full text: http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Ext ... ether.html According to some versions of quantum mechanics, gravity is mediated by the exchange of 'gravitons', but no one has ever seen one, and the whole reason for string theory, loop quantum gravity, modified Newtonian gravity etc etc is to find a model that accommodates both GR and QM.

Obvious Leo wrote:The elephant in the room of GR is that gravity is just an alternative expression of time, and time as we all know is merely a convenient metric for the rate of change in a physical system. Time is NOT a spatial dimension.

Personally, I think my fruitloopery better fits the facts than yours and that gravity is due to refraction.