Cosmological Argument from Contingency

[Jac3510]

Is it not you who is abandoning cause and effect by inferring an unmoved mover? Causality boils down to change or impermenance...and time, of which there are many interpretations. Artistotle, Hume & Shankara provide rather conflicting ideas, all of which are quite nice to the point that it is a matter of taste imo. It does seem reasonable to infer the unchanging from the changing but if our experience is one of change it's still a leap to those who hold to the laws of physics methinks.

This is very incorrect. You are assuming (wrongly) that "the laws of physics" are in some sense a competing philosophy with Aristotle or whomever. As a matter of fact, if we hadn't gotten off onto the stupidity that Descartes gave us, we probably would have discovered much of modern physics (including quantum indeterminacy) much earlier than we did, as Aristotle's view of time and causality is the sole philosophy (I'm aware of) consistent with what modern science is now producing. Of course, philosophers don't study Aristotle anymore, so they don't know this . . .

Secondly, causality does not "boil down to change or impermanence." Unless, of course, you are Cartesian/Kantian/Humian or anything Eastern. Without going into a long discussion of that, suffice it to say that classical Christian theism holds to an absolutely unchanging First Cause. This Cause is unchanging. On this view, causality is about actuality, and actuality is decidedly not about change. Change is about potentiality.

The point here is that jlay is not the one making the leap. He is actually taking modern science--the "laws of physics"--and placing them on the only philosophical grounds that works (in fact, the very philosophical grounds that they entail) and taking those premises to their logical conclusion. But fools who refuse to recognize the necessary distinctions are just making a host of category errors and transfers of authority, as if because someone is skilled at a mathematical analysis of motion that they therefore are qualified to speak to the nature of motion. It's absurd on its face, but that's the philosophical dept of people these days. It would be embarrassing if it weren't so harmful.

Philosophy and physics often overlap and influence each other. If I seen much conflict I wouldn't be suggesting one can use a variety of philosophical frameworks whilst still respecting modern science. To suggest the stupidity of Descartes has hampered the progress of physics and we're better off with Aristotle is quite a claim, the science of physics was pretty dormant for the two thousands years or so whilst Aristotle went in and out of fashion, within a generation of Descartes we have Newton's laws of physics...one of his biggest influences, if not the biggest, was Descartes himself. By the late middle ages Aristotle was on a fairly high pedastal in Europe, not long after Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton & Francis Bacon all objected to Aristotle in different ways and with the help of others kick started modern philosophy & science.

Someone skilled at mathematical analysis of motion is as qualified to speak on the nature of motion as anyone, that one should be properly qualified to speak about the nature of motion precludes listening to most peoples opinions on the most basic of observations, if you were interested in a logical approach to change I would think talking to someone who has dedicated their life to modeling mathematical change would be a worthwhile chat to have. Absurdity does not bother me nor embarrass me, I rather enjoyed Camus' Myth of Sysiphus. The absurd is where we get comedy & tradgedy, as much a part of life as reasoning things through in a proper fashion......you seem to recognize that many of the great philisophical giants who spent their lives attempting to properly think things though look like wise sages to some and absurd fools to others.

You've just bought into the modern myth about the history of philosophy and its relation to modern science.

I'm sure you come by it honestly as it is a very popular myth, but it's a myth all the same--and all based on a rather obvious illegitimate transfer of authority. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

Tall claims? Yes. Defensible? Absolutely. But all I'm doing here is just telling you that you are wrong. Full admission that I'm not arguing. I just don't have the time or energy to walk through the history. You're smart enough that if you decide to look at the other side, you'll have no trouble realizing where you've been misinformed (not surprisingly, by people who have been misinformed). I'll only leave you with this: people who don't understand Aristotle are making an assessment of Aristotle based on a correlation fallacy and making the same incorrect assessment of Descartes (who they equally fail to understand) on the same fallacy. It's all very sophomoric.

I'll leave you with the tall claims.

[Proinsias]

I'm aware of the 'myth'. I read James Hannam's book debunking it last year. I'll stick with my tall defensible claims in the mean time, you can hold to your dreams of how awesome physics would have become if the world gave a different reponse to the one it actually did to Descartes.

[Jac3510]

Good book, but not the myth I'm referring to. Related, but not the same. The myopia of the Enlightenment and the complete dismissal of the middle ages is horrific and, frankly, laughable enough. But that's barely the tip of the iceberg. The problem with Descartes wasn't his math. On the contrary, his math was and is genious, and we cannot thank him enough for it. The problem was the he confused math with philosophy, and that's an error that in other fashions is still repeated today. It wasn't original with him, either. The real problem here is for science, though. When scientists confuse physics with philosophy, they make philosophical errors, and in doing so, they read those errors back into their physics, and that prevents them from making discoveries they would have otherwise. Why do you think special and general relativity were such profound ideas? Not the least because they overthrough the Newtonian view of a mechanistic universe in which space and time were absolute. But that stupid idea (and it is stupid) came from Descartes--not from his math, but from his philosophy.

As a philosopher, Descartes is boring. His ideas were long preceded by certain Arabic philosophers (and by long preceded, I mean over four centuries preceded!). But Descartes didn't read them, and people who pretend like they have read Descartes (and who haven't except for maybe an excerpt here or there of his Meditations) certain have never read them. The reason Descartes is important as a philosopher is how much damage that he did to physics and science in general. Had he just been the mathematician God made him to be, we would have been much further down the road than we are now.

But you don't see that, because you've bought into the same myths as he did, which are very evident by your last two posts. I'd just invite you to get your head out of the sand and read real philosophy and real history of philosophy, not the poor garbage that passes for it by third rate wanna be philosophers that write so much pop-science/philosophy today.

[PaulSacramento]

Just so that we are clear about science in the middle ages:
https://explorable.com/middle-ages-science

http://www.medievalfayre.com/index.php? ... &Itemid=85

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_me ... scientists

and so forth.

To claim that there were no scientific advances in those times or that they pale to what happened later is, well, lets put it this way about those that came later:
They stood on the shoulders of giants.

[PaulSacramento]

No one really goes with that whole silly "dark ages" BS anymore.
http://www.cracked.com/article_20615_5- ... -ages.html

https://mises.org/library/european-miracle :

The stereotype of the Middle Ages as "the Dark Ages" fostered by Renaissance humanists and Enlightenment philosophes has, of course, long since been abandoned by scholars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_ ... ography%29

[PaulSacramento]

http://biologos.org/blog/rediscovering- ... iddle-ages

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/159698 ... 1596981555

The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution

From the Inside Flap

Maybe the Dark Ages Weren’t So Dark After All…

Here are some facts you probably didn’t learn in school:
People in the Middle Ages did not think the world was flat—in fact, medieval scholars could prove it wasn’t
The Inquisition never executed anyone because of their scientific ideas or discoveries (actually, the Church was the chief sponsor of scientific research and several popes were celebrated for their knowledge of the subject)
It was medieval scientific discoveries, methods, and principles that made possible Western civilization’s “Scientific Revolution”

If you were taught that the Middle Ages were a time of intellectual stagnation, superstition, and ignorance, you were taught a myth that has been utterly refuted by modern scholarship.

As a physicist and historian of science James Hannam shows in his brilliant new book, The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution, that without the scholarship of the “barbaric” Middle Ages, modern science simply would not exist.

The Middle Ages were a time of one intellectual triumph after another. As Dr. Hannam writes, “The people of medieval Europe invented spectacles, the mechanical clock, the windmill, and the blast furnace by themselves. Lenses and cameras, almost all kinds of machinery, and the industrial revolution itself all owe their origins to the forgotten inventors of the Middle Ages.”

In The Genesis of Science you will discover

Why the scientific accomplishments of the Middle Ages far surpassed those of the classical world
How medieval craftsmen and scientists not only made discoveries of their own, but seized upon Eastern inventions—printing, gunpowder, and the compass—and improved them beyond the dreams of their originators
How Galileo’s notorious trial before the Inquisition was about politics, not science
Why the theology of the Catholic Church, far from being an impediment, led directly to the development of modern science.

[Philip]

In the film, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne's character actually shot the criminal, although he allowed Stewart's character take credit for it. But when Stewart's character tries to set the record straight with a reporter, the response he received was, "When the legend becomes fact... print the legend." That's because the LEGEND concerning the truth is often better and more often believed, perhaps because it seems more exciting or it fits easier with society's preconceived notions of what they think is accurate about history and people, and as it often fits well with whatever personal or media narrative it has already been widely bought into.

So, keep thinking the innovators and great thinkers were all narrow-minded and evil, and that we, today, are somehow (as a society) so much wiser, more moral, and insightful, and that most of the best of us would never make the same kinds of mistakes as did out ancestors . We're EXACTLY the same, except with just more technology, smartphones, internet, 24/7, zillion-channel cable, millions of narcissistic nitwits posting selfies to instagram, babbling endlessly about flossing our teeth on Facebook. We're, as a people, no wiser, smarter, or less small-minded. But the press likes to utilize the same-old, convenient narratives about things its writers never even researched. Oh, and did I forget to add that the LEGEND sells more easily, is easier to remember and justify attitudes. The truth is typically complicated and not so tidy, perhaps just plain dull.

[Proinsias]

Wow, lots of stuff to cover.

In the film, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne's character actually shot the criminal, although he allowed Stewart's character take credit for it. But when Stewart's character tries to set the record straight with a reporter, the response he received was, "When the legend becomes fact... print the legend." That's because the LEGEND concerning the truth is often better and more often believed, perhaps because it seems more exciting or it fits easier with society's preconceived notions of what they think is accurate about history and people, and as it often fits well with whatever personal or media narrative it has already been widely bought into.

The Christian narrative has been pretty widely bought into over the years too...

So, keep thinking the innovators and great thinkers were all narrow-minded and evil, and that we, today, are somehow (as a society) so much wiser, more moral, and insightful, and that most of the best of us would never make the same kinds of mistakes as did out ancestors . We're EXACTLY the same, except with just more technology, smartphones, internet, 24/7, zillion-channel cable, millions of narcissistic nitwits posting selfies to instagram, babbling endlessly about flossing our teeth on Facebook. We're, as a people, no wiser, smarter, or less small-minded. But the press likes to utilize the same-old, convenient narratives about things its writers never even researched. Oh, and did I forget to add that the LEGEND sells more easily, is easier to remember and justify attitudes. The truth is typically complicated and not so tidy, perhaps just plain dull.

That's quite a rant. I don't think we are much different to people in the middle ages, the rise in creativity that marked the closing of the middle ages is in my opinion far more to do with the massive impact of the black death on the population of Europe and the subsequent introduction of the potato from the new world......less people alongside increased food yeilds led to more time spent on the arts, it literally gave people more time to think. What narrow minded evil people and instagram have to do with this I'm not really sure.

Paul,

I wasn't aware of that James Hannam book, I was referring to his God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science which is in the same vein by the sounds of things. The smithing of the middle ages, the occasional Ulfberht sword aside, pales in comparisson to that of the east, the Japanese in particular...they are still at the top of class as far as steel production goes with thier Hitachi white steel and carbon steels to die for. Yeah it's nice they stumbled upon blast furnaces and mechanical clocks long after the Chinese but being behind other cultures in some repects is not an awesome achievement. The point is not so much that they didn't lay foundations for modern science but that they done so rather slowly in contrast to the period that followed. The art of the period reflects this too, each to his own but the burst of creativity in art that also marks the closure of the middle ages is awesome to behold......the art of the middle ages is pretty dull in contrast to the delights of Michelangelo and co which followed. Vasari's Lives of the Artists gives a nice commentary on this.

Jac,

The reason Descartes is important as a philosopher is how much damage that he did to physics and science in general. Had he just been the mathematician God made him to be, we would have been much further down the road than we are now.

This is all sorts of wrong. It's not just harmless daydreaming about what might have been, no doubt inspired by ideas about potentiality as opposed to things as they, but suggesting that God made Descartes to be a mathematician is just pure conjecture and misplaced faith in your own opinions.

Why do you think special and general relativity were such profound ideas? Not the least because they overthrough the Newtonian view of a mechanistic universe in which space and time were absolute. But that stupid idea (and it is stupid) came from Descartes--not from his math, but from his philosophy.

Einstein held to the God of Spinoza, who read and responded to Descartes. Without Descartes we don't have Newtons law of motion or Spinoza stumbling upon a God more akin to that of Vedas, a God beyond the restraints of classical theism and man made categories of good/bad potentiality/actuality space/time and so forth. In abandoning the God so long held to in the west physics blossomed, Newton is another who made huge progress in physics whilst holding that the worship of Christ was idolatry.

[Jac3510]

The reason Descartes is important as a philosopher is how much damage that he did to physics and science in general. Had he just been the mathematician God made him to be, we would have been much further down the road than we are now.

This is all sorts of wrong. It's not just harmless daydreaming about what might have been, no doubt inspired by ideas about potentiality as opposed to things as they, but suggesting that God made Descartes to be a mathematician is just pure conjecture and misplaced faith in your own opinions.

Why do you think special and general relativity were such profound ideas? Not the least because they overthrough the Newtonian view of a mechanistic universe in which space and time were absolute. But that stupid idea (and it is stupid) came from Descartes--not from his math, but from his philosophy.

Einstein held to the God of Spinoza, who read and responded to Descartes. Without Descartes we don't have Newtons law of motion or Spinoza stumbling upon a God more akin to that of Vedas, a God beyond the restraints of classical theism and man made categories of good/bad potentiality/actuality space/time and so forth. In abandoning the God so long held to in the west physics blossomed, Newton is another who made huge progress in physics whilst holding that the worship of Christ was idolatry.

The God-making-Descartes-to-be-a-mathematician is rhetorical flush. Don't distract. You're better than that. In any case, it isn't all sorts of wrong. It's fact, and if you bothered distinguishing Descartes the mathematician and Descartes the philosopher, it would be as obvious to you as the nose on your face. Modern physics is in spite of Descartes, and many of the problems we still have, we have directly because we have underlying Cartesian ideas in mind (referring, again, to the philosophy, not the math). I mean, his La géométrie was published in 1637. Those are the ideas that were so influential to Newton and such. His Mediations was published until 1641.

He was a mathematician first. He made great mathematical discoveries--and those discoveries are not mere opinion but objective fact. Those discoveries are what had a massive impact on the scientific revolution. It wasn't his philosophy that did it. As far as your riff on the categories such as space/time and trying to tie that to the God of classical theism, I really am having a hard time not laughing at you. If you knew what you were talking about, you would be embarrassed to make such a statement. That category, take but the one, came out of Descartes, NOT ARISTOTLE. Aristotelians have always mocked such categories. Go read Maimonedes and his treatment of the aforementioned Arabic philosophers and their stupid belief in "time atoms." It's absurd, but the moment you deny the actuality/potentiality distinction, you are forced into such retarded beliefs. So Newton learns his math from Descartes and can make great discoveries. But in the process, he adopts the idiotic notion of absolute space and time, which he learned from Descartes, an idea he would have never stumbled upon had he been a classical theist, and he makes a mistake so major it takes Einstein to clear it up. Einstein's ideas only seem revolutionary to the foolish Cartesian. And guess what? That same problem holds today. The difficulty in grasping QM is directly related to our Cartesian principles. As if quantum indeterminacy is unexpected (much less a threat to some arguments for God?!?). Classical theism denies a mechanistic, deterministic world. The whole system is built on indeterminacy. Physics are only just now rediscovering this. Go look up the New Essentialism. We're just rediscovering that the actuality/potentiality distinction is real. These new physicists haven't read Aristotle, either, but their concluding he was right all along.

To quote a great scholar, you are all sorts of wrong here, Pro. Had the world stuck with classical theism, we would be miles ahead of where we are now. There are so many applications of this it is ridiculous (and it is personal to me because, as a hospital chaplain, I see the effects of this on people's health literally every day). And it wasn't just Descartes, btw. Descartes just finally gave the world a philosophical approach that didn't just modify Aristotle but replaced him. Descartes was the first to do that. And replace him he did, and for that reason, he has become the father of modern philosophy, and now everything in that field is nothing more than a response to him and an attempt to get ourselves out of the intractable problems his ideas created (again, not his math, which preceded his philosophy). The only way to do that is to reject his rejection of basic truth. Until we do that, we will continue to handicap ourselves, and any discoveries we make in the world of physics and related sciences will continue to be in spite of of underlying philosophy, not driven by it (which, by the way, is exactly why scientists particularly and the populace in general can get away with thinking that philosophy has no bearing on reality--because we're making discoveries in spite of our basic beliefs about the nature of reality, which creates an unbridgable chasm between the two spheres of knowledge).

edit:

BTW, it should be noted that Descartes' Geometry was an appendix to a book titled Discourse on the Method of Properly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking the Truth in the Sciences. In that book, due to the reigning skepticism of his day (thanks, by the way, to the rejection of classical theism which itself went back to Ockham), Descartes was looking for a way to ground human knowledge. In other words, the book was a philosophical book. So you might be tempted to say that Descartes' philosophy came first. But you would be wrong. Because in that very book Descartes claim to find a way out of skepticism. He had discovered certitude in math and thought he could use the same mathematical method and apply it to philosophy and so to knowledge generally. In other words, because he was a great mathematician but terrible philosopher, he confused math with philosophy. And so that does not sound like an unfair assessment of his ideas, here his own words:

• "I was especially delighted with the mathematics, on account of the certitude and evidence of their reasonings; but I had not as yet a precise knowledge of their true use; and thinking that they but contributed to the advancement of the mechanical arts, I was astonished that foundations, so strong and solid, should have had no loftier superstructure reared on them."
  
  "The long chains of simple and easy reasonings by means of which geometers are accustomed to reach the conclusions of their most difficult demonstrations, had led me to imagine . . . that there is nothing so far removed from us as to be beyond our reach, or so hidden that we cannot discover it, provided only we abstain from accepting the false for the true, and always preserve in our thoughts the order necessary for the deduction of one truth from another."
  
  "The accurate observance of these few precepts gave me . . . such ease in unraveling all the questions embraced in these two sciences [geometry and algebra], that in the two or three months I devoted to their examination, not only did I reach solutions of questions I had formerly deemed exceedingly difficult but even as regards questions of the solution of which I continued ignorant, I was enabled, as it appeared to me, to determine the means whereby, and the extent to which a solution was possible. . . . But the chief ground of my satisfaction with thus method, was the assurance I had of thereby exercising my reason in all matters. . . . I hoped also, from not having restricted this method to any particular matter, to apply it to the difficulties of the other sciences, with not less success than to those of algebra."
  
  "With me, everything turns into mathematics" (or more literally, "but in my opinion, all things in nature occur mathematically").

I could continue to quote ad naseum, but this should be sufficient to make the point. Descartes was a great mathematician, and we thank him for his contributions in that field. Such contributions helped pave the way for the scientific revolution, and yet, Descartes foolishly thought that the method that worked for him in looking at algebra and geometry would apply equally to philosophy and all other sciences, for as he ays, for him, all things reduce to mathematics. That is, he confused math with philosophy, and in doing so, he passed that confusion on to his students and those whom he would influence (i.e., Newton, who in turn impressed Kant and made the same error Descartes did, only instead of confusing philosophy with philosophy, he confused philosophy with physics). And so people continue to repeat that error in one form or fashion down to the present.

[Proinsias]

Again it's back to had the world done stuff they way you think is right and proper things would be much better. Yeah we're still dealing with a lot of problems inherited from Aristotle & Descartes but both men also gave us cool stuff to play with. Let's all imagine how awesome our hoverboards would now be had Einstein been a classical theist and advocate of Aristotle.

man made categories of good/bad potentiality/actuality space/time and so forth

That category, take but the one, came out of Descartes, NOT ARISTOTLE. Aristotelians have always mocked such categories

Yeah, but if we don't 'take but one' all is well and there's no need for the caps.

So Newton learns his math from Descartes and can make great discoveries. But in the process, he adopts the idiotic notion of absolute space and time, which he learned from Descartes, an idea he would have never stumbled upon had he been a classical theist, and he makes a mistake so major it takes Einstein to clear it up. Einstein's ideas only seem revolutionary to the foolish Cartesian. And guess what? That same problem holds today. The difficulty in grasping QM is directly related to our Cartesian principles. As if quantum indeterminacy is unexpected (much less a threat to some arguments for God?!?). Classical theism denies a mechanistic, deterministic world. The whole system is built on indeterminacy. Physics are only just now rediscovering this. Go look up the New Essentialism. We're just rediscovering that the actuality/potentiality distinction is real. These new physicists haven't read Aristotle, either, but their concluding he was right all along.

You are choosing metaphysics you have a taste for and claiming it does not contradict modern physics, this is what most people do, hoodoo fits as well as classical theism & Aristotle. You are the one reading Aristotle and concluding he was right all along, first of course you need to abstract out Aristotle the metaphysician from Aristotle the guy whose physics and cosmology were in grave error. It seems simpler to me to state that both Aristotle & Descartes were men of enourmous brain alongside some pretty weird views on the world. Aristotle's views on life and the relation of the heavens and the earth are as confused as cartesian dualism....thankfully Darwin, Bentham, Newton, Galileo, Copernicus & Co got things in perspective.

[Jac3510]

I'm afraid you are mistaken, Pro. Your hoverboards comment is, of course, a red herring if not a poor attempt at poisoning the well. I assume you recognize the fact that bad ideas about the nature of reality can hamper scientific progress. My point is that Descartes gave us a lot of bad ideas about the nature of reality. Whether or not that would have given us "hover boards" is beside the point. The fact remains that when you try to do science based on bad assumptions, it makes science harder to do if for no other reason than you are locked into seeing things this or that way and cannot see potentially helpful hypotheses that can be tested.

Second, I was being charitable in only taking the time/space category, because that's the big one. The good/bad distinction is hardly rooted in classical theism nor bound to it. And while I would not lay the loss of that distinction at Descartes' feet (he has enough real error to answer for without making him the scapegoat of all that is wrong with our world), certainly the loss of that distinction has created some very serious ethical problems we are having to deal with, not the least of which are bioethical. But to press the point, were we to have retained a good/evil distinction as understood by classical theism, there would have been no ground for a lot of errors and serious problems we have fallen into today. To give you only one example, according to the National Institute of Health, we have spent some nearly $1 billion on human embryonic stem cell research and $3.6 billion on human non-embryonic stem cell research since 2002 for a total of about $4.7 billion. That's about 20% of the total stem cell research budget that went to embyronic stem cells, and guess what? Embryonic stem cells haven't cured anybody, but non-embryonic cells have. Defenders of the former insist that we might "yet" find cures (so see NPR's admission and hope), but here's some more what-if thinking for you: suppose we could have increased the research on non-embryonic stem cell research (you know, the proven one) by 20%. Suppose we did it tomorrow. Wouldn't you support that? Don't you think an increase in a billion bucks would produce some new cures, or if we'd had the billion over the last decade that there would have been some more than there are now? And yet, we haven't had that money because it's been going to useless embyronic research (and not to mention all the unnecessary energy spent in fighting about it). Now, had we kept with our good/bad distinction, that argument would have never happened, and we would have spent the money on non-embryonic cells, and who knows what we would have cured by now?!?

And so it is with all these distinctions. And to the real one in question, the actuality/potentiality distinction, that's nothing more than the whole of Aristotelian metaphysics. Again, I encourage you to look up the new essentialism, which is nothing more than a revival of that distinction. The rejection of that distinction necessarily leads to an acceptance of a physical determinism. Yet no less a scientist that Hawking can now say, "Gödel's theorem, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and the practical impossibility of following the evolution of even a deterministic system that becomes chaotic, form a core set of limitations to scientific knowledge that only came to be appreciated during the twentieth century." Only during the twentieth century? That sounds like quite a shame! Would you not agree that recognition of the basic indeterminacy of the most fundamental aspects of reality is something we need to study, something that is good for us to know, something that if we deny would lead us to mistakes? And yet why is this late appreciation, well, so late?

Simple: because Descartes and Newton bequeathed to us a mechanistic universe, and while we may thank them for their great scientific discoveries, that does not absolve them of their very fundamental errors that we are still trying to recover from!

So you can pretend like rejecting Aristotle and ignoring philosophy is no big deal. But it IS a big deal, and to say it is not is the very myth I am speaking of. You think that science finally got around to being productive when we freed ourselves from Aristotle. You could not be further from the truth. And your last riff on trying to separate the physics from the metaphysics of Aristotle is as good a demonstraton as any that you don't know what you are talking about. Aristotle himself distinguished between them, and no less an interpreter of Aristotle than Thomas Aquinas would point out that Aristotle's physics could (and likely were) wrong but that his philosophy was correct and useful. Once again, both Aristotle and Aquinas made the distinction I am asking you to make, one that is simple to make, but one that moderns refuse to make. And that they don't allow others to make the distinction just shows their total incompetence in addressing this subject matter.

In sum, far from cherry-picking which metaphysics works and which don't, I'm actually talking about metaphysics qua metaphysics. It is modern fool who buys into the myth I've talked about from the beginning with you who acts so naively. They do so in their failure to distinguish philosophy from science, from math, and even from linguistics (the new modern trend, and it is just as sickening and is having all the same disasterous consequences as the error always has had). The irony is that your statement actually betrays a metaphysics of your own, whether you explicitly claim or merely implicitly hold to it. My fear is that you are reading your metaphysic back into science, and it is preventing you from coming to right conclusions on certain matters. It is certainly doing so in labs all around the world today, and we are wasting billions of dollars because of it.

That, my misguided friend, is one expensive myth!

[Proinsias]

The hoverboard is an attempt to ground your repeated claims, and they are still coming, of physics being much further down the road if people took Aristotle more seriously. You see things as they are and imagine how much better they would be if people done things the way you would like to see them done. If you prefer to frame it in terms of medical advances or suffering that's fine too but it's still pure conjecture. I'm not quite sure where the cures of the future will come from and am happy to see money being pumped into a variety of areas of research. The distinction between embryonic and non-embryonic doesn't really bother me too much but I can see why someone who holds to actuality/potentiality, alongside a view of humanity as made in the image of God, would be concerned enough to highlight it. Maybe we need to pump in several hundred billion dollars more to get our money's worth, maybe it will come to nothing....nobody knows. Again it seems that if you were in charge of the funding for cell biology we'd be sorted, or at least much further down the road, personally I'll leave it to the cell biologists, I'm relying on them for day to day existence at the moment and would rather they got on with their work than spent their time reading Aristotle regardless of how beneficial you reckon it would be.

It's not as if Aristotle never got a chance, he was held almost as high as the gospels at one point and very little came of it. I can speculate you would be much further down the road if you took the psychological insights of Krishna and the Buddha half as seriously as you commit to the philosophy and theology of Aquinas, Aristotle & Christianity but it's pure speculation and truth be told I think it's great we have people like you holding to and promoting ancient thinkers with a passion.

Classical theism does cover a lot of ground and I was perhaps a little hasty in combining it with the good/bad distinction but I do feel, rather strongly, that to to make the distinction between good and bad and to then place God on one half of that divide is to judge God and cling to categories. Personally I never gave much credit to Richard Dawkins and his attack on the Christian/Muslim God beyond being quite timely to counteract anti-evolution YEC movement, then I read Paul Copan's 'Is God a Moral Monster' as it seemed popular on the forum and was left feeling that Copan is much more of a misguided chap than Dawkins.

[Jac3510]

I'm not arguing what the advances will be. Only that there would be advances. Your refusal to address that basic point beyond just calling it speculation (which is nothing more than incredulity) is straining your credulity. The premise is simple: errors about reality hamper our ability to understand and interact with reality. I've given you multiple examples of how errors in our understanding of reality have hampered our ability to understand and interact with that reality. And you really want to suggest that if we didn't make basic mistakes a long time ago that we wouldn't understand it better today? Seriously? THAT is your defense?

That's absurd. (There are other words, but I'm being kind.) It is obviously not "pure conjecture" to say that we'd be better off if we had put more money into, say, non-embryonic stem cells. More money = more research = more discovery. It is obviously not "pure conjecture" to say that if we had not assumed the universe was mechanistic/deterministic then we would have a better understanding of the world than we do today. It is obviously not "pure conjecture" to say that if we had not assumed a steady-state model of the universe for much of the 18th and 19th century that we would have a better understanding of cosmology today. To suggest that would be "pure conjecture" is to imply that error in thinking doesn't effect scientific progress, and that is pure conjecture.

So the question isn't whether or not bad philosophy hampers or has hampered our progress. The question is where that bad philosophy came from. The answer, as I've offered a lot of evidence for, is primarily Descartes in particular and from a general rejection of Aristotle. If you want to make an argument that Buddha gives us a better philosophical understanding of the universe than Aristotle, then that's a perfectly valid claim. Be ready to have evidence for it as I have lots of evidence for my claim that classical theism provides a better, more coherent view of the world, one that promotes science and predicted modern scientific findings a long time ago. Maybe you can make a similar case. I doubt it from what I know about that philosophy, but I'll leave you to make your own case.

In the meantime, don't just offer blanket rejection of evidence without an argument (i.e., "that's just conjecture!") and stop resorting to poor analogies/red herrings. Again, you're better than that. You can always concede that you don't know how to answer the argument but that you simply don't accept the conclusion. At least that would be honest. But stop pretending like denial of the evidence is anything like interacting with it or showing some error in the argument (which is what attempting to characterize it as mere speculation as you've repeatedly done is

edit:

RE God and right/wrong, I obviously think the category is very real and necessary. With that said, if we were to hash this out, it's possible that you and I might have more agreement than you think. It is a common misconception among, well everybody, that when we say "morality comes from God" (which we ought to) we mean that things are right/wrong because God so declared it. That's no more or less the case than saying that I am 5'11" because God declared it or that the sky is blue because God declared it. There may be a trivial sense in which it is true to state that any true proposition is ultimately rooted in God's decree insofar as God is the First Cause of all things, but we ought to be very careful about falling into a veiled divine command theory, which many Christians do and which atheists love to critique.

[Proinsias]

I'm not arguing what the advances will be. Only that there would be advances.

I know, stop it. It's dreaming and conjecture, it's not an argument.

The premise is simple: errors about reality hamper our ability to understand and interact with reality. I've given you multiple examples of how errors in our understanding of reality have hampered our ability to understand and interact with that reality. And you really want to suggest that if we didn't make basic mistakes a long time ago that we wouldn't understand it better today? Seriously? THAT is your defense?

If we didn't make mistakes we wouldn't learn, we did tear down Aristotle, we did learn a lot. To imagine if we had not done so what might have been is not an argument. The notion of a mistake is laden with the psychology of free will, to imagine you could have have got out of bed on the wrong side this morning is to imagine you could have done something other than what you did do.

So the question isn't whether or not bad philosophy hampers or has hampered our progress. The question is where that bad philosophy came from. The answer, as I've offered a lot of evidence for, is primarily Descartes in particular and from a general rejection of Aristotle. If you want to make an argument that Buddha gives us a better philosophical understanding of the universe than Aristotle, then that's a perfectly valid claim. Be ready to have evidence for it as I have lots of evidence for my claim that classical theism provides a better, more coherent view of the world, one that promotes science and predicted modern scientific findings a long time ago. Maybe you can make a similar case. I doubt it from what I know about that philosophy, but I'll leave you to make your own case.

The buddha's, alongsde Krishna, insights are more psychological, that which underlies our personal tastes in philosophy.

It is obviously not "pure conjecture" to say that we'd be better off if we had put more money into, say, non-embryonic stem cells.

Repeatedly stating it does not make it so. Had jac not spent years clinging to Arisitotle and Christianity he'd be much better off and much further down the road......I can make stuff up too.

RE God and right/wrong, I obviously think the category is very real and necessary. With that said, if we were to hash this out, it's possible that you and I might have more agreement than you think. It is a common misconception among, well everybody, that when we say "morality comes from God" (which we ought to) we mean that things are right/wrong because God so declared it. That's no more or less the case than saying that I am 5'11" because God declared it or that the sky is blue because God declared it. There may be a trivial sense in which it is true to state that any true proposition is ultimately rooted in God's decree insofar as God is the First Cause of all things, but we ought to be very careful about falling into a veiled divine command theory, which many Christians do and which atheists love to critique.

Again it comes down to you thinking a particular category of your choosing is very real and necessary. Have a little faith, let go, the categories are fine it's clinging to them in a serious fashion that brings about disagreement. Potentiality and actuality are fine it's when you take them so seriously that you paint God as pure actuality that you are making category errors. Your distinctions are so certain that you are judging God by your own standards.

[Jac3510]

Then I was sadly wrong; you aren't better than that. It's nothing less than foolish and silly to pretend it only "conjecture" that studying and funding science and not approaching it with basic confusion about fundamental reality--that is, that approaching it correctly, with the correct assumptions and correct methods--will not result in advancement. If that's how far you have to go to deny the obvious then you are on exactly the same level as a young man I spoke to several years ago who, after hearing the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, "argued" that perhaps aliens stole the body and impersonated Him.

Given all that, I simply say, QED. My point is obviously proved by those willing to be rational. For those unwiling to be rational and make such silly "responses" (which are no responses at all, but an excuse not to respond), then no argument and no reason is sufficient.

So the argument is demonstrated. I would only highlight one more item for the rest who happen to be reading: Pro's riff on us "tearing down" Aristotle only further illustrates my point. We never tore down Aristotle's philosophy. It was ignored, sure. It was replaced, absolutely. But nothing we have ever discovered in any field of any science has shown any of his philosophy in error. In fact, just the opposite. What has happened is that we have empirically torn down the philosophy of Descartes and Newton (again, their philosophy, not their math or physics, although some in the case of the latter and that very much because of the underlying stupid philosophy he held to that caused him to misinterpret physics). The fact that we had to waste time tearing down those philosophies, that they forced scientists to work from false assumptions and therefore come up with false hypotheses all due to their ignorance of classical thnking, is the great shame in all this. That Pro thinks that we have torn down Aristotle is only further proof of my original claim: he has bought into the myth that science today is opposed to classical philosophy, that scientific advancements came at the expense of Aristotle and Aquinas, that once we were freed from them we were finally able to get on with the process of real investigation. That is the myth. It's wrong. And Pro's willful ignorance of the evidence here is appauling and, sadly, absolutely typical of people today. Were it only academic, it would only be embarrassing. But people are suffering because this error continues. Untold millions, if not billions, of dollars are being wasted that could go to real research. People in hospitals across the world are not getting needed treatment. Counselors are working with incorrect models and are actually discouraged from working with objective reality in an objective way. Religiously, Pro and those like him leave us with nothing more than moralism on one side or mysticism on the other, both of which have a historical record of being harmful both to individuals and society, and that before we have any consideration of the harm in denying people the actual good that comes from a true approach to God. There are political, social, ethical, economic, religious, and scientific consequences to this myth. So it isn't merely academic. It is positively harmful.

An observation by Etienne Gilson here seems an appropriate way to end this three or four day long demonstration of the absurdity, hubris, and shallowness of "the modern man" (all of which are immoral in their own right and show further the depravity of our fallen state anyway):

• There is an ethical problem at the root of our philosophical difficulties; for men are most anxious to find truth, but very reluctant to accept it. We do not like to be cornered by rational evidence, and even when truth is there, in its impersonal and commanding objectivity, our greatest difficulty still remains; it is for me to bow to in spite of the fact that it is not exclusively mine, for you to accept it though it cannot be exclusively yours. In short, finding out truth is not so hard; what is hard is not to run away from truth once we have found it. When it is not a "yes but", our "yes" is often a "yes, and . . ."; it applies much less to what we have just been told than to what we are about to say. The greatest among philosophers are those who do not flinch in the presence of truth, but welcome it with the simple words: yes, Amen.