I realise that the way I phrased the question it might not have been clear. What I was asking was not “assuming you reject evolution and the big bang, what else do you reject” it was “which scientific theories (if any) do you reject on the basis of your religious beliefs, apart from evolution and the big bang which have already been covered in some depth”. Other religions were also included.
Is this still the case? I thought that attributing mental disorders etc to demonic possession wasn’t practised anymore.
I suppose if God has no mass, there’s no problem with him escaping from a black hole, either.
Definitely still the case in the extreme(the rather unreasonable extreme, in my view) of Christian fundamentalism - a big overlap with the Christian young-earth creationist camp, I’d say, and certainly forms a key part of the ministry/message of preachers such as Kenneth Hagin, Benny Hinn, Kenneth Copeland, Oral Roberts etc.
Depends what standards you have for your unpredictability!
The double pendulum is perfectly predictable - you can model one on a computer, and the model will do all the zany loops and dancing about that make them interesting.
Trouble is, you make a real one, put the computer model in the “same” starting configuration and let them both rip, and after a while the computer model is doing different stuff from the real one.
Turns out you were a fraction of a mm off when you measured your starting position. So this time you’re really careful, and measure your starting postion correct to the nearest angstrom. Let it rip, and… after a somewhat longer while, it’s doing different stuff from the real one. The point being that you can never have sufficient precision for the real pendulum to be long-term predictable - you need to be EXACT and that simply doesn’t exist in the real world.
The real pendulum will also be highly susceptable to external disturbances - gusts of wind, minute changes in air pressure, the sound of a pin dropping. (After all, if it can nudge your eardrum, it can nudge the pendulum!) That’s the so-called “butterfly effect”. So a chaotic system is unpredictable, despite being governed by perfectly predictable rules. However, in the short term, if you have sufficiently good data regarding the starting conditions, you CAN make approximate predictions.
Of course, compared to quantum unpredictability, where things appear to happen for NO REASON AT ALL, chaotic systems are the height of predictability…
That’s right, and I see that just about every Major newspaper and News TV weather show also beleive that the Earth stays still, and the Sun rotates around it. :rolleyes: All of these list a time for “sunrise and sunset”, and we know the Sun does neither, it’s the Earths rotation…
DrDeth, I just don’t see how you have any point of contention here. So, your point seems to be that common sense trumps what the bible says. That doesn’t make the bible say it any less.
But as (I think it was) Chronos explained to me before, that is a perfectly legitimate way of looking at it. There is no reason that you cannot assign the earth as an inertial reference frame and interpret the rest of the universe relativistically.
The sun doesn’t really 'rise" or ‘set’. However, we commonly use those terms as if it does. Thus, the use of poetic language does not nessesarily denote a belief. Actually- “common sense” says that the Earth stays still and the Sun revolves around us. “Common Sense” is of course, incorrect- but it took thousands of years to determine this.
Of course, it *is *very likely the anceint Isrealis did believe in a Earth-centric universe, as just about everyone did at that time.
In your humble opinion, do you think that is what they believed? Or is it more likely that they believed, like the vast majority of people at the time, that there was only one true frame of reference, with the Earth at the center?
As far as I know, the trick to calculations in celestial mechanics is to establish first an appropriate inertial frame (which obviously makes calculating the orbits of satellites very difficult, given the sun’s and moon’s effects on the earth). So, yes, it is simpler to calculate the earth’s orbit around the sun than it is to calculate the earth’s orbit around the center of the galaxy. Therefore, I don’t see why a heliocentric model is superior to a more universal one, except that it is more convenient to earthlings. But then, it is often more convenient to use an earth-centric model, as when calculating sunrise and sunset, or tides.
Almost certainly the latter. But why that should disqualify their observations is unclear. In the future, men might well laugh at our quaint theories, even though we call upon them now to paint ourselves as superior to our ancestors. I’m sometimes accused of nitpicking, and yet pulling up Biblical passages for the purpose of showing that they are scientifically inadequate seems rather like examining the life of Albert Einstein for the purpose of showing that he was a pathetic athlete. I mean, what’s the point? Someone (I think it was Tamerlane) once noted that religion tends to fall apart under skeptical observation, whereupon I responed that skepticism tends to fall apart under religious examination. So what?
That’s how retrograde motion and a lot of other silly things made their way into ancient astronomy. It might be clearer to say this: when you live on Earth it’s easy to draw the conclusion that the Earth stays where it is and everything else moves around it. But when you start looking at the movements of the planets and things, that model ceases to be the simplest or most sensible.
The alternative under discussion would involve calculating the motion of the sun and the universe around the earth.
This earth-centric modeling of tides is only feasible when the sun and moon’s motion relative to the earth has already been calculated heliocentrically.
It certainly disqualifies it from being taught as science in schools, since we now know much more correct viewpoints.
If future people, who long since discovered evidence that 21st century science is wrong (or at least not as close to reality as their current knowledge), still want to teach 21st century science because of religion or politics or whatever, they’d be just as ignorant as the people today denying evolution because of the Bible.
The thing I believe you’re forgetting here is that part of the definition of God’s omniscience isn’t that God learns of what happes as it happens - rather God knows everything in one act of knowing.
Thus God doesn’t observe the sparrow’s fall and remark upon it to Godself out by Alpha Centauri, rather God knew all along that that was when, and where, that sparrow would fall.
Which is, AIUI, the big problem that many religionists have vis-a-vis the argument about predestination vs. free will.
FWIW, I don’t care that God knows what I’m going to do at point X, God’s foreknowledge of my actions doesn’t change that it’s a result of my free will.
While I have no problem with reconciling modern physics with my faith - it’s not exactly a secret that Albert Einstein really never did. I don’t know if that really means anything more than Albert knew both more of physics and religion than I do, or not.
I suppose the hypothesis that spirituality might be a delusory condition, dependent on environmental and neurological factors, the latter which include a genetic component, and that religion is a viral memeplex which thrives in this mental environment, wouldn’t get much support. Of course, it gets little support from anyone, so the Christians are in good company.
