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"Darwinists don't accept direction in evolution." -- Swenet
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Doug M: [QB] [QUOTE]Originally posted by Swenet: [qb] In case people think I'm making this up: [QUOTE]The [b]most immediate impact of the Newtonian worldview was to break the late-medieval synthesis of the physical and the spiritual.[/b] While Copernicus had, unintentionally perhaps, initiated the destruction of this Church- sponsored relationship by denying Earth as the cosmic center, [b]Newton completed the job[/b] by showing that the same physical laws held for both the earthly and the heavenly realms. Under this inspiration, geologists, assuming that the same laws also applied throughout time, showed Earth to be vastly older than the Bibles 6,000 years. [b]This led directly to Darwins theory of evolution[/b], the most socially disturbing idea of modern science.[/QUOTE][URL=https://books.google.nl/books?id=KfJetAWVJJsC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=This%20led%20directly%20to%20Darwin%E2%80%99s%20theory%20of%20evolution&f=false]Source[/URL] [QUOTE]Though [b]aspects of Newtons legacy will forever endure, the Newtonian mechanistic worldview, and what we today call "classical physics," is chal- lenged by modern physics[/b]. But the mechanistic worldview, our Newtonian heritage, [b]still molds our commonsense view of the physical world and shapes our thinking in every intellectual sphere.[/b] We now focus on five "commonsense" Newtonian stances. [b]Quantum mechanics challenges each of them.[/b][/QUOTE][URL=https://books.google.nl/books?id=KfJetAWVJJsC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=This%20led%20directly%20to%20Darwin%E2%80%99s%20theory%20of%20evolution&f=false]Source[/URL] In case you didn't catch it. What is the default worldview of mainstream science? [QUOTE][i]But the mechanistic worldview, our Newtonian heritage, [b]still molds our commonsense view of the physical world and shapes our thinking in every intellectual sphere.[/b][/i][/QUOTE]How does Darwinism relate to this default Newtonian worldview? [QUOTE][i]This [b]led directly to Darwins theory of evolution[/b], the most socially disturbing idea of modern science.[/i][/QUOTE]and what is happening to the worldview Darwinism is built on? [QUOTE][i]Though [b]aspects of Newtons legacy will forever endure, the Newtonian mechanistic worldview, and what we today call "classical physics," is chal- lenged by modern physics[/b].[/i] [i]We now focus on five "commonsense" Newtonian stances. [b]Quantum mechanics challenges each of them.[/b][/i][/QUOTE][/qb][/QUOTE]Swenet I believe we are in violent disagreement. First I said way back on page one than ancient phiolosophers did not see a break between "science" and "religion" or spirituality. Europeans believed this (albeit under the Christian church) right up until Newton, who was an alchemist, which itself goes back thousands of years and blends both physical phenomena and spiritual precepts. The issue is that by saying "Newtonian" you aren't really talking about Newton as in breaking science from religion. Newton was an ardent Christian and spiritual and did not himself see the world as separated in such a way. So the whole idea of "Newtonian" did not come from Newton, it came from others AFTER Newton and again is partly the result of RATIONALISTS integrating themselves into Newtons concepts and promoting it as "Newtonian". I keep saying this and you keep missing the point. And when it comes to Newtonian versus Darwinian, note how Darwinian means including every aspect of Darwins DIRECT beliefs, including "direction", whereas Newtonian only generally is based on Newton's ideas even when it contradicts Newtons actual thoughts and writings.... This is why I don't accept these terms blindly without understanding who defined them, why and how they came about. Most people who accept "darwinism" are generally referring to evolution meaning speciation not necessarily "direction". In fact, the word rationalism also suffers from the same problem of variation in meanings in philosophical circles. Hence, Rationalism in its purest form means "without superstition or belief in mythical beings or forces". It was reinforced in the 18th and 19th century as a way to distinguish European thought processes and the newly defined "scientific" processes, from those of so-called "primitive" cultures. However, like many other things in philosophy, there are many varied definitions of rationalism. But even with that, most of these philosophical concepts are linked to ancient Greece, which is seen as the birthplace of "western rationalism". Meaning, superior "western culture". The problem is the Greeks weren't purely rational and neither were Europeans or most of their history, hence Newton and alchemy. Therefore, as a result of European propaganda trying to frame the newly emerging concept of "science" into a "rational" framework, many aspects of what was traditional philosophy and metaphysics which always dealt with theoretical concepts such as thought and belief in gods or alternate states of things, were broken off into a separate category of study. But those "mysterious" or cosmological views never went away and were always part of the process of studying nature going back to ancient times. It is just that Europeans segregated and categorized these things to make it seem as if they were separate when the reality is they were always part of the SAME process of cognitive thought evolution. I have been saying this since page one. Yes there are schisms, but you over emphasize them because you don't understand that there have always been various camps within European thought and everybody was not "Newtonian" in the strictest sense of the word. In fact, the discovery of quantum theory is a result of so-called "newtonian" research into optics. So I don't get all caught up into these contradictions of Europeans trying to categorize and over emphasize one set of ideas over another. Some of the time there is overlap between seeming distinct camps. [QUOTE] An approach which is perhaps more promising, in terms of its ability to connect to explicit subjects of debate in the period is the definition of rationalism in terms of ratio, i.e., reason. The rationalist, on this telling, distinguishes between the faculty of sense/imagination and the faculty of pure reason/intellect. The empiricist collapses them. On this way of drawing the distinction, Cartesianism turns out to be a paradigmatic form of rationalism (good), and Malebrancheans get to be rationalists for the same reason other Cartesians do (also good). Further, Hobbes and Gassendi offer explicit arguments in favor of empiricism in this sense, and Berkeley and Hume appear to presuppose such an empiricism. Still, there are some odd consequences. The question whether Locke is an empiricist turns out, on this approach, to be a difficult interpretive question rather than a straightforward textual one, though Locke does strongly suggest empiricism (in this sense) by his intentional collapse of the distinction between ‘species’ and ‘notions’ (EHU §1.1.8). A stranger consequence (which perhaps suggests that this account should not be pushed back before the mid-17th century) is that the traditional Aristotelian/Thomistic picture turns out to be a form of rationalism, despite holding that “there is nothing in the intellect which is not first in the senses,” since it does affirm a distinction between sensory and intellectual representations. One more curious feature of this approach (which is the reason I am thinking about it today) is that it turns out that Newton offers an explicit argument for this kind of rationalism in De Gravitatione:* If anyone now objects that we cannot imagine extension to be infinite, I agree. But at the same time I contend that we can understand it. We can imagine a greater extension, and then a greater one, but we can understand that there exists an extension greater than we can imagine. And here, incidentally, the faculty of understanding is clearly distinguished from imagination (Janiak 38). [b]Now, in a way this is not surprising. In Descartes (and Plato), as in Newton here, there is considerable evidence that the affirmation of rationalism (in this sense) arises from reflection on the phenomenology of mathematics: many people who have a great deal of experience in mathematics report the experience of encountering an object not revealed by the senses, hence one supposes that there is a faculty of understanding that has objects of its own, distinct from the objects of the senses.[/b] Perhaps these objects may be somehow derived from the senses, in a manner consistent with the Aristotelian dictum (“nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses”) as the Aristotelians interpreted it, or perhaps not. Nevertheless, the idea/notion of extension contemplated by the intellect is unlike anything known by the senses, for the senses know only particular images of extension, all of which are finite. Hobbes, Berkeley (at least on my reading), and Hume all hold, on the contrary, that this mathematical activity, which may be somehow and in some sense about infinite extension, nevertheless employs, as the mind’s immediate object, only finite determinate sense images. These images, which according to Descartes and his followers are the objects of the faculty of sense/imagination and are not even properly called ‘ideas’, are in fact all the ideas there are. It can be seen now why Locke’s empiricism is somewhat ambiguous: although he rejects the species/notion distinction, whether his abstract ideas are imagistic in this way is highly controversial. One can also see here that Newton’s rationalism (in this sense) is part of a broader tension in the development of physics, which to some degree continues to this day. [b]Galileo, Leibniz, and Newton all insist that a proper approach to physics must be both mathematical and experimental, but math itself is, of course, precisely not experimental. For Newton (at least in De Gravitatione), just as much as for Descartes, many of the fundamental concepts of physics (most notably, in both cases, extension) are mathematical concepts attained by the pure intellect and differing radically from anything perceived by the senses.[/b] Yet (against Descartes, in agreement with Galileo and Leibniz) Newton holds that the laws of physics, employing those concepts, must be derived from sensory experience. And of course even Descartes holds that the laws ought to be applicable to what we experience by means of the senses. So there is no obvious contradiction between Newton’s rationalism and his empirical/experimental methodology, but there is an apparent tension, or at least a collection of difficult philosophical questions (which are, again, still very much alive) concerning the very concept of (what we now call) applied math. [b]Though these sorts of questions are by no means absent from (e.g.) Plato, the mathematization of physics through the 17th century suddenly places them among the most important questions in natural philosophy, a role they had not previously occupied.[/b] [/QUOTE] https://philosophymodsquad.wordpress.com/2017/06/27/newtons-rationalism/ At the end of the day, what all of this is about is the rise of new models of cosmology based on theoretical mathematics. The issue is and the contradiction is you cannot directly experience or observe the phenomena in these theoretical mathematical models. So there is no guarantee that they are going to turn out to be true. Yet because the rationalists to some degree viewed mathematical symbolic models as "superior" to superstition and other forms of symbolic thought about cosmology, you get into these somewhat contradictory trains of thought. [QUOTE] A new debate has recently emerged as to whether string theory admits even a single rigorous solution that includes a cosmological constant, as we find observationally in the real universe. The debate follows on a period of several decades during which the mathematical richness of the theory has been advanced considerably but with very limited connection to experimental testing. This experience inspired a new culture of doing theoretical physics without the need for experimental verification. Given our academic reward system of grades, promotions and prizes, we sometimes forget that physics is a learning experience about nature rather than an arena for demonstrating our intellectual power. As students of experience, we should be allowed to make mistakes and correct our prejudices. .... snip .... [b]Identifying the boundaries of our knowledge is more exciting than taking pride in past knowledge. And only our contact with reality itself through experimentation can direct our notions into new realms. No one, not even Einstein, would have imagined quantum mechanics without the experimental data that led us to this unexpected notion of reality.[/b] [/QUOTE] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/theoretical-physics-is-pointless-without-experimental-tests/ As far as science vs religion goes it comes down to faith vs proof. Science as in how we currently define it, requires proof in observation or practice. Religion or spirituality is based on faith which does not require proof. The two don't mix. Most people today keep the two separate and so did folks like Einstein and Newton. This is why I said practicing science is not looking for proof of "god" in a direct tangible sense. That said, the cognitive ability to imagine and believe in abstract concepts like various "gods" is the same ability that allows you to imagine/develop and believe in theoretical concepts like "string theory" or even "rationalism" and "newtonian physics". And on top of that the separation of philosophy, psychology and from "hard" sciences like math and physics are ultimately part of the result of the "scientific revolution" in Europe which came up with distinct categories of disciplines regarding thought about the nature of reality and the mind. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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