Flat Earthers vs Scientists: Can We Trust Science? | Middle Ground
Jubilee | 11 Oct. 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7yvvq-9ytE
Two sides, none of them both Geocentric and Globe Earth, none of them both Christian and Globe Earth, from what I saw on the "step ups" before they began to speak. One potentially a non-Christian flat earther, unless I missed something.
I take on both on where they are wrong. Turn by turn, along the timeline of the video.
Against Christian Flat Earthers:
3:06 I agree it's not a fancy story, the verse talks about continental plates and the mud on them getting folded so mountains could rise and water could run down from them after the global Flood.
Not a flat earth passage.
3:16 I verified that LXX has "guron" which means circumference or "round of" ... a feature common to both flat circles and globe shapes.
Not a flat earth passage.
3:18 "there is a difference between a circle and a ball"
There is a conceptual difference between either and "circumference" which is a common feature of both.
I find the LXX more reliable than the NIV.
3:24 It seems at least the "vault" translation in Strong is compatible with the Greek "guron"
Strong's Concordance
chug: vault, horizon
Original Word: חוּג Part of Speech: Noun Masculine Transliteration: chug Phonetic Spelling: (khoog)
Definition: vault, horizon
NAS Exhaustive Concordance
Word Origin from chug Definition vault, horizon
NASB Translation circle (2), vault (1).
Note: cannot see the vault of heaven walks, Job 22:14
IF you insist that it means "vault" (half globe shaped object) in Job, you cannot also claim Earth is flat from this, it would be at least a half globe, at least potentially.
If a half globe shape, why not a whole globe shape, for both Isaiah and Job?
For Proverbs, it possibly does mean circle, but if so was a stage in the construction of sth ...
3:26 "there are over 200 scripture in the Bible that point to a flat earth"
All I have so far seen are, even at utmost literal interpretation, perfectly compatible with a globe shaped earth.
But if Wendell likes to hand over the full list, I'll be fine with ploughing through that too.
Against Science Believing Heliocentrics:
3:47 "is very old and was initially posited by people of a pre-scientific age"
Like most good ideas, except minor detail.
3:55 "since then we have learned .... when that happened"
If you mean 13.8 billion (or earlier) for universe and 4.5 for solar system, those "we have learned" are not credible, at least not outside your own charmed circle (pun not intended by me initially, but accepted).
4:05 "modern humans"
He clearly does not mean "contemporary" or "people who are alive now" but more like people who are "up to date" or "fashionable" ... not a very good argument.
4:16 You are aware that the idea of God of the Gaps is not from any well balanced professor of logic, but from two very unbalanced, one could say unhinged, "historians of ideas" of a very impressionistic and inexact kind?
Nietzsche when scolding priests and a Scottish I think Free Church pastor who was scolding Christians refusing to rally to the newer and clearly unbiblical understanding, his only weapon being ridicule, you are aware that the second coined the exact phrase and copied Nietzsche about the idea?
Meanwhile, while I don't dispute Franklin's observations on electricity, I consider them as an incomplete explanation of why the lightning strikes in a particular place at a particular time.
No lab experiment has shown that the lightning could not have come five minutes later or earlier if some spirit had willed otherwise.
4:22 "we couldn't attribute those lightning bolts to God, now we had to attribute them to the real science"
The comment is intensely dense on two levels.
a) Before Franklin, the immediate agency behind a lightning or other damaging things in storms was typically held to be a demon, not God, however, the demon was obliged to defer to God's will;
b) while I already said, the factors now held as decisive are not the only real ones, it's also highly inaccurate to say it's the "science" rather than specific objects of science (static electricity and some other) that you have to attribute anything about the lightning to. Just as there is a difference between God and a Theologian, there is a difference between atmospheric electricity and the sciences about it.
4:37 "why is just the Bible correct?"
When it comes to history, I hold many other texts to actually be if not correct at least close enough.
Mahabharata, Ramayana, the Iliad and Odyssey, perhaps the Aeneid too, and I have no qualms in seeing Sigurd / Siegfried narratives, pagan and Christians, as about a real event in the Age of Migrations.
When it comes to direct and real access to the one God who will tell the truth, the other texts even if taken as entirely historic, typically do not even pretend to this. The exception is Hercules wrestling with Thanatos in the tragedy Alkestis. That one could be plagiarised, via Phoenicians, from Elias raising the son of a widow. For origin stories about the physical world, the Theogony atributes the knowledge to nine pretty girls who, at the first encounter, felt they had to honour all the gods, including "Kronos of the crooked thoughts" or "crooked mind" and who specifically warned the poet they could tell both truth and lies. (Ulysses being known to have lied on occasion is also a reason to not take scenes in the Odyssey too seriously if the only source Homer gives if Ulysses telling it to Nausicaa). And the Voluspa (which seems to draw on both Hebrew Genesis and apocalyptica, and on Babylonian Enuma Elish and Egyptian Osiris lore), the purported source is simply the kind of medium you can find doing Voodoo or Santeria these days. Also not comparable to writers both performing and observing miracles before the eyes of the first audience or at least purported such.
The question was posed by someone not very familiar with what he was comparing the Bible to.
In the back and forth:
To Shelley:
4:48 Actually, more than one of these religions (and pretty specifically the one in the Norse religion) is very explicitly flat earth.
If "earth" or "Midgarth" is one of three concentric and narrowing upward platforms on a very huge tree, Yggdrasil, that pretty much clinches the Norse cosmology to flat earth.
With the Bible, there is a pretty consistent avoidance of taking sides. If you wanted a non-Christian explanation, you could argue, Hebrews in 500 BC or little after were set between Babylonian (and Persian?) Flat Earthers, and Phoenician Round Earthers, and made a decision to avoid taking sides. I obviously believe the texts go back to before this situation, as is born out by the traditions surrounding the texts (a criterium nearly always, if not quite always, followed for non-Biblical texts from Antiquity).
To Ali:
5:15 "it is wrong to infer or deduct scientific readings out of those books"
Ali is here obviously relying on a consensus within his specific religious community, specifically liberal Islam, and then making that kind of a law for other religions too.
Given some of the "science" info from the Qoran (leaving that to David Wood to explicitate), I think that's a prudent thing for them to do, but not very prudent for all other religions, specifically Catholic Christianity to follow their example.
It's so annoying with this Muslim superiority complex "this is how we do religion vs X, so therefore everyone else has to do so as well ..."
To Wendell:
5:49 "Second, we were kind of excited to see the curvature ourselves. Most people know Earth is a sphere but don’t get to witness the evidence so beautifully through telescopes across bodies of water."
This is Jim Underdown also talking about Salton Sea.
My views from a shore in Denmark near the ferry boats confirms that the Sound between Zealand and Scania has curvature over the distance, since I could see, in binoculars, the lower parts of the ferrys appear last or disappear first.
It may be noted that the Sound is somewhat larger than Salton Sea.
37,8 km is the distance by the now extant bridge and most of it is not land on either side, but bridge across the water. That's 23 and a half miles.
You bet you can note the curvature.
To a Question:
5:55 Q: "the internet has played an important role" etc.
Yes and no. (I am a Globe earth Geocentric).
Without the internet, I would not have come across the Distant Starlight objection to Young Earth (taken as implying a Young Universe, which I do).
Thanks to the internet I have been able to confront myself to lots of objections to my view and see why they didn't refute it.
However, between getting confronted with the Distant Starlight problem, trying (as Kent Hovind still would) "a very skinny triangle" and presenting in the continued debate next day my new found Geocentric conviction, I did the thinking offline, and St. Thomas Aquinas and a Heliocentric Astronomy book from 1980 were far more important. Thanks to St. Thomas, I knew most scholastics (or at least he, but he didn't tend to untypical positions, and I later confirmed from Riccioli, most scholastics) believed celestial bodies moved by angels. Hence my wry remarks about Franklin's view on lightning strikes previously. The astronomy book showed proper movements clearly surpassing the one known as parallax (which is in fact a movement componenent, obtained by comparison to the medium aberrational movement, not a movement observed in and of itself, unlike the other). Barnard's star moves more than 10 times as far one way in a year in terms of angles of observation as alpha Centauri two way, each way in a half year.
If angels can move things like Barnard's star, why not the ones giving "parallax"?
Against Christian Flat Earthers:
6:37 "it's not easy to come to a consensus"
One of the ways in which a bad position shows itself as such is the difficulty of reaching consensus on how it works with observations all people agree on.
- like earth being of flat or at least not-close-to-complete-globe shape
- like many-body problem of a purely materialistic system
- like (over centuries) gravity between fix stars (infinity and big bang being two ways of dealing with it)
- like chemical evolution or abiogenesis
- like human language evolving from ape communications ....
Against Science Believing Heliocentrics:
7:25 — 7:34 A) "the information from someone who decides to start a website or make a youtube video is not reliable"
1) OK, what exactly do you mean by "info" here?
Facts? What if I get all raw facts from reliable sources or sources you would admit are reliable?
Arguments? The problem is, you are treating argument and conclusion as if they were raw fact. Not a good idea. Argument has to be "cogent" and not "reliable" ... and my raw facts are reliable. Even from your pov. To flatten out both into the category "info" is misleading, and calculated to give a biassed conclusion.
2) This is magic thinking. You can give any amount of comparisons between advantages of the scientific publication and disadvantages of the single truther, but none of them cogently proves that the output has to be more reliable in the former and less reliable in the latter. It's still a question of free will and good or bad judgement swaying the output to more or less reliable independently from those factors.
Ba) "toothache / dentist, car problem / mechanic"
Testable by results.
Bb) "questions of cosmology / astrophysicist"
1) Not testable by results. You don't stay in toothache bc of wrong cosmology and your car doesn't stay broken because of wrong cosmogony.
2) Astrophysics, unlike planar astronomy, is mostly not even observational, but deducing things from how other things look differently.
11:18 "I don't think you guys are uneducated, I think you are wrongly educated"
As opposed to Flat Earthers just speaking of uneducated vs shill about Globe Earthers, this is how I, as a Geocentric, view Heliocentrics. Or for another matter, this is how I, as a YEC, view Evolutionists.
I've been through their education system most of my school days prior to getting out of high school. I know how it works. I know what questions you can and cannot ask at this specific teacher or to that specific one (a Christian one was more informative on Heliocentrism, and actually convinced me mostly of it up to the internet debate, an Atheist was more "shut down the debate" on radiometric and specifically carbon dating).
I also know from hundreds or thousands of debates on SSHL (especially Ängsbacken) how Atheists reason and don't reason.
I also know, Atheists have a pretty good hold over some institutions of science. It's a system pretty set up for shutting Christianity up from being heard and down from business. And this doesn't mean anyone now has to be a shill. The ones who set this up in the 19th C. were on the contrary very upfront. Carnegie, who sponsored lots of Evolution biassed research was upfront on being dissatisfied with Christianity having so much remaining influence. Ferry-Combe, Lenin-Stalin, and a few more. Every government of Social Democratic and some (alas) of Fascist persuasions, has contributed to the trend.
It's a bit how Sweden is traditionally (like before 1900) Protestant.
- Confronted with good Catholic argument, lots will at first not understand what they mean, which is not to say they have been badly presented, but even when presented best possible way.
- Lots will remain truly convinced while improvising bad faith on this or that question, where they really understand the Catholic argument and don't want themselves or others to become Catholics.
- Lots of others will stand in awe of them and imbibe bad faith as "rules of logic" -- like some were doing at the start about "God of the gaps" or "why the Bible" ...
- AND on top of that, there was a legal system actually stopping Catholics from speaking up on all issues without getting into legal trouble.
- In such a case, I'm not surprised to find a country where 98.8 % are so wrong educated they aren't Catholics.
Atheism is part of how Protestantism broke down. New Age is part of how Atheism is breaking down. Except of course as a cudgel to beat Christianity and "pseudo-science" with ...
... not quite unlike Protestantism still gets to shine as a cudgel to beat Catholicism with.
An Atheist in Sweden getting a systematic and complete explanation of a question on Christianity from a Catholic, will resort to the Protestant "where is that in the Bible?" and to a Protestant "how do you know your tradition isn't complete bogus?"
11:33 "start with a conclusion and try to cherrypick evidence"
Part parody, part projection.
And part misunderstanding "evidence" and "conclusion" as two different sets. Unless you take "evidence" as raw facts, they aren't.
One piece of conclusion is usually a piece of evidence in another discussion.
And for some reason, everyone's own world view is "conclusion based on evidence" but someone else's world view is a bit too often "evidence cherry-picked for a conclusion" ...
Normally when two world views clash, one would want both sides to admit that:
a) they claim to have at least some good evidence according to which their world view is a reasonable conclusion
b) at the same time they will view evidence presented in the light of their world view, except on the occasions when they change it (sth which I have actually done a few times).
The reasonable approach to the other is not to pretend he has a radically different relation to his world view, but instead, both sides go at some piece of evidence, until to the satisfaction of the other or the public the world view of the other is inadequate to explain it.
Obviously, this reasonable approach has been badly hurt in scientific circles since Popper said "you don't try to prove your theory, you try to disprove it"
If it only means, you subject your theory to tests that will disprove it if it's false, I agree, I've done that with palaeontology and found no pelykosaur beneath a dinosaur in any meaningful sense of "beneath" ... and I've done that with carbon dating and come up with a table for carbon rise and how to calibrate carbon dates into Biblical dates. It is simply a question of accepting the other guy's challenge. But if it means you are doing something intrinsically wrong if you argue for your own view, no, that's again a wrong education, and more or less calculated to get a biassed result. Whoever is at a given moment in tune with the majority view of his discipline can always find people arguing for his theory for him, and so allow himself the luxury to argue only against it.
To Flat Earthers:
To Wendell, a Christian:
12:09 "People end up becoming Flat Earthers."
Not on the coasts of the Sound.
However, a few people end up becoming Geocentrics — unless they start out as Atheists.
To Dan:
14:17 "show me a globe spinning with clouds and a moon"
For the globe, I don't rely on NASA, I rely on voyages on Earth.
This means, I don't think NASA had to fake anything, even if they could if needed. So, I don't think globe pictures are faked.
Time lapse pictures of globe spinning are also not fakes, but don't prove the point.
If our ordinary view of Sun and Moon and Stars spinning around our stationary Earth can be parallactic illusion (an optic illusion over time, the one you experience when watching "trees fly towards you and lag behind you" from a train or a car in movement, nothing woo woo about that), then time lapse moving pictures of Earth spinning, taken from the Moon can equally be parallax, taken from a Moon that was turning around Earth in 24 hours 55 minutes. Therefore, the pictures don't prove anything, even if they are perfectly genuine.
For globe, one could equally rely on phoning each other across the Atlantic when we have Sunset on the Old World's Atlantic coast, and verifying the angles.
Again a thing which is useless to either prove spinning or annual orbit, supposedly of earth.
Against Science Believing Heliocentrics:
14:42 "twenty years ago, the flat earth world was tiny and insignificant"
You mean the parts that were vocal and organised.
This is true about absolutely any view, world view, societal view or other.
However, the ones who are expressing with some degree of authority or responsibility a certain view are always prone to overestimate how many of the non-vocal ones are sharing it.
15:11 Ali is so "inbuvable" as they say here:
a) talking down to the Flat Earthers about the evidence and the sources they used (not robust, not reliable), without giving examples and obviously showing he does not question his own belief system for a single moment;
b) requiring the other side to question their own belief system first ...
Some people react to a disgruntled Muslim immigrant doing some act of violence, however marginal, and say "we want them out" ... what I see as worst in Muslim immigrants are people like Ali, who tend to distort our freedoms and become a very reliable police for the party line. Not very unlike what a Mollah would do in Afghanistan or Iran, but obviously for another version of Islam and not exclusively Muslim one in this case ...
- Spencer Marks
- @TheRealSpencerMarks
- But Ali is not Muslim. He rejects all magical thinking.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- @hglundahl
- So, @TheRealSpencerMarks ?
Is the late Bishop Robertson not an Anglican?
You know, the author of "Honest to God"?
Or the still alive Reverend Vosper of Progressive Christianity, is she not a Protestant?
They reject "Magical thinking." That doesn't necessarily change the religious holidays they enjoy with their family, and it also doesn't magically (hear the pun!) change his cultural background.
I can understand an internal quarrel about such and such a Muslim of more Fundie views saying "he's not a Muslim" but compared to us he certainly is a Muslim and not a Westerner.
Against Christian Flat Earthers:
16:07 "Is it going over the curvature or not?"
The higher up one stands, the further away what's over it is. I'll use the diagram as shown on the video.
[credit: https://youtu.be/Q7yvvq-9ytE?si=pJa7T5bkWZB_bpGr&t=952]
I've made the point to the late Rob Skiba too.
Dana Point, 44 feet c. 15 meters up, maybe 14.
San Clemente, "Die 39 km lange und 147,13 km² große, unbewohnte Insel erreicht eine Höhe von 599 Meter über dem Meer"
That would be near 1800 feet.
The diagram clearly would apply.
Obviously, the diagram is not my reason why I believe the earth is round, but why I believe the view from Dana Point to San Clemente Island is not a reason to not believe it round.
To a Question:
17:08 Q "scientific consensus is possible"
Yes. There is a real consensus that Latin has six cases with forms differing over large swathes of nouns and adjectives. Not meaning any noun or adjective has twelve different forms, six in singular, six in plural, but that at least in the singular no two cases will coincide for all large classes of nouns, known as declinsions.
There is also a quasi consensus that "cum venero" is a future perfect, and not a future subjunctive. However, there was equally a quasi consensus that it was a future subjunctive and no one even spoke of future perfect.
And there is a pseudo-consensus that Latin and Sanskrit both came from Proto-Indo-European. I e, there are real alternative explanations, the Balkan Linguist Trubetskoy considered Indo-European, as per between the different "branches" (like Italic-Latin-Romance and Slavic), is not a family descending from Proto-Indo-European, but a Sprachbund. So, the "consensus" is a fake news about the status questionis. Hence, a pseudo-consensus.
There is also manufactured consensus, as with Markan priority (nearly all both Protestant and non-Believers hold this, and Catholics and Orthodox who don't can be dismissed as "unscholarly" because they believe in tradition (again, this is the most common way of identifying authorship for texts from antiquity, and there are very few exceptions)).
So, scientific consensus is possible, manufactured consensus is possible, quasi-consensus is possible, pseudo-consensus is possible.
Consensus between scientists can be a scientific consensus, but is in and of itself not sufficient evidence of being so.
Against Science Believing Heliocentrics:
17:55 "there is scientific consenus on a global earth, there is scientific consensus about evolution"
The scientific consensus about globe earth is definitely not the best reason to believe it. Direct empirical evidence like voyages and time zone views of the Sun or the Moon are far superior.
The globe earth is being used as a way to boost the value of scientific consensus, not the other way round.
The scientific consensus about evolution is a cultural phenomenon with roots in 19th C. political and religious conflicts, and is no independent proof of Evolution (in the sense of Common Descent from a LUCA or gradual humanisation from not-yet-human primates, specifically apes), and also does not prove there actually is good such proof.
18:14 Dictionary dot com:
SCIENTIFIC THEORY: A coherent group of propositions formulatedto explain a group of facts or phenomena in the natural worldand repeatedly confirmed through experiment or observation.
Dan:
"its an explanation"
Correct, it says "formulated to explain" ... that means it is an explanation.
Now, the most basic explanations are not the most certain facts.
The closer you get to raw facts, to directly observed facts or facts inferred by only very few and automatic steps, the more you are in the area of things to be explained, and the less in the area of things that explain them.
The one explanation that's actually different in this way, needs only very few steps of inference, is God.
Five ways of St. Thomas, as he formulated them, and he arguably meant the "via prima" as Geocentrism, this is at least how Riccioli took it, are pretty self evident.
You have two ways of inferring about God and the daily movement:
a) as long as we have no proof that the daily movement of the visible universe around us is parallactic illusion, we take it at face value, if we take it at face value, only God explains it;
b) as long as we have no other than the topic discussed evidence for God, we cannot use God as an explanation, therefore we cannot take the daily movement at face value, must take it as parallax, and therefore the earth spins.
The problem with the first as to logical principle? None.
The problem with the second? You can take that approach at any topic given. Even if there are 100 topics on which God is an excellent explanation, and the alternative is varying between counterintuitive and outright totally lacking any model, this schmuck can go on topic after topic.
The people who do this are not necessarily shills. But they are horribly badly educated.
They are equally horribly badly educated if they consider that a theory is certain because it is an explanation.
That things certainly have an explanation does not mean the explanation my set of people have been agreeing on is the right one. Prior to Harvey, the medical corps of the universities actually had a consensus of what the pulse was. It is considered now, and I believe very rightly so, as totally exploded. It had also been repeatedly confirmed all the time between Galen (if not even earlier) and Harvey.
On 18:14, I end this post, hoping to return (but I don't often do, when so hoping) to the second half.
No comments:
Post a Comment