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Peter_Plato
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Interesting what you talk yourself into believing about what people “back then” thought, as if your privileged modern perspective affords you such certainty.
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Tomdstone
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Atypical RC.When you say your religion is “other” exactly what does that mean?
Or is the “other” so vague you cannot define it?
Or are you hiding behind the “other”?
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Tomdstone
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Thanks a lot PP for this paper. I will need a little time to study it further, but at first glance it appears difficult to reconcile many concepts here with the life and words spoken by Jesus, who was, or rather is, God.
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Peter_Plato
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Psalm 145
I lift you high in praise, my God, O my King!
and I’ll bless your name into eternity.
So David, apparently thought he could literally lift God up “high” just by uttering words of praise from his lips? Thought he had magical powers, then?
Why would he even need to lift God “up” if God was already “up” there in Heaven? Seems a little uppity for David to think he was capable of lifting God to where God already was, no?
Well, unless David was using “high” as a metaphor, in which case your whole theory about people “back then” just disappeared like a puff of incense smoke.
What, too, is that about blessing God’s name into “eternity,” as if David knew something about what that implied?
Sounds very much like he is relating space “high” to eternity as if he knew something about spacetime connectedness? Hmmm.
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RGCheek
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Evidence for other universes has been found, but not the ‘Many Worlds’ theory which as I understand it is based on a sort of QM probability model.
space.com/25100-multiverse-cosmic-inflation-gravitational-waves.html
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Tomdstone
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Don’t Catholics believe the Nicene Creed today? I know that there are some Protestant bishops who take many beliefs stated in the creed as metaphors, such as the Divinity of Jesus.
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Aloysium
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- sigh -
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Tomdstone
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There are models, mathematical and/or physical, which affirm the existence of a multiverse, but that is not the same as saying there is evidence for such. Anyone can build a toy model which is isomorphic and correlated to many properties of the existing world, but that does not of itself, prove that the model is the correct one because any mathematical model necessarily leaves out certain features which would be too complicated to include.
From the paper you reference" “It’s possible to invent models of inflation that do not allow [a] multiverse, but it’s difficult.”
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RGCheek
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But the CMB ‘rings’ are evidence that the multiverse models are correct.
How did you miss that?
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Bradski
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The literacy rate in America is currently about 98%. Pretty much the same as any western country. And people in America (and elsewhere) have some really weird ideas about how the world actually works.
In biblical times, in rural areas, the literacy rate would have been effectively zero. Overall, including scholars and priests and those rich enough to afford an education, it would have barely reached 3%.
Extrapolate from what people believe now when almost anyone can read and has more information literally at their fingertips than it is possible to digest to what the situation would be like when not only could no-one read, but only a tiny percent of the population actually had anything to read.
People weren’t stupid in biblical times, but we do tend to forget that, apart from what they needed to know to survive, their knowledge of the world and how it works wasn’t just minimal. It was non existent.
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Tomdstone
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Right.
Of course, the multiverse has been proposed as a possible explanation of various irregular phenomena in the universe such as for example, the anomalous cold spot in the CMB. The idea is that anomalous features like the cold spot are evidence that one or more “other universes” — at some distant point in the cosmic past — bumped into our universe causing a bruising or cold spot. Please see:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMB_cold_spot
It is hypothesized that a supervoid along the line of sight of the cold spot is an explanation of the cold spot. And according to Laura Mersini-Houghton of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “Standard cosmology cannot explain such a giant cosmic hole” and the WMAP cold spot is “… the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own” caused by quantum entanglement between universes before they were separated by cosmic inflation.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMB_cold_spot
However, according to the recent paper: “Can a supervoid explain the Cold Spot?” by
Seshadri Nadathur, Mikko Lavinto, Shaun Hotchkiss, and Syksy R¨as¨anen,
(Dated: August 21, 2014)
arxiv.org/pdf/1408.4720v1.pdf
the conclusion is that the void found in the WISE-2MASS galaxy data is not capable of accounting for the Cold Spot temperature through the second order Rees Sciama effect. You can read this yourself at:
arxiv.org/pdf/1408.4720v1.pdf
For collection of data leading to detection of the supervoid, please see:
Detection of a Supervoid Aligned with the Cold Spot of the Cosmic
Microwave Background
arxiv.org/pdf/1405.1566.pdf
Further, for an older paper arguing that there are number of problems with the multiverse concept including the fact that the multiverse is observationally and experimentally untestable, please see:
Issues in the Philosophy of Cosmology
George F R Ellis.
February 5, 2008
arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0602280v2.pdf
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tonyrey
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Egypt is an example of a culture which had advanced knowledge of aspects of how the world works but Jewish society was more advanced in a far more important respect. Amidst the primitive ideas of justice and sacrifice there emerged a pure concept of God and** love for others beyond one’s family**. It was refined yet further by Christ’s teaching that we should care for everyone because we are all children of the same Father and should respect the beauty of nature as a precious gift - in stark contrast to the view that we exist by chance as naked apes entitled to exploit with impunity other animals and our environment in order to satisfy our own desires and ambitions.
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Bradski
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You’re falling into the same mistake.
In ancient Egypt levels of literacy were very low, less than one per cent. britishmuseum.org/explore/themes/writing/literacy.aspx
That’s probably less than the literacy of the people living in the Middle East in biblical times. To say that ‘the Egyptians knew how the world worked’ is like taking Neils Bohr and saying that Scandinavians are expert at quantum theory.
This is not a controversial point I’m making. But it’s one that flies under the radar of almost everyone.
Check this out from CBN:
It’s clear that many Americans – including Christians don’t know their Bible. Just look at the numbers from a recent study:
"More than 60 percent of Americans can’t name either half of the Ten Commandments or the four Gospels of the New Testament.
Some 80 percent including “born again” Christians believe that “God helps those who help themselves” is a direct quote from the Bible.
And 31 percent believe a good person can earn his/her way into heaven.
According to a recent George Barna study, most self-proclaimed Christians don’t believe that Satan or the Holy Spirit actually exist. And even though the Bible is very clear about the sinless nature of Christ, 22 percent believe that Jesus sinned while he was on the earth". cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2009/June/Do-You-Know-Your-Bible-Many-Christians-Dont/
If those sort of percentages represent Christian knowledge today, with access to everything you’d ever need to become informed, what do you think it was like a couple of thousand years ago?
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tonyrey
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Bradski
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Non existent for the vast majority of any given population at that time. And most of the people who said that they knew what was going on were wrong.
Actually, not much has changed really.
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tonyrey
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Even in prehistoric times there is evidence that our ancestors’ interests were not confined to what they needed to survive. Their drawings and paintings reveal curiosity about the meaning and purpose of natural events as well as an intuitive grasp of the difference between mind and matter. Art is not a luxury but a necessity because it expresses and often fulfils our intellectual, emotional and spiritual needs." Man doesn’t live on bread alone…".
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inocente
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Reading what is written rather than what we might have liked to be written is a good way to read any book. And with scripture, it can’t be revelation unless we let it reveal.
Sounds like you’re a substance dualist a la Descartes. The CCC does not agree with souls existing without bodies: 365 The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the “form” of the body.
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inocente
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That’s kind of what I was talking about. The average Christian would not only find it incomprehensible, but completely irrelevant to their faith.
If any of that stuff was remotely important for salvation it would be in revelation.
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Bradski
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I’m not sure that curiosity and finger painting equals knowledge.
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inocente
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I agree, probably the vast majority of Catholics and all other Christians think of heaven as a place up above.
I don’t believe it has much to do with literacy though. We can only see the world through human eyes, only relate to God as human beings. Humans haven’t changed much at all since we first came down from the trees. We might think we’re better than cavemen but we’re not, we’re exactly the same under the covers.
There have been attempts to produce uber-rational societies, such as the USSR, but they all failed. Rational is what rational does, and being rational doesn’t require us to deny our humanity. Imho.
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