Just curious how many gods did the pagans have?
That’s ridiculous. The orderliness of the universe and its intelligibility is one of the basic tenets of the Greeks and Romans from the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers to Pliny, Galen and Ptolemy, and its cause was sought from the beginning. The baton was picked up from the classic philosophers and scientists first by Islamic scholars and then by Christian thinkers and empiricists. From where do you think that Thomas Aquinas gets the bulk of his physics and a good chunk of his metaphysics?
**Foundation For Science
buffalo, I don’t know whether you are among those who regard the moon landings as a hoax. However, if you are, you should know that the NASA space program has shown there is no inverted bowl over a flat earth; it has also shown that Brahe was right to dismiss the crystalline spheres of the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic firmament. You cannot look to Basil of Caesarea for accurate cosmology.
The Catholic Encyclopedia.
And what makes you think that either this website or Dr Rizzi’s opinions on the history of science (assuming that they are being correctly represented by the website - the book seems to be about something else entirely) are worth a second glance. Linking there does nothing to redeem your error.
What article? Be specific?The Catholic Encyclopedia.
****Christianity: A Cause of Modern Science? ****
Basil the Great, ca. 330 - 379 A.D.; and John Philoponos, 6th century A.D.
Nah, NASA were careful to aim all their space shots through the windows in the Firmament.
This was one of the implications of Galileo’s discovery of the moons of Jupiter. If there were moons orbiting Jupiter, then Jupiter could not be set in a solid crystalline sphere - the moons would have smashed through it. The other implication was that not everything in the universe orbited around earth, which had until then been the case in the Ptolemaic universe. Even without Galileo’s heliocentrism, the old model was in trouble.
Of course.
In his exegesis of Genesis 1, Basil is attempting a literal interpretation of the firmament (according to him, a physical, stiff but thin spherical membrane around the earth that divides water on the earth from the rest of the infinite water in the world), but his argument is fatally undermined by his erroneous physics, some of which derives from debased Aristotlian physics and some of which he or his contemporaries have invented. His cosmology is wrong and his attempt at a literal exegesis fails utterly. It’s a perfect example of how it is not reasonable to take everything in Genesis literally.
I linked it because StA ridicules the ancients and I was trying to show the ancients were not the simpletons she claims.
I acknowledged in my first post on this subject that the modern scientific method emerged in Christendom (although it is clear that neither Catholic nor indeed Christian philosophy and worldviews were solely resposible - Catholic apologists are keen to minimise the important influence of Protestant willingness to question received authority, and rationalist thinking in the 17th and 18th centuries was critical too, and many of the most important advances are a consequence of free-thinking in the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment - note that it took 1500 years of Christianity before the modern scientific method began to emerge so it must need more than a Christian worldview), so by posting all of these links you are evading the point. The point is that you claimed that pagans did not think that the universe is orderly which is blatant nonsense, given, for example, the debt Scholasticism owes to classical metaphysics and physics.
I see it will be pointless to link the countless references that would disagree. I can’t even remember know why we are even arguing the point. LOL.
Well, in the light of modern scientific knowledge, Basil’s cosmology is utterly wrong and his support for a literal interpretation of the firmament is untenable. Of course he wasn’t a simpleton but he was wrong about the firmament and nearly everything he says about the natural world is mistaken in one way or another. The foundations of his argument for a literal interpretation of the firmament are rotten. The ancients were as just as clever and as stupid as we are, but since they pre-dated the modern scientific method their physics and cosmology were hopelessly wrong. You seem to be confusing ignorance with stupidity.
Although you are one of the people on CAF who make mistaken statements most often, the day you actually admit you are wrong about anything, the firmament will fall to earth.
C’mon, your whole basis for being here is to prove Revelation wrong with an a priori restricted bias.
That means you can’t provide such a reference and you are attempting to divert the issue with a personal comment. You are sooooo transparent.hecd2:
C’mon, your whole basis for being here is to prove Revelation wrong with an a priori restricted bias.
Uhhh? Who made the personal comment?
Got that reference yet that states that Socrates, Plato, Aristotle (Greek), Galen, Ptolemy, Pliny (Roman), Aryhabata, Brahmagupta (Indian), Ibn Sahl, Avicenna and Alhazen (Islamic) did not believe that the universe is orderly?