We are discussing creationism, are we not? Creationism is a cosmology, NOT a religion. This is why the debate over I.D. is retarded; it assumes that creationism and judeo-christianity are one in the same.

Some scientists maybe.
They take lots of idea from sci-fi writers.
Thanks.

In short, no.

what?

what you said doesn't make sense to me at all, so, can you explain before i answer?

You should have told the girl to let you finish explaining before she had her way with it.

Here is my thing.

Imagine that humans have developed an engine that can proplel a spacecraft fast enough to reach, let's say half the speed of light.
Imagine that this spacecraft is loaded up with humans and these humans take off for a star 100 light years away. (it would take them 200 years to get there).
Before leaving, they send my proposed microbial seeding spacecraft to venus, mars, mercury, titan, io,and any other place in the solar system that we can find compatible microbial life on earth to suit it's environments.
The super fast human will take 100 years to get to their destination, traveling at a speed which is relativistic and warps spacetime. They stay for 100 years and then travel back to Earth at the same speed.
In their experience, only 500 years would have gone by, but they spent 400 of those years traveling at relativistic speeds. On earth and in the solar system, time progressed much more rapidly (I d not know the exact calculations but let us imagin ethat a million years have gone by)

In that time, the whole of humanity or even life on earth may be gone.
Can you imagine that in those intervening million years some of that microbial seeding would have not only survived but flourished and by doing so altered the planets/moons/asteroids where we have seeded them?

Mars could be covered by continent sized mats of microbial life that eat iron oxide and shit out oxygen, allowing for a slow oxygenization of that planet, or venus could be an ocean of microbes converting the methane into hydrogen and carbon. who knows?

These humans could check shit out, then head right back to their original destination, coming back every 500 years to them, but every milion or so years to our solar system.

it could be done.

and it would rock.

sweet ass comic book based on this will be forthcoming from the rob instigator

What you described wasn't the practice of philosophy. Philosophizing is uninterested in modern or ancient, German or Greek. Philosophy is asking what and why. Critiquing and defending philosophers is not philosophy.

that's what Vonnegut said. he thought humanity had ruined itself and the earth with it and that we were past the point of repairing it all.

I think he gave us maybe another thousand years of existance, robably reverted back to agrarian subsistence existence, before we become a footnote in the life cycle of the planet earth
(that is why we need to take off into space!)

there was no girl. my friend was a professor, her friend was an older wrinkly woman who likely had been taught "philosophy" at a seminar, hence, rather than listen to the explanation, she refuted my terms at every point based on the fucking doctors of the church.

i was not "made to feel bad", i just thought it was stupid of her that she'd refuse to hear a theory because it was not compatible with a dead greek (an admirable one, still dead). she was great at quoting archaic sources but useless at understanding.

my question though (which you haven't answered yet, and i'm not interrogating, i'm honestly asking) is what do these archaic people have to do with our current debates? yes, they came up with certain solutions, certain modes of addressing problems, but besides that, you posted a link to the summa theologica and in spite of your answer to lurker i still don't get how you see that book as relevant to the current debate of creationism "vs." science.

i side with stephen jay gould in believing that science and religion don't/shouldn't touch each other's dicks, so i find the opposition to be a spurious one, based more on politics than on a quest for truth, but that's just me.

so again could you explain your posting of the link to the aquinas wikipedia article? because i don't see the relevance.

right, that's exactly what i posted in my question to you. so we agree on this point.

but why aquinas??

platonic ideals fucked up the development of humanity's creativity for thousands of years.
his ideas on the humours of the body fucked up medicine until late into the 19th century.

fuck them mo-fuckers.

Great idea ( for a book ), Rob.
But travelling near the speed of light also alter the mass of the object, in theory, so when they'll be back, the astronauts and their ship will be huge and they won't be able to adapt to any environnement.

I haven't said that it is relevant to the current discourse. If you read earlier, I was arguing that creationism, if it should be at all taught, should be through philosophical seminar. My reference to Aquinas was to show that creationism can be argued. Evidently there are students for and against intelligent design in every high school, or at least they are curious about it. It is in a philosophy course that creationism be allowed to be heard and argued over.

no disrespect Rob, but Earth has enough problems to deal with as it is with out dreams of terraforming and intergallactic space travel to waste even more unimaginable sums of money on.. as it is NASA spends over $1 BILLION on a program to attempt to terraform mars while we let the earth fall to shit...

"rally sight of Mars ship in darkness, cite them truth, right in front of them kids, but you're bound to see a world full of misfortune and dread.." (ie, even if the teraform mars, we will just relocate all the human problems on earth to mars)

Because it is an example of philosophy in favor of creationism. Creationism is capable of being philosophically discussed.

thank you!

And capable of being philosophically rejected.

ok, but when lurker said "i still dont' see how you can argue for creationism", he wasn't referring to the middle ages, he meant (i'm sure) in our current context. hence i found your posted link irrelevant.

the question then is to be rephrased as "how can you credibly argue for creationism today"? and you could-- but you could look at more modern sources that take into account our scientific knowlege (unlike kant's discussion on the number of stars). there was recently (the 70s?) this english physicist genius madman, fred hoyle, who argued in favor of a "constantly created" universe (and he was a theist i believe). and roger penrose i believe has argued (i'm not sure successfully) for the existence of a platonic world of ideas that makes mathematics possible...

and yes, creationism could be discussed in philosophy, i never "denied kids the right to expressed themselves" because "a girl made me feel bad". what the fuck! but am i IRATE about the fucking churchmongers fucking with kid's science education? fuck yes. it's an atrocity.

the odd thing relativity wise, is that the mass only increases as your speed increaes. it decreases as your speed decreases.
where it comes from? who knows?

it must be like the Hulk's extra mass. where does that come from? cu the fucker is at least a thousand kilograms more massive than puny banner.

that is why it will be done by private enterprise.

not governments.

Nasa served it's purpose. it can maintain hat it does.

it will take private enterprise to do the rest.
and it needs to be done, for if we as a species understand that our possibilities are far far greater than we currently imagine, we may yet realize that 99% of what we argue about is meaningless shit, and I include personal beliefs in that.

and to complement my post above, a couple of links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Ho...ical_evolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_P..._consciousness

extra:

penrose on the big bang:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEIj9zcLzp0

"one good thing about science is that you're allowed to change your mind..."

seen iyah, I think that was the central point I made in the very beginning of this tread to begin with!

why not?

microbes for the awesome rock win

I took him as how can you argue for creationism in philosophy.

Not contemporary philosophy, since we are talking about schools and not debate television or political books.

Sorry, that was a bad joke. And of course I dislike churchmongers attempting to manipulate the debate of creationism in order to perpetuate ignorance. Teaching their intelligent design is simply impossible even if it were allowed.

This is why there is only one true god and that is Mario.

May his blessings rain upon us in the form of magic mushrooms

Mario Liturgy

Today we shall read of the parable of St. Mushroom.

It it was then said upon the Lord, "Praise be upon you, Mario. Yet your princess on high is imprisoned in another fortress."

i don't get this sentence. are you implying think that kids are not equipped to practice philosophy?

That is the exact opposite of what I am arguing for.

you posted aquinas because



i think your laconism is getting the best of my reading comprehension.

I think kids are barely equipped to handle wiping their own asses, or serving deli meat at the supermarket.

how bouts that?

shit, same goes for many adults.

hopefully not the 2 of them at the same time, or we're facing a cholera epidemic.

Well first I disagree with this assumption that ancient philosophy is irrelevant to consider or discuss because it is "before the invention of electricity, before there was empirical science."

If fact I believe that considering the timeless questions discussed in antiquity have direct relevance to contemporary philosophy.

i'm not saying that it's irrelevant as a tool or blueprint for certain modes of reasoning-- it is not. the study of ancient philosophy is great to see how people have grappled with questions, and to learn their methods.

but ancient philosophy dealt with many questions that are now silly and irrelevant. like the kant example i posted (or aristotle's classification of animals).

so yes, we can model certain responses to today's problems on ancient philosophy, but i don't think we can use the ready-made responses of ancient philosophy to today's problems, particularly when our sets of problems were unavailable to ancient philosophers. today's problems require their own solutions.

can you agree with this or no, and why?

the questions of antiquity still have relevance.

Their ANSWERS however.....

Yes, but I'm talking about coming to understand today's problems in a classroom environment both in origin and as it is today. Not answering today's problems! Have you never taken a philosophy seminar course?

ok, i'll take that as an agreement


so you're talking about teaching the history of philosophy, not about practicing philosophy.

because if you're going to practice, you have to face the questions that make sense today-- and if you're going to discuss creationism, sure you can start with aristotle's first cause, but then you have to input the fact that time approaching the big bang is nothing aristotle ever imagined, and his laws of motion that justify the first cause argument do not apply to how we see the origin of the universe today-- not at all--

in the singularity from which the big bang presumably originated, there was no such thing as "time" as we understand it, and this singularity is described as a physical phenomenon, not a deity, which neutralizes the need for a deity that ancient-world first-cause begged for.

and any kid that watches science fiction today is going to know this shit and say "hey, wait a minute, aristotle's laws of motion don't apply to the big bang, and our everyday laws of causation don't apply to quantum mechanics, and his argument therefore is moot!"

and with aristotle gone, aquinas is consequently de-nutted.

aristotle would be a good mental exercise, like doing pushups, but discussing the origin of the universe, they would be better off with a paul davies text-- not because he's a better thinker, but because his information is more relevant.

let's see....
here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=C7g2WSzd6IcC&pg=PP6&source=gbs_selected_p ages&cad=0_1&sig=ACfU3U04WvlBD6CqguLrPH8emIYbWsuPN w#PPA10,M1

ps- you will notice, reading that article i linked, how davies uses the history of philosophy in his discussion (st. augustine) as a tool for his explanation which deals with current science, not the cosmology of roman times. his problem is a different one because his problem was not possible in st. augustine's time.

his argument, funny enough (i found that article by googling him, and i hadn't read before), is an argument against the first cause. and yet, he touches on another argument already provided in the history of philosophy-- god as a lawmaker of the universe. sounds both like jewish theology (god as giver of laws) and like 17th century science-- like descartes and his heirs (newton's view of god as the watchmaker of the universe, for example.) the history of the notion of scientific laws is a peculiar one, and it's steeped in theology-- but that discussion would belong in the history or sociology or philosophy of science.

Okay, we've gone too far on a tangent. My point that creationism should be addressed philosophically, I assume, is still agreeable regardless of the which texts considered.

but i had fun!


yeah.