Christian 'Mythology'.

[torridon]

Hi torridon,
Thanks for the above post.

I agree with you that for each mathematical concept we can say "it did not start to exist and it owes nothing to concepts of space and time."   Surely, Pythagoras's theorem was true before he discovered it and (as far as we can know) true at the beginning of time?

Is our recognition of twoness + twoness = fourness instinctive to all humans, or is it something we have to be taught?    Whichever, it is not something dependent upon what "we agree".   It is true whether we know it or not.   The role of mathematical concepts in the successes of science demonstrates that they are objective truths independent of the human mind.

In that regard, mathematical concepts are similar to moons around Saturn.   The later are physical realities, true before we discovered them (i.e. objective).    Mathematical concepts are abstract realities, true before we discovered them (i.e. objective).

If non-euclidean geometry is not an objective reality, then how was Einstein able to use it to discover gravitational waves 100 years before we could confirm their physical existence.

God bless

I'd agree things exist outwith human mind, the moons of Saturn, as you say. With abstract realities maybe we need to tread more carefully around words like 'exist'.  I'd suggest that we could put it this way : things exist externally to us, and there are relationships between those things that could potentially be expressed in a suitable language, maths, say.  However, the formulation of those relationships in terms of abstract principles is something that takes place in a cognitive mind.  Beauty exists in the eye of the beholder, and abstract principles are another form of cognition in the mind of the understander.

[SusanDoris]

I think that: before life began and if there was a stone and another stone and another stone and another stone which happened to be on the ground with no other stones nearby, there would be no   living thing to look at them and form a counting system and then to conclude there were four of them. A counting system to be objective  must somehow exist independently of all life.
How would you, Rosindubh,  show that it was objective I wonder?

[ippy]

Hi ippy,
Thank you for your post.

'Twoness' and 'two' are different things.  The former is abstract and objective, the later is physical and objective.   Human brains identify the former by intellectual understanding, the later by physical senses.

If mathematical concepts were not objective, science would not be objective.   But abstract maths has enabled discovery Higgs field, gravitational waves etc as well as development of Quantum Mechanics, so both are objective.

God bless

Just look up delusional in the O E U and stuff your pointless, empty G B; I suppose if you are delusional it doesn't dawn on you, but there, carry on if it keeps you happy.

ippy

[Walter]

Just look up delusional in the O E U and stuff your pointless, empty G B; I suppose if you are delusional it doesn't dawn on you, but there, carry on if it keeps you happy.

ippy

the problem is though, when this nonsense is peddled to young informative minds who don't know any better.

[ippy]

the problem is though, when this nonsense is peddled to young informative minds who don't know any better.

I agree and I'm not very happy about these new schools being allowed to have 100% faith/belief intake; no wonder the R C lot promised to build a number of new schools, like rats up a drainpipe, anything to keep up their intake of new recruits.

I mean look at how successful these organisations are at indoctrination, they have inbuilt the parents to act like automatons that actively indoctrinate their own children into indoctrinating the next lot, on and on, the best bit of that is none of them think they've been indoctrinated.

ippy

 

[Walter]

I agree and I'm not very happy about these new schools being allowed to have 100% faith/belief intake; no wonder the R C lot promised to build a number of new schools, like rats up a drainpipe, anything to keep up their intake of new recruits.

I mean look at how successful these organisations are at indoctrination, they have inbuilt the parents to act like automatons that actively indoctrinate their own children into indoctrinating the next lot, on and on, the best bit of that is none of them think they've been indoctrinated.

ippy

 

I used to know a head teacher of a catholic school who was the source of some heated arguments around the dinner table when he came to visit , and you are exactly right he thought I was the crazy one when I made such a suggestion .
Mind you , he always brought some decent wine with him ,so we had at least one thing in common .

[ProfessorDavey]

I used to know a head teacher of a catholic school who was the source of some heated arguments around the dinner table when he came to visit , and you are exactly right he thought I was the crazy one when I made such a suggestion .
Mind you , he always brought some decent wine with him ,so we had at least one thing in common .

There is another deeply pragmatic issue with the expansion of faith schools - that being the difficulty in getting quality leadership when the schools require the Head (and other senior staff) to be practicing and 'upstanding' members of their faith community.

There was actually a letter to this effect in the Times (I think) the other day, noting how few applicants there are for Headships in faith schools and fewer still of quality. The letter writer had extensive experience in recruitment of senior leaders into schools and his comment was that those being appointed to faith school headships wouldn't even have made the long-list for the non faith schools he had experience of.

This rings true with my own experience, particularly the RC schools that my sister in laws kids attend in Wales - not sure this is the case now, but until recently none of the schools her kids attended had a permanent head because they couldn't recruit. And at one point all three RC senior schools in their locality didn't have a permanent head.

It didn't help that one of the schools appointed a head and then revoked the offer when they discovered the appointee had split from his wife (not not divorced just split up). And that was back in 2014 - they have not had a permanent head for 3 years now, running continually with an acting head who wants to retire but gets persuaded to stay on again and again as they fail to recruit a permanent successor to the previous head who retired in Dec 2013!

[Walter]

There is another deeply pragmatic issue with the expansion of faith schools - that being the difficulty in getting quality leadership when the schools require the Head (and other senior staff) to be practicing and 'upstanding' members of their faith community.

There was actually a letter to this effect in the Times (I think) the other day, noting how few applicants there are for Headships in faith schools and fewer still of quality. The letter writer had extensive experience in recruitment of senior leaders into schools and his comment was that those being appointed to faith school headships wouldn't even have made the long-list for the non faith schools he had experience of.

This rings true with my own experience, particularly the RC schools that my sister in laws kids attend in Wales - not sure this is the case now, but until recently none of the schools her kids attended had a permanent head because they couldn't recruit. And at one point all three RC senior schools in their locality didn't have a permanent head.

It didn't help that one of the schools appointed a head and then revoked the offer when they discovered the appointee had split from his wife (not not divorced just split up). And that was back in 2014 - they have not had a permanent head for 3 years now, running continually with an acting head who wants to retire but gets persuaded to stay on again and again as they fail to recruit a permanent successor to the previous head who retired in Dec 2013!

You might have noticed in my post I didn't mention his wife , he was at the time going through a divorce . It almost cost him his job . If I remember correctly he faced a series of interviews with the church and school governors to explain himself , it almost did for him . Poor chap.

[ProfessorDavey]

You might have noticed in my post I didn't mention his wife , he was at the time going through a divorce . It almost cost him his job . If I remember correctly he faced a series of interviews with the church and school governors to explain himself , it almost did for him . Poor chap.

I really is totally unacceptable - in no other job would you be allowed to revoke a contract on the basis that the appointee had split up from his wife, or even been divorced. And all the more unacceptable when you recognise that the post is 100% paid for out of the public purse, so why on earth the church has any business in making these kinds of discriminatory judgment is beyond me.

[ippy]

I used to know a head teacher of a catholic school who was the source of some heated arguments around the dinner table when he came to visit , and you are exactly right he thought I was the crazy one when I made such a suggestion .
Mind you , he always brought some decent wine with him ,so we had at least one thing in common .

This very thing was brought up at one of the synod meetings at the later half of last year, so I've read and one of the contributers to this meeting mentioned redoubling the efforts of their schools to gain as many new recruits as they can, I've not got that verbatim but this was certainly their train of thought they were conveying where schooling is concerned.

They should be teaching children to think for themselves rather than teaching their dogmatic nonsense, any kind of introduction to religion should be for the 7/8 year olds and older not one day earlier than 7 or 8 years.

ippy   

[Walter]

This very thing was brought up at one of the synod meetings at the later half of last year, so I've read and one of the contributers to this meeting mentioned redoubling the efforts of their schools to gain as many new recruits as they can, I've not got that verbatim but this was certainly their train of thought they were conveying where schooling is concerned.

They should be teaching children to think for themselves rather than teaching their dogmatic nonsense, any kind of introduction to religion should be for the 7/8 year olds and older not one day earlier than 7 or 8 years.

ippy   

its frightening, and if I were religious id call it 'evil'.

[Rosindubh]

I'd agree things exist outwith human mind, the moons of Saturn, as you say. With abstract realities maybe we need to tread more carefully around words like 'exist'.  I'd suggest that we could put it this way : things exist externally to us, and there are relationships between those things that could potentially be expressed in a suitable language, maths, say.  However, the formulation of those relationships in terms of abstract principles is something that takes place in a cognitive mind.  Beauty exists in the eye of the beholder, and abstract principles are another form of cognition in the mind of the understander.

Hi torridon,
Thanks for your post.

I agree maths is a "suitable language" for expressing "relatationships between things" in science.   It appears to be the only way we can even think about such relatationships in modern physics.

But mathematical concepts are much more than a mere language.   No language of words can alone discover new things beyond our imagination, while mathematical concepts can.   No language of words can alone offer an objective analysis of the physical Universe, while mathimatical concepts appear to do so.

Science is a work in progress, many questions to be resolved, much to be expected, but unless mathematical concepts (underlying the symbols) exist independently of human minds, then much of modern physics would be subjective circular reasoning.   If the science is objective, then the maths from which it comes must also be objective (exist independently of the human mind).

God bless

[Rosindubh]

Just look up delusional in the O E U and stuff your pointless, empty G B; I suppose if you are delusional it doesn't dawn on you, but there, carry on if it keeps you happy.

ippy

Hi ippy,
If there is an error in my post, why not point it out so we can debate it.   Name calling is not a rational argument.

God bless

[Rosindubh]

I think that: before life began and if there was a stone and another stone and another stone and another stone which happened to be on the ground with no other stones nearby, there would be no   living thing to look at them and form a counting system and then to conclude there were four of them. A counting system to be objective  must somehow exist independently of all life.
How would you, Rosindubh,  show that it was objective I wonder?

Hi SusanDoris,
Thanks for your post.

If current scientific theories of particle physics are true and objective, then the mathematical concepts on which they are based must be true and objective.    If these mathematical concepts are true and objective, they needed to be true and objective at the beginning of timr before humans existed.

Does that answer your question?
God bless

[SusanDoris]

Hi SusanDoris,
Thanks for your post.

If current scientific theories of particle physics are true and objective, then the mathematical concepts on which they are based must be true and objective.    If these mathematical concepts are true and objective, they needed to be true and objective at the beginning of timr before humans existed.

Does that answer your question?
God bless

No, I don't think so - too many 'ifs'!! What is your  understanding of 'objective' in this context?

[torridon]

Hi torridon,
Thanks for your post.

I agree maths is a "suitable language" for expressing "relatationships between things" in science.   It appears to be the only way we can even think about such relatationships in modern physics.

But mathematical concepts are much more than a mere language.   No language of words can alone discover new things beyond our imagination, while mathematical concepts can.   No language of words can alone offer an objective analysis of the physical Universe, while mathimatical concepts appear to do so.

...

Well I think I will just have to disagree with this. The difference between what we invent and what we discover is sometimes a subtle one; I see maths as a language we have to invent so that describing numerical relationships becomes easier to communicate from person to person.  This sprang from accounting for trade originally, early merchant traders needed words like two and four and plus and equals and subtract so that all parties to a trade could be confidant they all agreed on the details of the trade. When we invent new branches of maths now we are continuing in this; we invent string theory as a mathematical description of matter below the level of quarks.  We invented fractals in order to better describe and hence calculate the length of the British coastline, originally.

Having said that we invent mathematical language to describe what is out there, clearly there must be something out there to warrant description and what is out there is lots of stuff and that stuff stands in all sorts of particular relationships with each other.  I think this is what you are getting at, that there are laws of nature that we discover; Einstein for instance realised the equivalence between matter and energy and was able to describe it using the language of maths as e=mc².

[Walter]

Hi Walter,
Why are you so upset?   If there is an error in my post, why not point it out so we can all debate it?

God bless

Rosindubh,
try this,
instead of trying to make an 'intelligent' argument that you hope will lead us all to the conclusion you want, why don't you just make a statement of what you believe the truth is and show us why you believe it .
I don't like following false trails .

[Rosindubh]

No, I don't think so - too many 'ifs'!! What is your  understanding of 'objective' in this context?

Hi again SusanDoris,
Thanks for your post.   Which of the two 'if' do you not accept?

Look at the first - "if current scientific theories of particle physics are true and objective".   Would you not agree that CERN's success with the Higgs field indicates they are as near to true and objective as humans can currenty achieve?   

If you accept that first 'if', then surely the second follows?   That is how logic goes - 'if that, then this'.

God bless

[SusanDoris]

Rosindubh

No, that still doesn't tell me how you understand and define the word objective. As far as I am concerned - and will stand corrected if shown to be incorrect - objective means something that exists whether or not humans are here to observe and name it/them or not. How can 2 + 2 = 4 have existed before humans? 

[Walter]

Rosindubh,

what is your objective for posting on this thread ?

[Nearly Sane]

Rosindubh

No, that still doesn't tell me how you understand and define the word objective. As far as I am concerned - and will stand corrected if shown to be incorrect - objective means something that exists whether or not humans are here to observe and name it/them or not. How can 2 + 2 = 4 have existed before humans?

I think the 'name it' is an unjustified jump. Does that mean when there were no humans there were no fish because they weren't named 'fish'?

[Outrider]

Rosindubh

No, that still doesn't tell me how you understand and define the word objective. As far as I am concerned - and will stand corrected if shown to be incorrect - objective means something that exists whether or not humans are here to observe and name it/them or not. How can 2 + 2 = 4 have existed before humans?

There's a reasonable amount of evidence to show that the Earth and the moon both existed in broadly their current forms long before humanity evolved in order to develop counting systems.

Are you suggesting that those two rocky bodies were not 'two' rocky bodies before anyone could formulate a language to name 'two'? That's like suggesting that there were no kangaroos before we had the word kangaroo... but why would we come up with a word for something that wasn't there?

There was no-one (that we know of) to appreciate the fact there were two rocky bodies orbiting the sun, but there were still there, and there were still two of them.

O.

[ProfessorDavey]

I think the 'name it' is an unjustified jump. Does that mean wgen there were no humans there were no fish because they weren't named 'fish'!

Exactly - 2+2=4 prior to the existence of humans although there wasn't an appropriate way to describe it as such.

[SusanDoris]

Thank you for above posts. I wonder what Rosindubh will say.

[ippy]

Hi ippy,
If there is an error in my post, why not point it out so we can debate it.   Name calling is not a rational argument.

God bless

I'm a bit busy at the mo and I will be for a while, I'll get back to your post eventually, in the mean time I suppose if describing someone's condition to them, using the correct word amounts to name calling, I must be guilty then.

All you're arguing is a convoluted argument with yourself, a bit like when a smoker is standing on their head, turning themselves inside out in an effort to justify to themselves hanging on to a wholy unjustifiable habit and I really don't see that there is any good reason to assist you with your very similar struggle with delusion; the smoker wrestles with any excuse they can find, you're doing much the same.

I don't really like bad language very much but now and again it's apt, so please fuck off with your god bless, does it make you feel superior in some way? Or make you feel I'm above all of that, regardless of what is said to me? So typical of a holier than thou, type person.

ippy