OOAK Table Tennis Forum

Who's arguing. I'm teaching. LOL

I'm just waiting for a Flat Earther to show up in one of my classes.. should be an interesting phenomenon. I'll assign some YouTube videos to watch, maybe divide the class into pro- and anti-Flat Earth teams and have them debate it... should be an interesting illustration of how science works (and how science education fails, in some cases... ).. I suppose Young Earthers are old hat these days, don't hear too much from them.

Iskandar

You could do it like the EPA under Trump wanted to do it and that was bar all Scientist from participating in the debate on global warming (oh and also ban any use of those two words).



You mean those that were told personally by God that the world is only 6000 years old? And He also told them that He was being precisely literal, and there was nothing else to be learned from the opening of the Book of Genesis and it's the two conflicting accounts of creation?

Please, don't get me started on the cretins who abuse the very book they claim to believe in. In response to the literalists, Crossan wrote: "“My point... is not that [the] ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”

I've been pondering the nonsense that is flat earth theory and just get dumbfounded that any sane person could subscribe to it. For example, if the earth is flat, how does sunset and sunrise work? If the light is falling on a flat surface, then all parts of the surface have to be lit at the same time; regardless of where on the surface - north, south, east or west - the sun must rise and set at the same times. Why is it that it's dark at this moment here in Eastern Australia but two hours different in the west? Why is it morning in Europe but night here? Surely something that "obvious" must immediately confound their thinking?

Although there are still all those flat earthers who believe Australia doesn't exist. Hey, mac! Am i real or just an actor employed to fool the sheeple?

Neither.

You're a bot. Just accept it!

I’m not sure about that. It’s easy to write it all off as symbolic given how unrealistic it seems today. But I think we have to be mindful of the context within which the stories are written or told. Many of the world’s cultures and religions have surprisingly similar creation stories which may seem quite fanciful to us today. But they came from a cultural and knowledge base that is reflective of their time. As we have seen in this thread, humans are capable of believing (literally) all manner of things if it appears to explain what they personally see and experience.

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2. S&T Black & White / Armstrong SH-I 1.8 / TSP Curl P3 Alpha R OX

Of course there are lots of similar stories across varying cultures. Indigenous Australian groups share a number of common stories across a huge continent, remarkable given the lack of physical connectedness. But shared stories and common beliefs doesn't make these things either historical or factual. Aetiological stories serve a significant, cultural purpose - they help peoples make meaning of their existence. In many respects, believing in the big bang theory is not much different from "young earthers" banging on about six days of creation; both "theories" are attempts to resolve some need we have to know where we come from.

But, the big difference - and it is BIG - is that one theory takes the accumulated knowledge of people over the centuries and builds upon it until a coherent narrative becomes evident. The other makes no allowance for advances in human knowledge and understanding. Regardless of my religious or political beliefs, I will always come down on the side of learning. Which is why I find mac's extraordinary desire to place himself at the centre of all human knowledge both ludicrous and idolatrous.

Yes I agree. I was just commenting that I don’t think we should dismiss ancient theories as pure symbolism simply because they are incongruous with our current knowledge base.

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2. S&T Black & White / Armstrong SH-I 1.8 / TSP Curl P3 Alpha R OX

Their theory of it being a ball and the oceans magically adhering to the underside of the ball - well that to me qualifies as an insult to intelligence

Their science is corrupt,much in the same way as Big Pharma mediSIN is corrupted by what amounts to self funded research. Same with NIST and 911 - investigation from their own.

I only ask for the readers of this thread to have an open mind.

To believe we live on a spinning ball when every single one of our daily observations tells us the opposite - that is trust,blind trust.

Trust is a belief.

Do your own in depth research from all sides,then and only then will your opinion not be based on trust.

Well each to their own but I don’t consider gravity to be magic and a revolving earth is the only explanation for my observations. Btw, I know that “spinning ball” sounds impressive but our planet revolves at a mere 0.000694 RPM.

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2. S&T Black & White / Armstrong SH-I 1.8 / TSP Curl P3 Alpha R OX

Oh, no! Don't go using real maths! You'll stuff up the whole thing. You need to remember that when dealing with conspiracy theorists everything you believe is wrong, particularly common sense stuff like mathematics. You go saying things like "a mere 0.000694 RPM" and you'll be leaving yourself open to claims that you believe the lies of scientists who think maths is real. If you want to convince an "open minded" person like mac, you'll need to use real science like "it looks flat to me".

Hey, mac. How come it's dark here but light where you are? Is that magic too? Or corrupt? BTW, how does someone corrupt the sun into shining in one place but being dark elsewhere?

And another thing: when I drop something, why does it always fall down? Why doesn't it go up or sideways? Is that magic too? Scientists talk about something called gravity, but obviously that can't be right, because scientists are corrupt, aren't they. What magic force causes table tennis balls to finish up on the floor rather than the ceiling?

As far as symbolism goes I would never intend that to be a demeaning term. After all that is what science does. It takes a set of observations, and generates a model of what the earth would have to be like for those events to occur. That is what the shadows on the cave wall metaphor for the Greek scientific method expresses. The difference today is we extend this through applying mathematical analysis of the shadows, and then extend our ideas with the logical method of postulating hypothesis of what else we might encounter within this model and then test these predictions. When we see the experiments are both repeatable and can be replicated we include them in the model and accept the mathematics behind them as part of the overall theory. But all this still does not remove the essence of symbolism - because the model is not a replacement for the world, it is merely symbolic of existence.

In fact as long as we rely on observational science we are stuck with this never being able to truly know the world. This is because of something called the white crow experiment. It basically contends that if you go out and observe all crows and they are all black you will be tempted to make a model that all crows are black. You can then go happily along, for thousands of years even, with this model and the resulting theories you may develop as extension, all posited on the idea that all crows are black. Then one day you observe a white crow and your theory and model must collapse. The reality did not collapse but your symbolism for the reality collapses. So what you knew was not truth but you did have a model that was very successful making predictions.

That has become the goal of modern science. The theory that is accepted is the one which provides the best predictive power. That is the one which gives us the most control over our environment. Science when it speaks of facts and knowing something is never claiming it in the absolute sense - because we have not observed the entire universe and there may be a white crow lurking out there. In fact we know we can NEVER observe the entire universe so we have abandoned the search for truth (at least in the sense of meaning that other ways of knowing - like Religion - use the terms).

It may very well be that creation took 6 days. It is just that simply claiming that, or even providing culturally useful stories to go along with the claim, does not provide us any predictive power and so science chooses to use a different model that does provide that predictive power. God may have created the universe in 6 days and then hid from us how He did it. But then what good does that do us from a scientific perspective? And because science has predictive power and not absolute truth as a goal it does not care. That is why on one hand Science and Religion are not at odds with each other but that is also why creationism is not a science, and should not be taught as one. Maybe God did reveal the absolute truth of how it happened, He just left out all the details that might helps us use it to make our world better; OR maybe he provided deeper moral and cultural truths through the story, that far surpass the usefulness of being able to control our environment. Who knows. What we do know is that we need something other than just a true belief to make something a science. We need useful predictions, and these relate back to our model and that too is symbolism.

Of course, mac is not guilty of either of these biases.

He will, of course, point out that we aren't, either..

Iskandar

Confirmation and dis-comfirmation bias is why peer review and both reproducibility and replicability are required before a theory is accepted in modern science. First you let other scientist review your work and methodology, critique your approach, offer recommendations on how to tighten your experimental controls and methods, then once you can re-do the experiment satisfying all these changes, you let go of the work and other scientists unconnected to your team do the experiments in many different labs around the world and they too must get the same predicted results of the theory or else the theory must be modified and the whole process start all over again.

You know - the same process YouTube uses before it posts a video. LOL