Posted by Pat on October 22, 1999 at 06:55:04:
In Reply to: Kepler, Aristotle, and Sagan posted by Tom on October 21, 1999 at 15:31:16:
: Pat:
: Aristotle, who was a remarkable thinker, had some notions incompatible with science of any kind. He was remarkably resistant to finding things out by checking them out. Hence, he was convinced that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones, and that women had fewer teeth than men.
: The Medieval Scholastics overexaggerated this flaw, of course, but the notion of "go and see" was alien to the Aristoteleans in large measure because of his disdain for evidence.
: Tom: I suspect that you're drawing on popular history here as well. I'm familiar with the "teeth story" from Bertrand Russell. It may be true, but I also know that Russell played pretty free with the historical facts.
Pat:
Someone seems to be pretty free with the facts, but we'll get to that in a bit.
Tom:
Read Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems. . . . You'll notice that Galileo admonishes the Aristotelian doctors for being overly preoccupied with observation, and not sufficiently attentive to reason. Galileo, at least according to Alexandre Koyre, was something of a Platonist himself.
Pat:
So was Kepler. The point is that Galileo, unlike the Platonists, he actually went out and tried things to see what would happen. I'm trying to remember the point at which Galileo criticises the Platonists for being unPlatonic. It sounds a little counter-intuitive.
Tom:
Granted Aristotle made lots of mistakes. That's not my argument, nor am I saying that Sagan does not discuss aspects of Kepler's thought that have platonic roots.
Pat: Sagan's greatest scientific I find your new statement puzzling in light of that one. Tom: Pat: Tom: Pat: : Pat: : Tom: Yes, and he implies throughout that it is the evil religious influences that draw Kepler away from the truth. Pat: Regrettably, the Church did sometimes act against the interests of science. The Pope did recently agree that the actions against Galileo were unwarrented. (Galileo was an obnoxious person, who published a thinly-disguised attack on the Pope himself; if he had not done this, it is likely that he would never have hand the truth suppressed by the Church) Tom: Pat: Tom: Pat: : Pat: Pat: The minister at one point disagrees with evolution, but says he's an "agnostic" on the age of the earth, which may ruin his credentials for you. Nevertheless the fact that Sagan makes such a man an admirable person is instructive. And it pretty much eliminates any possible motives you impute to him. Tom: Pat: Tom: Pat: Doesn't sound like the Sagan you've constucted, does it? But it's true. Read the book.
Let's see. You said:
hero of the 17th century is Johannes Kepler--who was a Platonist through and through--but Sagan never acknowledges this.
My objection is to the caricature the Sagan and others paint of the Church as anti-scientific and playing no part in the evolution of modern science.
I have read Sagan's remarks that the Papacy actually funded the scholars who proved tht the Donation of Constantine was a fraud.
You might want to read my article on this "The Galileo Legend as Scientific Folklore" QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH May, 1999. Popularizers of Sagan's stripe consistently misrepresent the history of this period in what seems to be fairly deliberate attempt to promote the science vs. religion myth. I mention Plato and Aristotle because they are usually denigrated in such stories because of their association with Church theologians.
We are getting a little off topic now; it appears that for you, Sagan (like Aristotle for secularists) is a sort of anti-icon for things you don't like.
: Nonsense. Sagan goes so far as to recount Kepler's early attempts to fit the motion of planets into a scheme using the Platonic solids. And he also points out that Kepler was so tied to the Platonic notion of the perfection of the heavens that he resisted almost to the very end the fact that the planetary orbits were ellipses and not "perfect" circles.
Never says that they are evil. Closest he comes to this, is a quote from Augustine denouncing scientific curiousity.
He acknowledges the platonic influences (which are almost always associated with Christianity in secularist propaganda) only to denigrate them. Kepler's triumph in the episode occurs when he shakes off the platonic obsession with perfection. What Sagan does not acknowledge is the enduring influence of a platonic way of thinking in modern science. Incidentally, the postmodernists are quite willing to recognize this, and that's precisely why they're so anti-science.
Yep. Like the Platonists, they prefer "reason" to evidence. "Reason" is so much more amenable to human desire. Science has the unfortunate property of telling people the truth, at least in its proper realm. And that gets in the way of political correctness.
They recognize the enduring legacy of what is fundamentally a religious world view at the foundations of scientific rationality.
Tom, all scientists know that the scientific impulse is essentially religious. Even the atheists know this. It is built of wonder and curiousity. The nice part is that we get to actually satisfy that curiousity. Your hostility is misplaced. It is people who try to put a religious spin on science who are the bad guys, not the scientists.
: As you can see (read Cosmos) that's so much prune product. Sagan was entirely aware of Kepler's Platonic roots and discussed them openly. And Sagan's novel Contact, far from denigrating science, favorably compares a decent and caring fundamentalist preacher to a shallow scientist, and has the protaganist at the end of the story, discover that the universe did indeed have a maker. Hardly the picture you paint of him.
:
: Tom: I have seen Contact and liked it very much. I haven't read the novel, but have been told by others that its more virulent anti-religious elements were toned down for the movie. Incidentally, the preacher is not a fundamentalist–if you're using that term in its historical or theological sense. A fundamentalist is usually a biblical literalist.
Read the book. Sagan didn't write the screenplay. He did however, give a fundamentalist minister both compassion and a sense of humor in the book.
I don't see any indication of this in that character. I think you misread the ending of the film.
Didn't see the film. If you want to argue the motives of the guy who changed the story, I couldn't say about him. I'm telling you what Sagan wrote. Maybe you should read the book?
There is no acknowledgment on the protagonist's part of a Creator. She recognizes that her scientific world view is faith based. She doesn't encounter God on here trip through the worm hole. She encounters a scientist-god disguised as her father.
The person she meets recognizes that she is unwilling to accept a religious idea (although the alien freely admits that they, too seek the numinous), so he gives her a clue about how to find out for herself. And she does so, and in the process, learns that there indeed was a creator.