Posted by Tom on October 21, 1999 at 15:31:16:
In Reply to: Hmm... that one would seem to contradict your argument. posted by Pat on October 20, 1999 at 21:42:30:
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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
Pat:
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.
Tom: Yes, and he implies throughout that it is the evil religious influences that draw Kepler away from the truth. 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. They recognize the enduring legacy of what is fundamentally a religious world view at the foundations of scientific rationality.
Pat:
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. I don't see any indication of this in that character. I think you misread the ending of the film. 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.