aeroz19 said:
Wait...why is that? Did Archimedes invent Calculus and then the church burned it or something? That doesn't sound right at all...
Greetings, aeroz19,
Nolo molestare mio circlos.
These are reportedly the last words of Archimedes, "Don't disturb my circles." But his death was at the hands of a common soldier, not a religious fanatic. A recent Nova program suggested that a rendering of the first writing on a discovered palimpsest can be attributed to Archimedes, and there are suggestions that his methods of calculating conic volumes involved mathematics similar to modern-day calculus. Of course, parsing the original forays by Newton and Leibniz, it would be difficult for an historian, given no other information, to see in it the calculus used today, so I'm not especially hopeful this can be appropriately judged.
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I'm minded of some of the other comments here suggesting a logical disconnect, especially in terms of the posts by A4C. As I've had occasion to mention previously, when discussing "evolution" with a creationist, especially a young earth creationist, it's often necessary to understand the creationist is usually conflating "evolution" to mean all science which serves to disprove the literal accuracy of the christian bible. More, in defending creationism, the apparent motivation is not to examine the scientific merits, but to support the moral philosophy engendered by their faith, one firmly rooted in the ideas of absolute right and wrong from an unquestionable source.
The most difficult arguments I've ever attempted are those leading toward separation of moral precepts from the mythological matrix inherent in any religious text, especially when the discussion is with an adherent. The comparison that springs to mind is that of a bicyclist first learning to ride without the training wheels. Eliminate all of Genesis from the old testament and there remains an instructive guide on a tribal society's attempts to survive inside their cultural milieu.
Eliminate the birth and death stories from the new testament and there remain spiritual truths for that contemporaneous society, many with a well-understood provenance from earlier and surrounding societies, that remain true today. The test of a spiritual truth is whether it can stand on its own, without the training wheels, so to speak. But, oh, how difficult to remove those wheels the first time.
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Aeroz, your first question, though you seem to have received other answers, is worth addressing again. Please allow me to rephrase it. Why continue to participate in a social interaction in the presence of the irremediably bigoted?
First, for your own journey of discovery. There is more to discovery than the mere accumulation of facts; there is also the accumulation of methods, the sum total of strengths acquired in the process of walking while opposed that could rightly be described as wisdom. And second, as others have mentioned, for the lurkers such as myself. Lastly, because the irremediably bigoted may not be remain so. There is no branch so liable to breakage as that lacking the ability to bend.
In peace, Jesse