On 4/8/2012 5:20 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
On 08.04.2012 09:04 meekerdb said the following:
On 4/7/2012 10:36 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
On 07.04.2012 22:16 meekerdb said the following:
On 4/7/2012 5:11 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
...
More to this story
http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/04/god-as-a-cosmic-operator.html
where there are results of my search in Google. The story seems to
have a happy end. Yet if Newton were a deist, then we would not have
the Newton laws.
What? You think he would have discarded his law of universal gravitation
if he had been a deist? Why wouldn't he have just concluded the solar
system was unstable and would eventually be dispersed?
"Ancient Babylonian records showed that the planetary system had been
stable for a considerable time."
"At any rate, there was a clash between the facts and Newton's law of
gravitation used without additional assumptions."
Actually not. Newton's gravity would have shown that it would have been
sufficiently stable much longer than Babylonian times - if Newton had
been able to solve the multi-body problem. It is solved numerically now
using computers.
Why do you suppose the solar system has been stable enough to be
predictable over millions of years? Do you think general relativity is
necessary to explain that?
Brent
I believe that we should consider Newton in his historical context. As far as I have
understood, because of not quite right empirical values (masses, etc.) and/or because of
low level of mathematics that was available at his time, his use of his laws did not
agree with observations.
Right. There was no "clash between the facts and Newton's law of gravitation used without
additional assumptions." There was a clash between Newton's calculations of the
consequences of his laws and the actual consequences.
Hence his use of God.
This also raises a question about mathematics that bothers me. If we assume that
mathematics (for example Newton's laws written as equations) is the result of neuron
spikes, then to me this whole story seems like a wonder. For example, try to think about
the history of Newton's laws according to the quote from
http://www.csc.twu.ca/byl/matter_math_god.pdf
(the references are in pdf)
"Materialists believe that mathematical objects exist only materially, in our brains.[3]
Mathematical objects are believed to correspond to physical states of our brain and, as
such, should ultimately be explicable by neuroscience in terms of biochemical laws.
Stanislas Dehaene suggests that human brains come equipped at birth with an innate,
wired-in ability for mathematics.[4] He postulates that, through evolution, the smallest
integers (1, 2, 3 . . .) became hard-wired into the human nervous system, along with a
crude ability to add and subtract. A similar position is defended by George Lakoff and
Rafael Nunez, who seek to explain mathematics as a system of metaphors that ultimately
derive from neural processes.[5] Penelope Maddy conjectures that our nervous system
contains higher order assemblies that correspond to thoughts of particular sets.[6] She
posits that our beliefs about sets and other mathematical entities come, not from
Platonic ideal forms, but, rather, from certain physical events, such as the development
of pathways in neural systems. Such evolutionary explanations seek to derive all our
mathematical thoughts from purely physical connections between neurons."
The same view expounded by W. S. Cooper's book "The Origin of Reason" which I have
recommended.
Brent
Finally a good quote from the same paper
"Bertrand Russell, certainly no friend of theism, concluded from his study of the
history of Greek philosophy that ‘‘Mathematics is . . . the chief source of the belief
in eternal and exact truth, as well as in a supersensible intelligible world.’’".
This shows nicely that the mathematicians have been as a fifth column all the
time.
Evgenii
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