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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Philosopher who wrote (18425)	7/17/2001 7:06:57 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

If you assume God is real, then everything that exists and happens is God's behavior. Not necessarily. God could have created the universe and then walked away and taken no further part in its development. But if you do assume that everything that exists and happens is God's behaviour, you must reach some very depressing conclusions about God.

To: The Philosopher who wrote (18425)	7/18/2001 7:45:46 AM
From: thames_sider	Respond to of 82486

A quick interjection here (I'm on a course break and barely have time to skim): The earth does not rotate around the sun in any "true" way, but only because we choose to look at it that way. Ptolemy's astronomy based on the sun rotating around the earth was mathematically equivalent to Copernicus's astronomy of the earth rotating around the sun. (I've done the mathematical proof. Have you?) Given two points in an otherwise static universe, it cannot be said which is rotating around another. So fair comment, in isolation. Now try fitting in the other planets - rotating about the earth, then the sun. Use elliptical orbits, not circular, and ensure that you fit in all known observations (sunlight falling at correct angle, eclipses, etc). Then do the maths including the path of the solar system around the galaxy, and indeed the other relative motion to the core. I haven't done it. But at first pass, I'd suggest that the Ptolemiac, Earth-centred mechanism could not be made logically consistent, unless you ignore all laws of Newtonian mathematics and gravitic forces, and have planets reversing, varying velocities, rotating around non-existent centres, etc... I'd love to see how you'd get the epicycles in ;-) If one model works and is consistent, in itself and with other observation (Einsteinian details aside), and another doesn't - or can be forced in only if much other verifiably accurate science is excluded - it's rather more than simply "Occam's Razor", IMO.