That's interesting and all, Dr. Awkward, but we've already determined that Hawking is a pompous jackass.

Ace wrote:

big_dave wrote:Hawking got a medal from the Pope for that statement.

JPII however, was rumoured to loathe Hawking.

Right, like JPII ever actually sat down and had a conversation with Hawking

Well, I didn't mean personally. I meant politically.

JPII was something of a new breed of Pope, who saw things as purely political and wasn't too interested in the ideas behind them or even "doctrine". In all likelyhood he probably saw quantum physics and the new schools of Mathematics as competition for philosophical elbow room as words such as "relativity" and "quantum" and "uncertainity" spread across to the philosophy and ethics journals, pages that the man probably read a lot more frequently than scientific papers about black holes and quasers.

But this is all abstraction from the event, Hawking meeting the Pope was a bizarre moment in Catholic history and the flowerly language and zeitgeisty media hype just seem to mask the lot of political infighting. It's like if He Man came back in the late 1990s and tried to hold a peace summit with Ash from Pokemon about the future of the nation's youth.

"I hear this guy is popular now, let's give him a medal before he says anything bad about us"

JPII's "tragic mutual incomprehension" seems to be a more accurate description of Vatican City politicking than it does about the theology/science divide.

and if they did, wouldn't that just be the most ridiculous thing ever??

I'm sure that there is a handful EA forums threads that might compare.

But let's cut to the chase. Hawking discovered a whole bunch of shit about the weirdest places in the universe, then from the comfort of his mechano-man chair he went on to become one of the most entertaining writers of popular science.

Whereas JPII contributed massively to the spread of AIDS, ignorance and Polish Conservatives.

Hawking wins.

Picturing a comedy scenario where someone spills Holy water on Hawking's kraftwerk box and it goes "Bzzzckwkkkzzzkk" and JPII replies "I grew up near Bzzzckwkkkzzzkk, on my Aunt Czzkyskskzz's goat farm. It is a beautiful village"

steve wrote:There are very few things left that the desperate theists can cling to in wishing for something with a supernatural origin. One of them is the beginning of existence.

It's only a matter of time before that too is revealed not to be magic, but if history is anything to go by, they still won't shut up.

I don't know Steve. The beginning of existence? The grand explanation for everything? There's another epistemological contest on, headed in the opposite direction, which aims to show that there is no such thing as unmediated knowledge of the world, that all methods of human understanding are constructs... pragmatic and expedient but in no way successful in extricating what we know from how we know.

And the latest on understanding dark matter and the origins of the universe... dream on.

tocharian wrote:

steve wrote:There are very few things left that the desperate theists can cling to in wishing for something with a supernatural origin. One of them is the beginning of existence.

It's only a matter of time before that too is revealed not to be magic, but if history is anything to go by, they still won't shut up.

I don't know Steve. The beginning of existence? The grand explanation for everything? There's another epistemological contest on, headed in the opposite direction, which aims to show that there is no such thing as unmediated knowledge of the world, that all methods of human understanding are constructs... pragmatic and expedient but in no way successful in extricating what we know from how we know.

And the latest on understanding dark matter and the origins of the universe... dream on.

The epistemological "issues" come from the use of mundane language and metaphor to describe scientific ideas. Such as "beginning", "existence" and "everything".

Dr. Geek wrote:That's interesting and all, Dr. Awkward, but we've already determined that Hawking is a pompous jackass.

Incidentally, this is the thread that ultimately convinced me that the Clocker Bob/Rick Reuben character is a total put-on. I mean, someone smart enough to effectively utilize every logical fallacy in the book when arguing on the internet must be aware when he's fallen into self-parody, right?

big_dave wrote:The epistemological "issues" come from the use of mundane language and metaphor to describe scientific ideas. Such as "beginning", "existence" and "everything".

I wouldn't make light of that, especially if you're dealing with something that defies understanding in terms of language and metaphor.

tocharian wrote:

big_dave wrote:The epistemological "issues" come from the use of mundane language and metaphor to describe scientific ideas. Such as "beginning", "existence" and "everything".

I wouldn't make light of that, especially if you're dealing with something that defies understanding in terms of language and metaphor.

Well, in many ways the thing that defies understanding exists in the language and nothing past it, or outside of the psychology of the speaker and the listener.

There is nothing in the universe that could possibly "defy understanding", the same as there is nothing before, after, above, below, right or left of the universe.

big_dave wrote:There is nothing in the universe that could possibly "defy understanding", the same as there is nothing before, after, above, below, right or left of the
universe.

ibid