The Last Word

[Cancer]

Re: The Last Word

 

As in, "Welcome to the monkey house."?

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

No as in my fellow colleages are monkeys (the IMOs), I'm an RMO, thus exempted.

[Cancer]

Re: The Last Word

 

Are they poo-flinging monkeys?

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

Might as well be

[L. Marcus]

Re: The Last Word

 

The typical kind.

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

well what else do you do with it?

[L. Marcus]

Re: The Last Word

 

... Compost?

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

have you heard monkeys compost before?

[Cancer]

Re: The Last Word

 

That usually called a monkey graveyard.

[L. Marcus]

Re: The Last Word

 

They're usually not secret.

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

One dsy several monkeys decided to form a cabal.

[Cancer]

Re: The Last Word

 

Kabbalistic monkeys! There's a great start to a Pulps story/adventure!

[L. Marcus]

Re: The Last Word

 

Apes, from the deep jungles of the Kongo ...

[Cancer]

Re: The Last Word

 

... with flamethrowers, biplanes, and bayonets, led by a coven of mortgage brokers.

[L. Marcus]

Re: The Last Word

 

... That last bit was uncalled for.

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

Kabbalistic monkeys! There's a great start to a Pulps story/adventure!

 

Monkeys who are mystical Jews?

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

Physics needs more theologians in the field.

[L. Marcus]

Re: The Last Word

 

The mine field then, please.

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

Typical response & to be expected; however from the opinion from an academic expert, the pervading opinion that has been passed down is wrong. Perhaps unintentionally, but still incorrect.

[L. Marcus]

Re: The Last Word

 

How can they be combined, you think? One deals with measurable facts, the other with spruced-up personal opinion.

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

The Gifford Lectures

The prestigious Gifford Lectureships were established by Adam Lord Gifford (1820–1887), a senator of the College of Justice in Scotland. The purpose of Lord Gifford's bequest to the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews and Aberdeen was to sponsor lectures to “promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term—in other words, the knowledge of God”.

Since the first lecture in 1888, Gifford Lecturers have been recognized as pre-eminent thinkers in their respective fields. Among the many gifted lecturers are Hannah Arendt, Niels Bohr, Etienne Gilson, Werner Heisenberg, William James, Max Mueller, Iris Murdoch, Reinhold Niebuhr, Albert Schweitzer and Alfred North Whitehead.

http://www.giffordlectures.org/

 

From the Gifford Lecture of 1936-1937: The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers by Werner Jaeger

 

extract from Preface (extensive boldfacing mine):

It is perhaps not unnecessary to state that the present book does not pretend to give a complete history of the early period of Greek philosophy with which it is concerned. Rather, I have concentrated on one particular aspect of this much-discussed subject, an aspect which has been unduly neglected or minimized by scholars of the positivistic school because in the early Greek philosophy of nature they saw their own likeness. Reacting against this one-sided picture, the opponents of this school have represented all Greek cosmological thought as an outgrowth of mysticism and Orphism, something quite irrational. If we avoid these extremes, there remains the fact that the new and revolutionizing ideas which these early Greek thinkers developed about the nature of the universe had a direct impact upon their conception of what they—in a new sense—called ‘God’ or ‘the Divine’. It goes without saying that the terms ‘God’, ‘the Divine’, and ‘theology’ must not be understood here in their later Christian but in the Greek sense. The history of the philosophical theology of the Greeks is the history of their rational approach to the nature of reality itself in its successive phases.

 

From Chapter one:

But throughout this period Greek philosophy—whether Platonic or Aristotelian—together with a gradually increasing amount of Greek science in Latin translation, was all that was left of Greek culture in the West at a time when the knowledge of the Greek language had vanished in the general cultural decline. If the continuity of the ancient Greek tradition was never entirely broken in Europe, it is due to the fact that Greek philosophy kept it alive. But this would not have been possible had not that same philosophy, as theologia naturalis, served as the basis for the theologia supernaturalis of Christianity. [...]

 

Originally, however, the concept of natural theology did not arise in opposition to supernatural theology, an idea which was unknown to the ancient world. If we want to understand what natural theology meant to those who first conceived the idea, we must see it in its genetic context. [...]

 

Greek philosophy is genuine natural theology because it is based on rational insight into the nature of reality itself; the theologies of myth and State, on the contrary, have nothing to do with nature but are mere artificial conventions, entirely man-made. St. Augustine himself says that this opposition is the very basis of the concept of natural theology.8 [...]

 

THat should hopefully give some idea on the definition of "natural theology" as the Greeks understood it. THe phrase above "rational insight into the nature of reality itself" would also be descriptive of modern science.

 

Again from Chapter one:

In later Greek philosophy, which is more systematically worked out, theology is so clearly distinguished from the other branches of thought that it is easy to give it separate treatment. But in the oldest Greek thought there is no such differentiation. Hence there arises a methodological difficulty; for if we really hope to understand the isolated utterances of Anaximander or Heraclitus on God or ‘the Divine’, we must always take their philosophy as a whole, as an indivisible organism, never considering the theological components apart from the physical or ontological. On the other hand, there are obvious reasons why it is here impossible to spread out all the traditional material before us and enter into all the special problems in the history of the earliest Greek thought. Since this has been done fairly often, we shall have to presuppose some acquaintance with the traditional field of research,24 We must now turn our attention to one particular side of philosophical thought, without losing sight of the whole context. In this way we may approach some of the relevant testimonia at rather close range and deal with them by direct interpretation. For herein, I think, lies our only chance of making new headway where the terrain has already been so thoroughly explored.

 

Ever since the time of Aristotle it has been one of the conventions of the history of philosophy to look at these thinkers from a perspective that emphasizes their achievements as natural scientists.25 Aristotle called them the φυσικοί (in the ancient sense of the term), which in turn led modern interpreters of the nineteenth century to understand them as the first physicists (in the modern sense). The pioneers of natural science could easily be pardoned, so it seemed, for having mingled their great new scientific intuitions with other half-mythological elements: it was the task of the modern historical mind to separate these features from each other and to select as truly relevant the scientific ideas which can be construed as an anticipation of our own empirical science. The modern historians of Greek philosophy who lived during the period of the metaphysical systems of Hegel and the other German idealists, namely Zeller and his school, dwelt primarily on Plato, Aristotle, and the speculative philosophers. The age of positivism which followed, with such representatives as Burnet and Gomperz, stressed in turn the empirical and scientific character of the early thinkers. In their zeal for proving the modernity of the pre-Socratics they have often minimized or even neglected that aspect of the first philosophers with which this book is concerned in approaching them in the perspective of the origin of natural theology. This is the perspective in which the ancients themselves saw these philosophers. When Cicero in his De natura deorum and St. Augustine in the De civitate Dei see the physicists from Thales to Anaxagoras as the first theologians, they only repeat what they found in their Greek sources.

 

My point: to try to show from a noted academic (on both early Greek thought/culture, especially Paideia and Christian thought of the early Church Fathers), that the opinion that has come down to us of these early physicists/philosophers were indeed rational in their approach to understanding reality, something that scientists, especially physicists do today. If scientists are not "rational in their approach to understanding reality" please let me know and I'll 1) shut up, 2) apologise.

 

If this piques your interest, i urge you to read the first chapter, it is very long, but well worth it. .

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

oh and I just purchased the book.

 

Well i do have his "Early Christianity and Greek Paideia" which in a way is the successor of the above book, and swan-song to his academic career.

[L. Marcus]

Re: The Last Word

 

I'd say that the natural theology would seem rational enough, except they build on a foundation of sand.

[Cancer]

Re: The Last Word

 

At that time, the strict rationalism and requirement of testability and observability hadn't evolved, so it is a mistake to try to distinguish theology from any other intellectual pursuit (well, perhaps not poetry or drama) in that era. The divergence didn't happen until after 1000 AD.

[lemming]

Re: The Last Word

 

could be a mime field.