by slimboyfat 175 Replies latest social entertainment
Maintaining the assertions in the OP has necessitated resorting to dishonest games like pretending not to know what flat means.
I agree, when people start saying "well it depends on what you mean by the term dinosaur" then all bets are off.
Most of the questions contain some assumption, not least of which is that people are using the words in their commonly understood usage.
Simon, language can be closer or further away from depicting reality. But it can never match it perfectly. No use of words can completely eliminate ambiguity, ever. That's just one reason why no description of anything should be described as 100% - either in terms of confidence or probability. It's both.
Cofty there are senses in which the earth is flat rather than round. Just because it is round from one perspective does not make that the only valid description. The mouse eye view as it were, that's just one thing. Additionally our imagination should be able to conceive that future ways of conceptualising the world might find more use for the concept of flat than the concept of round. Both of which are technically inaccurate of course. I am not saying that a future discovery might show that the ancients were right to think that the earth stretched out flat like a scroll opened up. Because that's how it looked to them and made sense. But rather that our own conception of the world as a round object in space might come to be viewed as just as quaint because of the discovery of more information. How on earth could that happen? I don't know, obviously. Which is rather the point. Allowing for the possibility of future discoveries to surprise. They wouldn't be both "discoveries" and "future" if they didn't surprise! Because the new discovery has not been made yet. It's like asking an ancient person to understand gravity and the idea that we are stuck to a ball held in space apparently by nothing. (Spontaneously from his own head, not sitting down with him with a modern textbook) It sounds like pure nonsense. The idea just would never occur to him. Maybe there are aspects of reality pertaining to the nature of the earth we similarly cannot get our heads around. New information that would alter our current arrogant insistence that the most satisfyingly accurate way to describe the object we live upon is to call it a sphere. Who knows! Who can rule it out? Everyone who has climbed a hill or a mountain knows the sensation of being positive that they can see the peak clearly in front then. Only to reach the "peak" and discover it was a false dawn (to mix metaphors) and the "true peak" lies yet further ahead. The conception that the earth look like an "oblate spheroid" sure looks like the "peak" in terms of accurate descriptions of the earth. But then the idea that the earth was like a scroll, flattened out and with four corners, made sense too, back in the day. So who's to say ours is the absolute last word on the matter, that we've finally cracked it once and for all? Who would be so daft, really?
"Daft" to assert that we will never go back to believing in a flat earth?
FFS!
Did you read what I wrote? I have just explained that any new conceptualisation of the earth as "flat" would not involve going "back" to a more primitive understanding of the world. It would involve a reconceptualisation of the world just as radical and surprising as the one involved in the shift that resulted in seeing the world as a sphere rather than a flat scroll (or tortoise or whatever) in the first place. Of course it would take a rather surprising discovery for that to happen! That's the point. Such discoveries are surprising by their very nature. An ancient person couldn't conceive of the world as a sphere in "empty" space because he knew nothing of gravity. It would sound like pure nonsense. Is it out of the question that we are similarly missing something "obvious"? Is it out of the question that what looks like the peak before us might not in fact be the final summit? We need to allow at least for the possibility. Or at least we should. The earth is definitely a sphere and that is all there is to be said about the matter. Truly only a fool could even make any such statement 100%. Ditto all the other questions to varying degrees.
Yes I read it. It was a load of prevarication and obfuscation.
I am not interested in semantic debates about the precise definitions of simple words.
From the OP - The earth is a sphere rather than flat in shape.
This was a very very simple statement. It is 100% true. It is a fact. Not a "so-called" fact; an actual fact.
There are more careful ways of expressing it but that changes nothing.
So you absolutely rule out the possibility of any future discovery to surprise in this matter? Truly what a small (but definitely spherical!) world (view) you inhabit.
I am getting tired explaining this. For all the reasons I have explained above it is clearly stupid to insist that the earth is definitely not flat. It's daft.
@Slimboyfat
I like your open-mindedness and your willingness to question things and look at things from new angles.
Although my examples of cats being obligate carnivores, dinosaurs existing and all humans dying might not have been great examples, I still feel that there must be some facts about which we should feel 100% certain.
I'd also like to ask Paul From Cleveland's question because it went unanswered and is in danger of being forgotten:
Slimboyfat, what is your percentage of certainty that Jehovah's Witnesses are the true religion?
Edit: Have you determined a percentage?
It depends what you mean by true. In the traditional sense of true I would put it less than 1% I think. But if I used a broader definition of true, a more pragmatic one, maybe bump it up to 5%. I've explained how JWs could turn out to have the truth in the past but I think people thought I was joking. Which I was of course, but that doesn't mean I wasn't being serious.
What do you think? I should have included that question for sure!
it is clearly stupid to insist that the earth is definitely not flat - SBF
We don't speak the same language.
It depends what you mean by true - in the traditional sense.
What do you think? - 0%
The WTS may be correct that the trinity is nonsense, they may be correct when they criticize the Catholic Church, but every doctrine unique to the WTS has either not happened, or requires a huge inexplicable leap of faith because it is not supported by evidence.
