But they don't need to save the classical Greek model of the solar system. All they want is clearly to save the Christian scriptures.

Worse for what?

Perhaps it is worse for those of us who like to find simple interpretations in our physics, but the people who defend geocentrism are not concerned with physics, they're concerned with theology.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Quoting myself from another thread:Joshua is the one about the Sun "standing still in the sky". 1 Chronicles: "Fear before him, all the earth: the world also shall be stable, that it be not moved."

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

That's right.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

The Bible implies these things only if we assume it's a scientific document attempting to describe the physical reality of the universe according to modern or contemporary scientific principles. If we don't make that assumption, the Bible could simply be describing everyday phenomena in layman's terms.

Taking the various passages you cite in context, and taking the Bible as a whole, I don't see much reason to assume that it's a scientific treatise in the way you suggest. I think that it's generally a mistake to read the Bible as a scientific work, whether to claim it gets the science right or to claim it gets the science wrong.

I'm not suggesting anything. I was discussing the views of geocentrists, who do see the Bible as a literal description of the physical world. Don't attribute their reasoning to me.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I was discussing the views of geocentrists, who do see the Bible as a literal description of the physical world.



Thats the way I read it.

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But you're sure the astronauts are lying; you just don't seem to know what they're lying about. jayutah

Some items in our library end up with literally hundreds of people in the hold list. Once even one person has requested the item, though, no more renewals.

Actually, those hundreds of people in line for things make it seem even less likely that anything bad's going to happen to our library any time soon. (Barring natural disasters and such, of course!)

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I should probably just go to the library around the corner, but it's incredibly small. I've honestly mistaken it for a qwik stop before lol. While my preferred library looks like it's built to stand the test of time, the one around the corner looks like it'll just be a fresh foundation after the next category 1 hurricane lol.

With respect to the public learning curve that folks go through - I have also observed that an - "interesting story" lasts longer in many brains than a debunking explanation - even a very good /effective debunk.

Wayne

Your not wrong there!

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But you're sure the astronauts are lying; you just don't seem to know what they're lying about. jayutah

You know, I recall seeing a study where they found that the average person, when watching a show that debunks or verifies myths, will falsely recall myths that were disproven as having been proven. Additionally, I think it said they only remember the bits of information that were in support of the myth, even though those points were countered.

I suspect that the selective memory and/or difference in memory relaxation time may account for some of the cyclic nature of the reappearance of urban legends like the classic "Proctor and Gamble/Satan connection".

Wayne

And don't forget all those "Mayan calendar predicts end of the world in 2012" threads! There must be about two dozen of those by now.

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Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

I apologize.

Additionally, I think it said they only remember the bits of information that were in support of the myth, even though those points were countered.

True. I actually had the opportunity recently to discuss this phenomenon with a psychologist. It relates to the almost irresistible urge to do things we are told not to do.

When the waiter in a restaurant brings your order and says, "Don't touch the plate; it's hot," you feel the urge to touch the plate. Why? Because your brain interprets the waiter's advice first by constructing the mental representation of the action, and then applying the maxim to negate it. In other words, you hear: "Touch the plate -- not." Before one part of your brain gets to "not," another part of your brain has already processed "touch the plate," and is beginning to program the appropriate motor activity. There is a brief moment of cognitive gear-clashing before your conscious mind overrides your unconscious urge to do what the water "told" you. Merely expressing the idea of an action begins to realize that action.

This has a more practical application in child-rearing, where parents can learn to carefully phrase warnings for children so that the motor instructions are not prominently activated. But it also has a bearing on the understanding of why people take away a belief in a strange thing after being instructed in why that strange thing is wrong.

After being told the statement that's wrong, e.g., "There should be a crater under the lunar module's engine," part of your brain is already beginning to encode that statement for recall even as you're hearing why it's false. The negatory information is a johnny-come-lately to the cognitive process.

It also means my dialogical organization at Clavius is probably counterproductive in the long run despite its apparent success.

But we need to realize that we must present information differently to people who don't know anything about the Moon hoax theory. If we're telling them about the conspiracy theory for the first time, we need to present the counterevidence first. If someone already knows about and believes the conspiracy theory, the point-counterpoint method will work.

So for someone who says, "There should be an crater from the exhaust under the lunar module," you can respond, "No, contrary to what you intuitively believe, the exhaust plume does not have that strong an effect."

But for someone who doesn't know this debate, a better approach would be, "Rocket exhaust in a vacuum can be surprisingly gentle, and much of the thrust can come from pressure effects that leave no fluid-dynamics traces on nearby surfaces. That shoots a big hole in the naive expectation that the lunar surface would be greatly damaged by a hovering lunar module."

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

Why? Because your brain interprets the waiter's advice first by constructing the mental representation of the action, and then applying the maxim to negate it.

That ascribes a pretty specific mechanism to the brain. Has psychology discovered such a sequence that takes place in the brain, or is it just one of the better and longer-lasting speculations about what might be happening?

I ask not to be controversial, but because the human tendency to invent and ascribe underlying mechanisms to explain complex phenomena is what I think may be a factor in conspiratorial thinking.

I don't know about that specific case, but the same general principle applies to other mental processes. For instance, I believe it has been conclusively demonstrated that the phenomenon of deja vu is caused by out-of-sync activity of two brain processes that normally occur together (or in the reverse sequence). It is, literally, remembering something before you become aware of its real-time occurrence.

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Bring back Firefly!

"It is quite clear that Occam's razor does not sharpen in your pyramid." (Nicolas)

"Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." (Paul Simon)

Whenever I go into my university's academic area stacks these days, I feel like I'm in a ghost town. I get the concept of "ivory tower", but this is ridiculous. I'm not certain any of these great books have ever been touched, much less read, in decades. I'm probably just in an academic wasteland, but it makes one ponder the state of learning.

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"fifty is nifty" , unknown poet