@OmSigDAVID,
Quote:I am not aware of evidence that Thomas Edison,
Robert Fulton or Nicola Tessla woud have done
their work sooner or better if thay had different spiritual opinions.
They are mere way stations. They had a fabulous system of science and social organisation to exploit. I'm talking about the origins of that out of primitivism.
I suggested Spengler for your attention but as you are too impatient to engage with that wild and fascinating philosophy I will quote a little for you. It is from Chapter VII of Volume I; Music and Plastic, The Arts of Form. He is writing about the influence of the Gothic north on the architecture, music, painting and plastic of the Renaissance. He sees the Renaissance as an ephemeral fad of small consequence and the Enlightenment as not disimilar to the hoola-hoop craze.
Quote:It was just then, too, that Nicolaus Cusanus, Cardinal and Bishop of Brixen (1401-1464), brought into mathematics the "infinitesimal" principle, that contrapuntal method of number which he reached by deduction from the idea of God as an Infinite Being. It was from Nicholas of Cusa (sic) that Leibniz received the decisive impulse that led him to work out his differential calculus; and thus was forged the weapon with which dynamic, Baroque, Newtonian, physics definitely overcame the static idea characteristic of the Southern physics that reaches a hand to Archimedes and is still effective in Galileo.
There is more to the persecution of Galileo than those who use his case to have an easy ride are aware of. They like to think of his temporary house arrest in his palatial apartments as out the other side of extraordinary rendition on the scale of evil. They use him as one might a fly swatter. Which defines their opinion of their opponents quite nicely.
I have a theory all of my own about how the Bishop arrived at the "infinitesimal" principle but whether I am right or wrong one might say with confidence that everything you do and think and dream Dave is sat upon him having done so. And I think his deduction was based on a close reading of the Gospels which one might expect someone in his position to have taken the trouble to do.
I see no way an atheist could have deduced what he did. Atheists would have been too busy boozing, shagging, gourmandizing and sleeping I should imagine. Expertly maybe.
The people you mention are basically technologists and entrepreneurs and not scientists at all. Not that I don't admire them.
But if you seek easy explanations I have no doubt there is a whole raft of people eager to provide them for a consideration. The trouble is that you end up knowing nothing about anything but believing that you know everything about everything and you end up in that state Goethe called "giddy lunacy".
Does that satisfy your curiosity?
