Pope praises Galileo's astronomy

 

Pope Benedict XVI has paid tribute to 17th-Century astronomer Galileo Galilei, whose scientific theories once drew the wrath of the Catholic Church.  BBC NEWS

It has been nearly 400 years since the papal trial in which he was found vehemently suspect of heresy for his teaching of the heliocentric theory.  Galileo was then placed under house arrest and his movements restricted by Pope Urban VIII.

I am delighted that the current pope has seen fit to acknowledge the truth of Galileo’s observations and his accounts thereof.  But I can only wonder how many more years it will require for the Catholic Church and the other religions of the world to acknowledge that God is a myth.

"There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell."
"There is only our natural world."
"Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds."
Freedom From Religion Foundation

Anthropomorphism

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena.

In my mind this is a form of insanity in the modern world and a total denial of all the knowledge that homo sapiens have acquired in the past 30,000 or so years. I can accept that poets and writers use the concept for the entertainment of their reader, but the reader, except for a rare few, rarely goes away believing that rocks can think a believer.

I say rarely, because I just received my current AARP Magazine where I found this letter to the magazine.

Sinking Ship

I was on the National Geographic Endeavour, one of the two ships that steamed to the rescue of the sinking M.S. Explorer [“Mayday in the Antarctic”]. Our captain remarked that the Explorer, nearing its final voyage, may have chosen to remain in those waters, and selected that moment, when its passengers could be rescued, to end its historic life. To those of us who witnesses this event, this actually seemed possible.  John Curtis, Heath Texas

This one stopped me in my tracks because it is pure Cro-Magnon insanity:

• That the captain of a scientific research vessel, someone that should have both knowledge of and respect for science rather than some strange mysticism, ascribed multiple human traits to an object.
  • He said that the ship made an intellectual choice to sink rather than complete its voyage.
  • He implied that the ship felt compassion towards its passengers and made a deliberate choice to sink where they could be saved.
• That someone, anyone, that heard those remarks would go away believing this strange mysticism, and repeat it and their belief in it, especially in a magazine that prides itself on providing their members with the facts and rational thinking they need to understand and deal with our modern society.
• That the editors of AARP Magazine, from the hundreds of letters they receive from their readers, many of them probably filled with facts and rational thinking, selected that letter to print and promulgate this strange mysticism.

To me, a science oriented atheist, this is how religion got started. Humans, unable to understand the world around them, used anthropomorphic concepts to explain their world. Gradually they expanded their explanation to mysticism and gods of many kinds.  Then when some humans realized that they could profit from the Cro-Magnon beliefs of their fellow humans, priests were born and modern humans have been plagued ever since.

Perhaps, for the Cro-Magnons still among us, the captain of the National Geographic Endeavour just became a priest of a new religion, Mr. Curtis his first apostle, and the letter to AARP will become their first epistle.

I really don’t mean to denigrate the Cro-Magnons of thousands of years ago, just those among us that have never evolved any further.

X-rays detected from Scotch tape

 

Just two weeks after a Nobel Prize highlighted theoretical work on subatomic particles, physicists are announcing a startling discovery about a much more familiar form of matter: Scotch tape. It turns out that if you peel the popular adhesive tape off its roll in a vacuum chamber, it emits X-rays. The researchers even made an X-ray image of one of their fingers.    Yahoo! News

 

I love this story. By itself it answers the myriad of questions, the cartoons, the snide letters-to-the-editor, and associated rants from all those whose knowledge of science is limited to how to dial a telephone. “Why”, they will ask about a particular research project, does the government fund such stupidity (their words).            

And for the answer we can now refer them to this article. Someone, not a researcher, must have criticized the researchers for even considering such an experiment. “A waste of funds” or some other snide comment. The truth they needed to be told, is that knowledge and the discovery of new information is never a waste.  All those that rail against scientific research, and especially research that on the surface appears meaningless need to understand this truth.

Today, the knowledge gained from this experiment may seem of little use. But other researchers will extend and amplify this knowledge and one day there will be a significant benefit that will be derived from it. It may not even be in the areas highlighted by the article but in an entirely different and unpredicted area. That is what science and research are all about and I believe this is a great example.