PHILOSOPHY/THEOLOGY THREAD

[SpaceLions]

Here, Hayden/Zane, you fuckin chodes.

[containercore]

What doth life...?

[weaksausage]

If sunlight travels millions of miles through space to illuminate the Earth, then why is space dark?

Also, if planets move between Earth and the sun why don't they cast a shadow over Earth?


Starting to think the heliocentric model is flawed. Was looking at the rays of sunlight coming out from behind a grouping of clouds and thought that the rays had a vanishing point that were way too close to be as many miles away as scientists say. Maybe an artist can explain why there is a vanishing point on these rays, shouldn't there be just a blanket of sunlight with no vanishing point if the sun is so far away?

I suppose my theological thought on this is that a vast amount of ancient and not so ancient cultures have had some form of sun worship, could Copernicus' heliocentric theory just be a way to take the center of the universe away from God's relationship on Earth with man and instead focus it on the pagan ideal of sun worship?

Aquinas blended the scientific with the bible and adopted the idea that gravity holds the universe together and is the law that governs the planets. However, the bible clearly states that the word is what created the world and holds the world together, and the word is Christ. So once again, we have science sneaking in and taking a little more authenticity of God's word. Also, Jesus (that holds the universe together) rose UP from the GRAVe, but Newton says that GRAVity is the true force holding everything together and its motion is DOWN. Interesting.

Next we have Darwin. Bullshit, enough said. The previous two examples are far more believable. This one just gets way out of hand.

These theories give way to the Renaissance and the rebirth of the Greek form of thinking, which is obviously not inherently geared towards God. It is more about individuality and self-actualization, becoming transcendentally the best possible version of yourself (according to yourself). Anybody nowadays self-obsessed, mission accomplished.

Ultimately, western philosophers debate the nature of the human self and the self in society and the purpose of it all ad nauseam until Nietzsche declares that God is dead.

I argue that God has been replaced slowly over time by a cult or religion of science which places the Greek form of thinking ahead of the Judeo-Christian, however, how solid is this new religion of science's footing if it can answer how sunlight travels millions miles through space to Earth, but space is dark! WTF!

[weaksausage]

NASA answer:

Your question, which seems simple, is actually very difficult to answer! It is a question that many scientists pondered for many centuries - including Johannes Kepler, Edmond Halley , and German physician-astronomer Wilhelm Olbers.

There are two things to think about here. Let's take the easy one first and ask "why is the daytime sky blue here on Earth?" That is a question we can answer. The daytime sky is blue because light from the nearby Sun hits molecules in the Earth's atmosphere and scatters off in all directions. The blue color of the sky is a result of this scattering process. At night, when that part of Earth is facing away from the Sun, space looks black because there is no nearby bright source of light, like the Sun, to be scattered. If you were on the Moon, which has no atmosphere, the sky would be black both night and day. You can see this in photographs taken during the Apollo Moon landings.

So, now on to the harder part - if the universe is full of stars, why doesn't the light from all of them add up to make the whole sky bright all the time? It turns out that if the universe was infinitely large and infinitely old, then we would expect the night sky to be bright from the light of all those stars. Every direction you looked in space you would be looking at a star. Yet we know from experience that space is black! This paradox is known as Olbers' Paradox. It is a paradox because of the apparent contradiction between our expectation that the night sky be bright and our experience that it is black.

Many different explanations have been put forward to resolve Olbers' Paradox. The best solution at present is that the universe is not infinitely old; it is somewhere around 15 billion years old. That means we can only see objects as far away as the distance light can travel in 15 billion years. The light from stars farther away than that has not yet had time to reach us and so can't contribute to making the sky bright.

Another reason that the sky may not be bright with the visible light of all the stars is because when a source of light is moving away from you, the wavelength of that light is made longer (which for light means more red.) This means that the light from stars that are moving away from us will become shifted towards red, and may shift so far that it is no longer visible at all. (Note: You hear the same effect when an ambulance passes you, and the pitch of the siren gets lower as the ambulance travels away from you; this effect is called the Doppler Effect).

My Response:

No clear answer, I guess they just haven't figured it out yet and that's what makes it so exciting! The flat Earth phenomena is a very interesting one to me because it seems to have some sort of merit and theological implications to Christians. By believing in flat earth it gives Christians a deeper bond with their God because it could validate the book of Genesis in the same way that the rejection of the heliocentric model and evolution would validate the word of God and bolster the believers faith. The theological implications of the flat earth movement could be crazy. It will probably only end with Christians in death camps to be honest. Those non-conforming Jesus freaks!

Occam's Razor might contend that the simplest answer is that the sun is not so far away. It seems to be the simplest answer.