Question:
Is Julian Huxley right: when man figured out the sun was a ball of hot gases, Apollo died?
anonymous
2010-03-13 05:48:51 UTC
If he is right, then when man figures out the universe, god dies. Science is very close to figuring it out. Man is also on the verge of creating life.

Should we hold a wake or am I being premature?
Seven answers:
Acid Zebra
2010-03-13 05:55:46 UTC
"The interesting thing that you've missed is that man doesn't know where the sun gets it's energy from. It never gets smaller. It gets no source from space. Yet it keeps burning."



Where do people GET this stuff? Do you just make it up as you go along? Can people really be this ignorant and still operate a computer?



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_formation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_sequence

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_evolution
Jallan
2010-03-13 07:22:37 UTC
Not at all.



About the same time that philosophers were claiming that the sun was a ball of hot gass, Apollo was first made into a sun god.



Apollo is not a sun god in Homer or any mythological text . The son god is Helios son of Hyperion, much worshipped on Rhodes and the myths told of Helios are very different than the myths told of Apollo.



Rather, the philosophers tried to rationalize the gods: Zeus became the heavens, Hera became air, Poseidon became water, Demeter became earth, Hephaistos became fire, and Apollo became light and enlightenment and as such could be conceived of as the divine force behind the sun.



Similarly Aprhrodite/Venus was connected to the male god Eosphoros or Phosphors or Hesperos who was the god of the planet that today we call Venus.



So religiously Apollo was connected with the sun and Aphrodite/Venus was connected to the planet today called Venus, and some religious connections were made with other deities with the other planets and the moon, but even religiously no-one ever believed that Apollo WAS the sun or that Aphrodite WAS the planet Venus.



And Helios continued to be worshipped also. The idea that he rode a chariot though the sky just became understood as a religious metaphor.



The sun god in Rome was even, for a time, made into the head of the Roman pantheon. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_Invictus and was quite distinct from Apollo who was also worshipped in Rome and elsewhere. Yet every educated person, at that time, knew that the sun itself, was a ball of fire.



One can’t get rid of religion so easily. The religious person will just start talking about “religious metaphors” and “divine truths that can only (or at least mostly) be understood through such metaphors.”
Jabber wock
2010-03-13 06:01:33 UTC
Well, death imples a previous life. While actually no, metaphorically yes, so the same could hold for monotheism. There is a tendency to rewrite the interpretation, such as after the Galileo affair when the doctrine of geocentrism was overthrown, but certainly the idea that god only exists in gaps of knowledge holds true. The more we discover, the smaller the gaps become. There will be rearguard actions, such as the opposition to evolution and geology, but these represent a futile clinging on to something and will eventually fade away.



@No Religion Know God: "The interesting thing that you've missed is that man doesn't know where the sun gets it's energy from. It never gets smaller"



Ah, no, we do know. It's losing mass continuously, due to energy loss and particle emission. The energy comes from a fusion reaction, mostly hydrogen to helium, and the emitted photons eventually find their way to the surface and out into space.
anonymous
2010-03-13 05:51:28 UTC
The interesting thing that you've missed is that man doesn't know where the sun gets it's energy from. It never gets smaller. It gets no source from space. Yet it keeps burning.



Oh... and when science can create just ONE drop of blood from nothing.... I will take science over God.



@ the the prideful here: please travel to the sun and verify what you've said. I'll pay for the ticket. lol.



@ lonestar: and God obviously isn't yours. Q: If YOU don't have a god, then what masters you? Yourself? Of course. You become your own god. How's that worked out for ya? Good luck with it.
anonymous
2010-03-13 05:54:11 UTC
There will always be gaps in scientific knowledge, where God can cling on.
anonymous
2010-03-13 06:12:08 UTC
****************************************************************************************************************

very interesting video, about an electric universe that explains alot of unknown problems with the current theory of the universe, eg. how bolts above the sun can be hotter than the sun itself



http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4773590301316220374&ei=5JqbS9DSL6GBlgeAptWUDg&q=sun+electric&view=3#
silver rain
2010-03-13 05:51:25 UTC
Definitely...becaus they never existed....


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