Philosophy and the Bible

 I believe the history of philosophy is substantial and comparatively few have even read most of the primary works. That being said fields like the philosophy of logic and analytic philosophy are worthwhile yet even fewer read that. Philosophy is kind of like an accoutrement to the last supper really. Understanding the world a little better isn’t such a bad thing.

The New Testament does follow chronologically (appx 480 to 540 years after) the Old yet it isn’t a derivative. The N.T. are largely letters written by disciples of Jesus Christ, and apostles like Luke and Paul. The O.T. has a fascinating history going to the foundation of the Hebrew language probably invented by Moses circa 17th-16th century B.C. Moses had access to Hebrew oral traditions dating perhaps to Abraham circa 2000 BC. The material was passed on to David who brought all of scripture together and probably in the court of Solomon or Rehoboam a comprehensive work of it was assembled that has changed very little the past 3000 years. There were some well known redactions from the J and priestly writers of the OT. 

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The New Testament was written in Greek in the first century, yet that is not the Torah aka Pentateuch-the first five books of the Old Testament. That was originally written in Hebrew except for Daniel and Ezra in Aramaic . The New Testament is different from the Old. The New Testament was written in the first century A.D., while the last book of the Old Testament- Malachi- was written in 430 B.C. The Septuagint translation into Koine Greek occurred in the 3rd century B.C. Septuagint means ’70’ in Greek. There were 72 scholars with six from each Israeli tribe that made the translation.

Why Africa Developed Slower than Europe Briefly

 It’s simply history and inertia. While metallurgy was developed first in the middle east, technological progress developed faster in colder, northwestern regions where working with hot water, steam and harnessing it’s power was stimulated by the climate. Africa being hot lacked certain challenges and opportunities that met with inventive responses and accumulative progress. Even flowing water to power mills was comparatively more plentiful in Europe than Africa.

Don't overlook Chinese inventions either…They developed a lot of tech even during the Han dynasty. It’s just that royalty tend to benefit exclusively from it, unlike the west where democracy and mass production accelerated tech inventions with a market ready to exploit every technology item produced for profit.

The Retarded Policy of Support for Ukraine-Russia War

 Democrat administrations selected hostility with Russia leading to war rather than historical competence and statesmanship to find a reasonable negotiated settlement that would have avoided the horrors of war. Fundamentally the President’s policy is retarded. Hammering a square peg into a round hole to make a policy of political avarice work, and repeat when it doesn’t ad nauseam isn’t intelligent and is harmful to U.S. national security in a variety of ways militarily, economically and environmentally.

There would be nothing easier, considering history of finding political settlements that worked, than ending the Ukraine-Russia conflict along present lines. Renegotiating the end of the cold war 1.0 theft of all of Ukraine from Russia is the sole stable political basis to establish lasting peace and normalized Russian-Ukraine-U.S. trilateral relations on a positive scale. The alternative is of course protracted war risking biological, chemical and nuclear escalation, a divided world economy and unnatural obstructions to getting the world t work cooperatively in the attempt to conserve and restore the planetary ecosphere.

Retarded political leadership is quite damaging to national and global interests. It reminds me of the decline of quality leadership in the Roman Empire after the age of the Antonines (five of seven emperors were beneficial to Roman interests). Only a few generations of retarded Presidential leadership are needed to make a national silk purse into a sow’s ear, and the U.S.A. is on the way. Yek the future is still not closed to peace and prosperity for those of faith and good leadership.

Psalm 111 verse 10; Contemplation

 

Should one fear the Other
respect for possibility and full ranging personality
the non-self creator of all being
infinity to know
In the light and dark
day and night
lightning flashes of insight
the natural moral order
shouldn’t one fear God
concerned  with right
and the wisdom of the Lord of Hosts
with quanta arrayed
entangled in a Higgs Field
a ram caught in a burning bush
Avrm led somewhere beyond
a  journey through space-time
an encounter with Mechilzedeck  at Mt. Zion
the omniscient power makes Universes
in every possible form
like a dream-coat for contingent beings
whom are willful, uncertain
- thankful for the grace for the Lord.

Determinism and Free Will; Not Mutually Ecxlusive

 Free will and determinism are not mutually exclusive. One would want to define what freedom means and obviously what determinism means.

 Quantum uncertainty is interesting to consider in regard t will. I believe the paradigm that is most useful is that being in the four-dimension continuum is phenomenal. Some say it is emergent and contingent being- a secondary phenomenon of the Higgs field and massless 2-dimensional particle-waves of an unknown field.

 Freedom of motion means degrees of free motion. In zero gravity one has more degrees of freedom of motion than on the surface of a planet with gravity. Free will may be comparable. One has freedom to think within the criterion of having a brain, body and mind that work together in a particular way in a very definite environment that is limited. Freedom is to think is delimited by the circumstance in which the mind is found to occur and within a particular temporal order.

 Adam and Eve probably were not on Earth. That is the Garden of Eden was exempt from space-time temporality and thermodynamics. I would think they were spirits in spiritual bodies. Created and tested they were found to be lacking direct obedience to the will of God. That is they weren’t infallibly obedient. Instead having the capacity to choose to think for themselves- what did Kant say? Oh yeah- Sapere aude! Not much has changed in that regard.

 So God created beings that could think for themselves, tested them. It was a learning experience, and demonstrating to them that they weren’t perfect like God, cast them into thermodynamics of the Universe where they began to age, had to work, had child bearing and developed short life-spans. Relativity and gravity slowed them down. Massless particles have no age and just two dimensions until slowed down in the Higgs Field and pick up a third dimension. Something like that happened to Adam and Eve.

 Adam and Eve had free will and choose to abuse it. The Universe was a temporal containment facility so those spiritual beings would not eat of the tree of life or the tree of knowledge further. They had run amuck and would have become eternal, willful malevolent spirits if given a mortal body.

 Once in the temporal Universe humanity was destined to die and to be judged eventually. Because of original sin containment was necessary and most people choose not to accept the salvation offered through the atoning sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ. People are pre-destined to eternal death unless they are saved.

 Free will in the Universe will not bring eternal life. There is comparably, no way for an odd number to become an even number or a prime number if it isn’t. God’s grace draws those who He wills to salvation. One must heed the call although none are deserve a pardon from original sin. Why God chooses to save some rather than others is known to the omnipotent one rather than to mankind.

 If there were an infinite Multiverse and human minds merely switched between the right Universe that conforms to the way they think at each new thought, God would know what choices would lead away from Him and which toward Him, even of the Spirit of God were needed to help people make the right choices or thoughts as He wills.

 If there is just this Universe (of however great a size) and no other, it is still a containment facility for those with original sin and the likelihood of being entirely will-full and running amuck-worthy given eternal life and infinite knowledge. Why should God enable such problems as the Devil to develop for created beings routinely? I would think it’s not in his divine economy. It is possible that with omnipotence and omniscience God has created (in his mind) every possible Universe and form of it a priori. The salient question, as Plotinus might have asked is; why bother to actualize anything like Universes and people then?

Tighten Up to Overcome (poem)

  

  The philosopher tightened a wrench
giving an extra twist on the nut at last
a wheel fixed firmly
he let the jack slack
and the electric car dropped a wheel down

  Where rainfall is measured in metric terms
while kilometers will drop in turn
scientists collaborate to fondle the Earth and Universe
calibrating concise intervals with facts to learn

  Measurements of the sky and falling stars arrived
to be or not to be comets
asteroids and pieces of broken planets
crowding imagination for what it’s worth

  Maximum population density
structures that killed growing spaces
reshoveling dirt with androids, A.I. and hydraulic power
overcoming the world’ perspicacity

  Packed in tighter than drum skins
beating the syncopation of cities
economic consumerism watering down
existence with chemical sprays too profound

  The philosopher considered robust existentialism
and dialectical reason’s functionalist
structuralism phenomenalized in serial cues
everyone in line watched youtubian news

  Building more buildings
wider than before
shaped like atrocious mountains
for everyone an open door

    Artificial instruction light fireflies way
passing through darkness unto eternal light’s day
something other than nothing
it was forever to be

  Something in motion; everything to see
electromagnetic accelerators a million miles long
gossamer wires in zero gravity spree
fields will hum capsules like generic song

  Bootstrapping beyond silence
when nearly everyone is wrong
finding the brightest stars
when all life is nearly gone

  What would become of you and I
if no one does plan ahead
would brilliance  at last overcome
materialism that can lead to just dead.

Differences between Philosophy and Science

 I wonder if you are familiar with the development of rationalism from Descartes to Sartre, and linguistic philosophy aka the philosophy of logic?Scientific method can be used for sundry applications and is obviously valuable, yet philosophy is more than technical applications of a method. It is interesting to contrast Berkeley's ideaism with the 'Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics' by Immanuel Kant; noumenon with speculations about infinite Multiverses or even being-in-itself of quantum fields. These are philosophical speculations for those that like philosophy, and a waste of time for those that regard empiricism and scientific testing of theories as the sole means of credible inquiry.

I believe philosophy to a considerable extent, is what one makes of it. There is a lot of the inductive side to it, unlike science that is more deductive and methodological. Philosophical inquiries have innumerable potentials and interdisciplinary synthetic recombinatorial potentials yet that is of course contingent upon the philosopher. There is a good reason why doctorates of philosophy are given to scientists too, for they may venture into areas that are interdisciplinary, original and far more than methodologies of plain science. 'Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down' by Robert Laughlin is an example of an approach to science that rises to the level of philosophy. Laughlin won a Nobel for solid state physics I believe it was, and he is obviously an inventive guy.

Philosophical thought is analytical and inductive building synthetic new lines of inquiry. That process has continued since the pre-Socratics Thales and Parmenides, yet philosophers that developed science such that it became methodological had their 'knowledge' aka science, become an ossified technique no longer part of philosophy except as phenomenal tools.

Philosophy isn't a settled technique or method; instead it is a pursuit of wisdom often able to generate new thought with discovery. On the other hand science can be bureaucratized and has millions of ardent defenders placing themselves at the center of the Universe of meaning.

It is comparable to a vast colony of ants defending their empirical turf. If humans can be compared to ants with organizational skills, structures and leaders to a limited extent, rather than more independent polar bears hunting for seals, philosophers are individuals that consider the entire phenomena from numerous angles with various filters, as well as the island Universe where they find themselves living.

Jesus Christ is Co-eternal (a poem)

 

Jesus Christ is co-eternal
with the Father and Holy Spirit
one God in three persons
alpha and omega;
Logos
in the beginning
light in the darkness
Savior of the lost.

Linguistic Epistemology (a poem)

 

Theories of knowledge in countless Universes
filled with sets of words
nominalism vs realism
lexicons for what is said

  Never filled with dread
what s said
rises with red blood
tides of where the spirit led

  To imagination electro-magnetics’
accelerators in space race
shattering speed to near light
inertial reference frames and gravity tight

  A solar system wired with e.m.g. routes
Earth to Pluto in two and a half months’ time
overcoming ‘lethargic chemical rocket doubts
pushing the envelope to fastest sub-luminal rhymes

  Worlds built in a literal day
one can’t sleep while A.I. makes hay
crushed rocket cycled to Dyson Sphere lines
somewhere, someplace, progress is more than a sign.

Philosophy in Comparison to Science (with Linguistic Epistemology)

 To contrast philosophy vs science, consider Husserl's 'Logical Investigations'; philosophy as rigorous science. Frege, Bretano, Whitehead and Russell, the 'Principia Mathematica and the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus'. Aristotle's classification system was rather useful in the day as well as his expression of logic. Leibniz also invented mathematical logic although he didn't publish it and speculated usefully about monads...and that 'atomistic idea of one dimensional bits of pure spirit equivalent to strings really is somewhat apropos for the contemporary description of quanta or energy units at the smallest scale- at least it isn't obviously refuted.

I believe that science is about physics and philosophy somewhat more concerning greater and speculative physics (aka metaphysics). Logic is a field of philosophy too. One field that is active is that of ethics and why it is that people can't get along in a practical way (such as in the border dispute in Ukraine). The parameters are a little too large for simple science experimentation to solve.

There are scientific investigations of the brain that are great of course, and also sociological observations of the behavior of individuals an groups yet packing together different fields and data, ideas and considering possibilities for ad hoc remedies to political choices that result in very harmful social outcomes is more the realm of philosophical activity I.M.O.

I enjoyed reading the Philosophy of Logic. Examples of good works are W.V.O. Quine's 'Word and Object', Strawson's 'Individuals' and Kripke's 'Naming and Necessity'. Wittgenstein's 'Blue and Brown Books' are also about language, and nominalism in a sense- quite philosophic. Also known as linguistic philosophy, the philosophy of logic is a primary tool for contemporary epistemology. When contrasting realism and nominalism having an idea of the values of words and what sort of lexicon they arise in is useful. One might consider The Critique of Pure Reason in light of the philosophy of logic and an emergent field that I would name 'Linguistic Epistemology'. That primarily would be simply the philosophy of logic.