Arthur Smith

2 hours ago, studiot said:

Indeed it begs the question, which came first the catalyst or the product protein ?

RNA is both template and catalyst.

9 hours ago, exchemist said:

If you were to confine yourself to discussing the historical evidence, as I am trying to do, there would be no problem.  Personal opinions on Christianity as a whole, however, have no bearing on historical evidence. That distinction does not seem confusing to me. 

Sure. Each forum has its own way of operating. I'll lurk and maybe chip in if something interesting develops. 

Here is a link to a talk by Bill Dembski  given back in 2002 in which he talks hopefully of TRIZ being an avenue of research for "Intelligent Design" scientists. Pretty sure nothing ever came of that.

1 hour ago, MigL said:

the word 'truth', and its many subjective meanings,is a touchy subject around here.

Well, I guess so. I'll leave you in peace.

1 minute ago, MigL said:

For one thing, the thread title concerns the existence of Jesus of Nazareth.
But the last few pages seem concerned with the existence of a historical Saul of Tarsus, and whether his writings as St. Paul were 'truthful' or not.

Again regarding truth, I'd like to respond. Is the culture to start a new thread?

9 minutes ago, Peterkin said:

I think atheists should be more open-minded and consider a longer perspective.

Well, that is an interesting point of view to which I would very much like to respond.

13 minutes ago, Peterkin said:

Outside this thread, none that I think it's worthwhile to dig up. David Fitzgerald comes to mind. Bart Ehrman, and carrier, too,  seem unduly concerned with the details of the gospels

This is not evidential support that "Unfortunately, too many non-Christian historians are just as determined to see deceit and fakery as the christian ones are to deny it, they go to absurd lengths to attack even reasonable evidence for the other side's position." unless three is too many. Not having heard of David Fitzgerald, maybe he fits your description of going to absurd lengths etc. I see he is a myther. Your description does not fit Ehrman though I'll grant you Carrier. That's two. Too many?

10 minutes ago, exchemist said:

The historian, however, will consider the evidence of the sources.

Sure but as I'm new to the site I'm finding the rules of being off-topic are a bit confusing to me. Regarding personal prejudice, I was just owning up to mine as a preamble but you see where that got me.

1 hour ago, Peterkin said:

Unfortunately, too many non-Christian historians are just as determined to see deceit and fakery as the christian ones are to deny it, they go to absurd lengths to attack even reasonable evidence for the other side's position.

Do you have evidence to support that personal opinion?

26 minutes ago, mistermack said:

I did cover that. . . 

 

Apologies, I'm an inveterate skimmer

33 minutes ago, Peterkin said:

Then why deny that the humans weaving that invention existed, lived, believed, preached and organized? Priests exist now - all kinds of clerics and prelates. They have existed for several thousand years.

 

I fear my reply may be off-topic.

Nitpick: air cannot suck. It exerts a pressure on surfaces caused by the sum of impacts of the individual air molecules. No suck, only blow!

30 minutes ago, swansont said:

!

Moderator Note

All: please note that that this (i.e. validity of Christianity) and related discussions are off-topic to the thread.

Further transgressions will be excommunicated to the trash

 

The title of the thread is "Was There a Real Jesus of Nazereth". Maybe the mods should have mentioned that earlier. I confess not to have read the forum rules. Could someone supply a link?

ETA I've read the guidelines!

1 hour ago, dimreepr said:

I'm with you, there is no god; but why do you suppose, we needed to invent one?

Well, I only reject the ones so far on offer. I don't know whether there is or was some unknown first cause or creator. Why there is religion is a fascinating question. I'm convinced there is (if not wholly, certainly partly) a socio-biological explanation. We are and we evolved from social animals. There is a limit to the size of groups in primates that equates to relatedness, extended family. Humans seem to have spent the last three hundred thousand years extending their capacity for communication beyond the family group. Family norms become competing social norms, family leaders can become group chiefs, stories become tools for social cohesion. There's maybe a heritable element, accepting information from others without question can save time and effort and human variance in that trait could have produced a propensity for belief in the supernatural. Even in today's US, being a declared atheist can be career-limiting. 

2 hours ago, Arthur Smith said:

Imagine a change of inertial frame. Instead of wind, the vehicle is in still air on a roadway that is an endless belt that can be static or moving powered by an external source. When the belt is static, nothing happens. When the belt begins to move, accelerate and reach some arbitrary velocity (say 10 m/s), what happens to the cart? If we first consider the propellor set with blades parallel to direction of movement (zero thrust), there will be an interplay between the force exerted on the vehicle wheels by the belt and the rolling and wind resistance of the vehicle including the blades. I suggest the equilibrium position will be that the cart will end up at just under belt velocity (wrt to air).

Does that make sense so far? 

If the propellor blades then are set to produce maximum thrust, will that make any difference. It seems to me the propellor thrust will tend to "pull" the cart in the direction of belt travel, resisted by rolling resistance and retarding force at the wheel. The pro lobby argues that gearing will result in a greater force from the propellor than the retarding forces. It seems counter-intuitive but it is not perpetual motion. There is an external source of energy: supplied by wind movement or belt movement. All Blackbird (and all the different models) does is exploit and redirect the energy extracted.

ETA

It just occurs to me, a simple illustration of the power of leverage. I came across it while doing some electrical work. There was a stock of flex I'd bought, supplied rolled around a cardboard tube with cardboard "wheels" at each end of the tube. There was perhaps 40 metres of flex on the originally 50 metre roll.The roll was needed and nearby and the end of the flex was nearer so I pulled it. The flex roll moved rapidly away from me even though I was exerting a force towards me. You can do the same thing with cotton on a reel on a suitable surface. 

ETA2

For amusement and to show there is still strong skepticism against the flight of bumblebees:

I posted the Blackbird brain teaser in another science forum, here.

A final response here!

ETA3

A previous discussion on scienceforums.com that got buried!

Oops! I just noticed an error (not to say there aren't others) in  my comment above.

The sentence "It seems to me the propellor thrust will tend to "pull" the cart in the direction of belt travel, resisted by rolling resistance and retarding force at the wheel" is wrong.

It should say "It seems to me the propellor thrust will tend to "pull" the cart against the direction of belt travel, resisted by rolling resistance and retarding force at the wheel.

24 minutes ago, exchemist said:

Do you simply mean you decided long ago that Christianity is bunk and that therefore none of the dramatis personae, St. Paul included, can be based on real historical figures?  

I did indeed make a decision about Christianity at a very young age. I questioned it and decided God wasn't real when I was about  8 or 9 years old. Once I rejected the central concept, the trimmings are very much like window dressing, especially when you look at the various schisms of Christianity I was brought up in the Church of England community and our next-door neighbours were Catholic. We had a very odd relationship.

There's no therefore. My decision that Christianity is a web of human invention that I need not concern myself with has remained with me. My prime directive is to live and let live. Whether this, that or other Biblical character is accurately represented, embellished or completely fictional is not an issue that obsesses me. It is only recently that I have become interested in what evidence there is that confirms people, events, places in the Bible. For instance archaeological investigation in the Levant is recent compared to regions with more stable politics, and is still under political influence and control. It's fascinating, both what we do and don't know if we evaluate it dispassionately.

7 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

Um, if the ground rotates the wheels using vehicle momentum to turn the propeller it will slow the yacht/vehicle down in direct proportion to the (ideal) thrust. To me that doesn't appear to explain it.

The bike vid example you provided did a better job, showing that there is still wind interaction with the moving vane as it passes through still air, and in the correct direction. I think it got me thinking in the right direction but it hasn't got me to the finish line. Unless that IS the finish line?

The notion that those vanes are acting much like a keel/centreboard keeps coming to mind - like the way the wheels prevent a sideways motion so a tangential force only produces motion along a predetermined line rather than principally a means of providing power; not sure that is helpful or not. It is fundamental to conventional sailing of course but in this case the vane's motion is connected to the ground, not the yacht... and I may be just circling back on myself...

And that didn't really help either - which could be more about my comprehension than the quality of explanation.

I may yet encounter an explanation that better suits my comprehension and I expect I'll keep coming back to this until I have understood it..

Imagine a change of inertial frame. Instead of wind, the vehicle is in still air on a roadway that is an endless belt that can be static or moving powered by an external source. When the belt is static, nothing happens. When the belt begins to move, accelerate and reach some arbitrary velocity (say 10 m/s), what happens to the cart? If we first consider the propellor set with blades parallel to direction of movement (zero thrust), there will be an interplay between the force exerted on the vehicle wheels by the belt and the rolling and wind resistance of the vehicle including the blades. I suggest the equilibrium position will be that the cart will end up at just under belt velocity (wrt to air).

Does that make sense so far? 

If the propellor blades then are set to produce maximum thrust, will that make any difference. It seems to me the propellor thrust will tend to "pull" the cart in the direction of belt travel, resisted by rolling resistance and retarding force at the wheel. The pro lobby argues that gearing will result in a greater force from the propellor than the retarding forces. It seems counter-intuitive but it is not perpetual motion. There is an external source of energy: supplied by wind movement or belt movement. All Blackbird (and all the different models) does is exploit and redirect the energy extracted.

ETA

It just occurs to me, a simple illustration of the power of leverage. I came across it while doing some electrical work. There was a stock of flex I'd bought, supplied rolled around a cardboard tube with cardboard "wheels" at each end of the tube. There was perhaps 40 metres of flex on the originally 50 metre roll.The roll was needed and nearby and the end of the flex was nearer so I pulled it. The flex roll moved rapidly away from me even though I was exerting a force towards me. You can do the same thing with cotton on a reel on a suitable surface. 

ETA2

For amusement and to show there is still strong skepticism against the flight of bumblebees:

I posted the Blackbird brain teaser in another science forum, here.

A final response here!

ETA3

A previous discussion on scienceforums.com that got buried!

6 minutes ago, Eise said:

Textual analysis shows that the author very probably is the same. See my link above

 I don't dispute this. I believe that textual analysis confirms a single author, writing in a Koine Greek that they were very comfortable in. I think we can question the date attributed to the texts and the familiarity of the author with the geography of ancient Palestine, as well as the identity of the author. Motive for writing is something to consider, too though looking back through the lens of modernity isn't reliable. Context would help and of that there is little or none.

11 hours ago, Peterkin said:

Only what other people, including Paul, have written and the authorship of his gospel and The Acts of the Apostles. And this https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Luke

I thought the Britannica article was very fair, with just the right number of caveats.

The circularity of the justifications for the character, Luke, still seem a serious issue for those claiming the Biblical Luke fits a historical Luke. Luke wrote Luke's gospel and the Acts. How do we know? Because Luke tells us in Luke's gospel and the Acts.

20 minutes ago, Peterkin said:

Luke is Paul's constant companion, and also an apostle in good standing

What do we really know of Luke?

1 hour ago, dimreepr said:

well someone, literally started the legend...

Does this mean there was a real Harry Potter?

20 hours ago, exchemist said:

He does not give any references. It just seems to be generally understood. If there were much doubt about it, I would expect MacCulloch to indicate that.

I presume it is because Paul came from Tarsus, in modern day Turkey, which like most of the Eastern Med. spoke Greek at the time. (According to MacCulloch there was already a centuries old diaspora of Jews around the region.)   

As I've never been convinced there was anything to Christianity since I was a child, I've not really looked at what you might call supporting evidence for people and events described in the Bible. Once you discount the supernatural stuff, whether some events and characters are correlated elsewhere is not particularly important. or relevant. However I did come across someone recently (rather vehement in his views) who claimed the Bible is basically an almanac and was not intended to be historical. It prompted me to look at history and archaeology of the Hittites. The Hittites occupied Anatolia for hundreds of years (prior to being conquered by/absorbed into Ancient Assyria) but at their zenith shared a border with Egypt that ran East-West through the middle of the Levant. Whilst Hittite sources record dealings and disputes with Egypt without any reference to Israel and Egyptian records follow the same pattern, the Bible has almost no mention of the Hittite Empire, allegedly at the time of David and Solomon. Israel Finkelstein has worked tirelessly to establish some archaeological support for Biblical people and places without success.

The Emperor Constantine's mother, Helena, seemed to come across many places of interest in Palestine three centuries after the crucifixion that are now famous sites for pilgrimage, none of which bear the slightest scrutiny archaeologically.

s

4 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

Like the other explanations, that didn't help.

I know, having read it myself, it was pretty garbled. I'm not much better with Lorenz transformation.

I might be able to invite someone here for a decent explanation if that would help or be of interest.

4 minutes ago, exchemist said:

No, this is also as stated in Diarmaid MacCulloch's "A History of Christianity", MacCulloch being Professor of Church History at Oxford.  

And his evidence that Paul the Apostle spoke Koine Greek as his first language would be?

I read the reference to Koine Greek but that in itself is supported only by a reference to a popular book and a 50 minute video. 

Anyway, live and let live. If religion enriches someone's life and they don't feel the need to invest in torches and pitchforks , who am I to criticize?

58 minutes ago, exchemist said:

Surely St. Paul wrote in Greek because he was not writing to Aramaic-speaking Jews, but to people in and around Asia Minor (Colossians, Ephesians, Galatians, Corinthians, Thessalonians etc.) who spoke Greek, it being the end of the Hellenistic period in the Eastern Med. 

That seems reasonable, at least for the epistles generally agreed as authentic. I understand there is a similarity of style and vocabulary that suggests a single author. And possibly Paul used a native Greek amanuensis.

Though it does occur to me that this might be a bit circular. Attributing works to one author by examining the style, content and vocabulary seems reasonable but do we have any independent (other than Biblical texts) historical evidence for the life of Paul the Apostle?

Further, on such a historical Paul, Wikipedia makes the same rather circular argument taking Biblical references as, well, gospel. There doesn't seem to be any more historical evidence for Paul than there is for Jesus.