Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Thank you to Hugo Holbling for his kind mention of my post on history at his blog here. He also asks how 'all history if fiction' can be a foundation of post modernism. I should have been clearer. What I meant is that it is often assumed to be some osrt of foundation by those who do not understand what it means.

On a rather less erudite level, I'm debating the history of science and Christianity with a poster over at Ebla. It remains to be seen if my opponent is open to new ideas but I was most impressed by how sure he was about so many things that are just dead wrong. The myth of the flat earth and the great conflict between science and religion live on!

3 comments:

Hugo Holbling said...

Thanks for the clarification.

I'm afraid your opponent does not appear to be open to new ideas at all. This is the second time this week my work has been selectively quoted from, alas, even though I have laid out the so-called Galileo Affair in painstaking detail. I guess there are sadly just some people who have such a strong desire to believe the worst of the Church that any subtlety of understanding is beyond them.

Anonymous said...

Hugo: all observation - and especially making sense of the observations - is theory-laden, right? The problem seems to be that some people truly perceive what they want to perceive; their eyes see the information that contradicts their views, but they ignore it as irrelevant. The myth (in the Barthesian sense) of the repressive Church is the theory, and all evidence is made to fit.

Hugo Holbling said...

Indeed. I suppose this again underlines the importance of rhetoric, as I've been discussing at my blog lately.