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Originally Posted by Nogrod
And mind you, most of the "new perspectives" that have really changed our way of looking at the world or which have actually changed our envirovenment come from science. The universality of abstractions, the theory of atoms or that of evolution, or dark matter or whatever you wish. Just mind-boggling ideas that easily make our mythologies look like unimaginative commonplaces - and just continuation of billiontimes used ideas.
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So I'd say science is creative but our everyday imagination is less inventive.
Then the first point about misrepresenting science. I hear people saying oftentimes that science destroys the magic from the world. But does it really? (look above) Or they say that science only concerns itself with matter (which is normally thought of in a way of solid things like tables or flesh-built animals) and forgets the other things there must be.
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All that said, I do love and appreciate mythology and fantasy to the fullest. I just think science is not a threat to it but a well from where our imagination can replenish itself to become even more fantastic.
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Well said. I too feel that science gets an undeserved bad rep sometimes. Reminds me about a discussion I had recently with a lady friend while watching a beautiful sunset. She thought that such a marvellous phenomena must mean that there is some higher power somewhere. I disagreed and said that what we are experiencing isn't actually a "sunset" in truth but an interpretation that our brain is making based on information it's received from the eyes having picked up photons that have radiated from the sun some 10 minutes earlier and hit the earth's atmospheric particles at a certain angle. This we perceive as a thing of beauty because of the wiring in our head. She felt it was a very unromantic and dull way of looking at a sunset. I tried to explain that from this perspective it is ourselves that are amazing and mysterious, not some divine entity somewhere, and that all the beauty and mystery in the world is in our mind. And ain't that magic?
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Last edited by skip spence; 03-14-2009 at 08:10 AM.
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