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Originally Posted by Neapolitan
Well Pratchett needs more than one finest sieve, there are about 118 (known) elements and it goes without saying they have different diameters, the finestest sieve should be no smaller than roughly 150 picometers.
Why within language there is an understanding of the difference between what is abstract and what is concrete, but Pratchett throws that whole idea out the window?
"...even if you'd grind the universe (concrete) to the finest powder (concrete) and sieve (1st time around a verb) it through the finest sieve (2nd time around a noun), you won't find one atom (concrete) of "love" (abstract)." honestly Tore that goes without saying.
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Honestly Neapolitan, you know how to pick the strangest arguments.
The quote you're having trouble grasphing was based on a quote from a book where a character has a dialogue with Death. Let me fetch it for you :
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Originally Posted by Hogfather
Death: Humans need fantasy to *be* human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.
Susan: With tooth fairies? Hogfathers?
Death: Yes. As practice, you have to start out learning to believe the little lies.
Susan: So we can believe the big ones?
Death: Yes. Justice, mercy, duty. That sort of thing.
Susan: They're not the same at all.
Death: You think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder, and sieve it through the finest sieve, and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet, you try to act as if there is some ideal order in the world. As if there is some, some rightness in the universe, by which it may be judged.
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This is light fantasy fiction, not a philosophical book, but Death points out that without people or other intelligent things (it's fantasy after all) to dream it up, justice and mercy do not exist. You could say the same for love.
That's the point really, not to say something which you're supposed to interpret literally about sieves and mortars.
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Originally Posted by Neapolitan
But understanding cosmology, Earth history, Human History can only answers how we got here, not why are we here. If one looked at the whole history of the universe and understand what took place before man appear on Earth one could appreciate the near infinite variables that it took to have the Earth the way it is for it to be inhabitable. I don't think that you could only use science to fully understand the meaning of life, certain science only have a strict system they study, and nothing outside of it pertains to what is being studied. So you need something more then Astrophysics, that encompasses more then one specific system, like the universe. Science is only good for answering how things work in the universe, not why things are....If one believes in God, then one can understand what done for us to be alive.
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You can't know
why we are here in the same way that you can never use a measuring tape to measure something that is
exactly one mile. It will always be somethingth of an inch wrong, but for all practical purposes, you can know what it is.
What I mean is we have scientific theory which is perfectly able to explain why we are here and there's no empirical testing so far that has proven it wrong. As studies in perhaps especially chemistry and biology progresses, but also in other fields, we're finding support for that theory and perhaps one day, the evidence will be so good even you will be convinced. Just like it's hard to measure a mile with a tape, using that knowledge to pinpoint the point in time when life originated on earth or the exact chemistry of those first replicating molecules may be difficult or even impossible. But, we will have a pretty good idea of how the chain of cause and consequence that started life on earth and eventually gave rise to me and you one day started. We sort of do already.
Neapolitan, here's a challenge for you. If you can get a hold of it, check out the Selfish Gene. You wouldn't even have to read the whole thing if you didn't want to, just the first chapter or two. It beautifully summarizes many of the ideas that biologists were having before the time of it's first publication in 1976, ideas which have evolved since then but remain absolutely relevant in science today. You argue a lot on this topic, so why not educate yourself a bit on what the opposition says?