Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy
that said, this texas decision is very very strange. what the fuck does it mean to say that the universe is ageless? well, at one level, is there time outside of human experience? there's motion, there's change: but is there time?
i don't think the answer is obvious at all.
we impose time through the act of observation because we deal with succession in those terms. so for us, movement/succession is temporal--but that's entirely for us.
but i don't think the arguments operate on this level of conceptual problems---i just think they're interesting.
what would it mean for a fundamentalist/creationist to argue that the universe is ageless?
the movement probably goes that by seeing the universe in that way, you make of it a kind of manifold in a platonic sense--so it already contains all possiblities---then the question of why these particular possibilities are manifest and not others turns up. since you've already framed the problem in platonic terms, the answer is the agency of some god. so to move from all possible outcomes to particular outcomes means that there has to be a designer or selector.
what a curious proposition to agree to.
sheesh.
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The gist I got from the article is not that they have changed the way in which they describe the age of the universe, but they are ceasing to address age at all. Or, at least, they have eliminated the specific requirement of defining the universe as X number of years old, leaving the door open for teachers to teach/say any old nonsense that pleases them.
This is unfortuante because, if they were exploring the same angle you were, I could at least give them credit for novelty, but they don't even deserve that.