mistermack

It's interesting, but far from conclusive. I used to bang rocks together as a kid. Occasionally you would get sparks, and they made a great noise, and would spring apart in your hands. Also, you can get a smell of burning from it, which is nice to sniff. I had no intention of lighting a fire with them, and the sparks were so small, it would have been impossible. But if someone found those stones years later, they might well think I had been lighting fires with them. Iron pyrites and flints do often occur in the same location, so it wouldn't be surprising if people did the same thing, 50,000 years ago. You would get better sparks with iron pyrites than I did with found cobbles, which would have looked pretty impressive in the dark, and that in itself could make it a party trick for some Neanderthals. But it still doesn't mean they could light a fire with it. It is actually possible, to light a fire with flint and pyrites, but it requires more than just a flint and a pyrites stone. You need special knowledge, of what kind of tinder you can successfully light, with such a tiny spark, and how to grow that initial glow into a flame. Even for modern survivalists, it's a challenge, but it can be done. You need a certain kind of dried fungus, to catch the spark and grow it. I have my doubts if Neanderthals could have pulled it off. You certainly would never light dried grass, or the normal fire starting ingredients with it. Here's how a modern expert does it, but bear in mind, he has modern knowledge about tinder that Neanderthals would not have had :

This is like justifying the burglar who raided your home fitting a burglar alarm. It can never be legitimate, to protect your possession of stolen property. It's hypocritical, that Jewish organisations should be so keen to campaign for the return of paintings looted by the Nazis, and yet so supportive of an entire country being kept by the people who stole it.

Easy. As far as I'm concerned, if you criticise people just for being Jews, that's anti-semitism. If you criticise the State of Israel, and it's existence and actions, that isn't.

I have no objection to the Jews being given a homeland. What I object to, it them being given Palestine, as if it was empty and belonged to nobody. To me, it's not the Jews who are of interest, but the Palestinians. Would people in the United States have stood for a Jewish homeland being created, in Colorado or Texas? Not a chance. Would the Brits have allowed it, in Kent? Ludicrous. But that's exactly what they did to the Palestinians. And then they started killing them, when they unsurprisingly protested. And they've never stopped since. Just a few weeks ago, the Israeli Army were using Palestinian protesters for target practice, because they were protesting and throwing stones. Adolf Hitler would have approved. During Nazi occupation, if one German got attacked, they would wipe out a whole village. Sometimes even a town. The Israelis use the same tactic. Throw stones, and they shoot a dozen dead. Disgusting. And in politics, they have teams of attackers, who round on anyone who says a wrong word about Israel. They are immediately labelled as anti semitic in a very organised and pre-planned way. I can't think of a single good thing about the State of Israel, or it's supporters.

No, we've jumped from fire use to inventions to leisure time. Going back to fire, though, I think it's very relevant to cave dwelling. I am personally convinced that the big attraction of a cave was the ease of keeping a fire going for long periods, which was surely a lifesaver to Neanderthals. If you picture the problems that they faced, in the absence of a cave, in keeping a fire going 24/7 in the very worst winter weather, you can get an idea of what difference a cave would make. It's so easy for us to throw wood in a shed, it's hard to imagine what it would be like for them. Your fuel could be soaking wet for weeks on end, and there can be torrential storms that would blow your fire away, and douse it. A cave makes it all so much easier. No high winds, no downpours, and your stored firewood dries out fairly rapidly. If they had the technology to light fires at will, then caves wouldn't be so vital. But it seems to be highly unlikely that they did. It's more likely that, if they lost their fire, they would have some technique of carrying smouldering embers, so they could maybe send someone to the next settlement, to get fire, and carry it back long distances as a smokey bundle, eventually getting fire restarted at home.

You write like you knew my uncle ??? In reality, what you describe was only true for a few days or weeks a year, on the odd days when there was good dry weather, and they made hay while the sun shone. The rest of the time, if you knew the weather in the West of Ireland, you would know that they had long spells of ENFORCED leisure time, when the weather prevented them from doing useful work. There were routine tasks, but also plenty of time for sitting round the fire, smoking and putting the world to rights and moaning about the weather. And that was in the summer. The winters are long with short days, and the enforced leisure time can last weeks on end. Not that they sat around all the time, they would find things to do, as most people do.

That's true, but it's not the full picture. They have been observed and studied from a distance, and landing parties have had a look around deserted villages, where the residents have melted away into the forest, and concluded that they don't know how to start fires, and wait for lightning strikes, and do their best to keep a fire going following that. Presumably local fishermen can tell when fire is in use, and note periods when there is no signs of it. If you see no sign of smoke for long periods, and then plenty of it following a lightning storm, then that would be pretty strong evidence.

My first impulse was to say god. Because I think that there is no meaning of life, and there is no god. But then I settled on 42, because I've seen 42, I've been 42, and so from personal experience, for the one in a billion billion chance that there is a meaning of life, it's more likely to be 42.

I don't think it's a lack of free time that stifles invention. It's resistance to change, which seems to be an inherited part of the human character. When I was a kid, I used to go to my Uncle's farm in Ireland in the school holidays. I was amazed at how some things were done, and would make suggestions that I knew would be better, but there was no chance of getting my uncle or grandfather to change. They were absolutely determined that that is how we've always done it, and we're not going to change now. That was more than fifty years ago, times have changed now. We're swamped with new inventions, and people see the value in them every day so it's almost a different world now. You might also have the influence of religion and spirits in ancient times. There might be ritual involved in flint knapping, or fire making, and mystic communication with the ancestors. To change it might be the equivalent of religious heresy.

Of course I get what you're saying. But the same argument could be used to support worshipping the great invisible teapot that is orbiting Jupiter. So long as the teapotters had a harmonious doctrine. I'm not so sure that that would be rational. But it's not much worse than Mormonism. Trouble is, we've got used to the established religions, so we aren't hit by the irrationality any more.

I remember as a kid, we used to pick up rounded cobble stones from the local fields, probably ice age remnants, and smash them together in our hands. You could produce tiny sparks, and they would give off a burning smell that was pleasant to sniff. Probably a bit of iron in the mix. The sparks were so tiny that you could never have started a fire with them, but you could see them sometimes, in the dark. I can imagine ancient hominids doing the same thing. If they ever did come across an iron meteorite, it would be interesting to know if they ever managed to light a fire from it. Probably not, though. There is a tribe alive today, on Sentinel Island, near India, that is so isolated they've never had close contact with modern people. They don't know how to make fire, and just wait till a natural fire starts, and keep it going. If it goes out, they have to wait for another lightning strike. From what I've read, making fire from friction or flint/iron is a very recent development, and before that, all humans did what the Sentinelese do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese

That's why I thought "logical" would be better in the OP. It's blindingly obvious that lots of rational people follow various religions. Their reasons might be wrong, or illogical, but they can't all be irrational. Unless maybe you argue that they are compartmentalising religion, and are irrational in that one sphere, and rational for the rest of their beliefs. Obviously, I'm using logical in the common parlance way, meaning coming to a reasonable conclusion, from evidence that is generally accepted as true. I suppose it boils down to the question "is it rational, to believe something for which there is no good evidence or logical argument for?" Or "is faith rational" ?

I have learned something from this discussion, so it's not a dead loss. I noticed that my suggestion, "formal logic" already has an accepted specific meaning, and it's own definition. Again from wiki : Formal logic is the study of inference with purely formal content. An inference possesses a purely formal content if it can be expressed as a particular application of a wholly abstract rule, that is, a rule that is not about any particular thing or property. The works of Aristotle contain the earliest known formal study of logic. Modern formal logic follows and expands on Aristotle.[3] In many definitions of logic, logical inference and inference with purely formal content are the same. This does not render the notion of informal logic vacuous, because no formal logic captures all of the nuances of natural language. So I'm a bit late with that suggestion

I think that's rather overstating the case. This is from the main wiki page on logic : "There is no universal agreement as to the exact scope and subject matter of logic " and " However, agreement on what logic is has remained elusive, and although the field of universal logic has studied the common structure of logics, in 2007 Mossakowski et al. commented that "it is embarrassing that there is no widely acceptable formal definition of 'a logic'".[6]

Well, I have a right to, because the word isn't owned by the tiny number of people who study philosophy. It's freely available to the general public, who use it in the same way I do. That's why I think the term "formal logic" is better for what you are describing. Otherwise, you are at odds with most of the English speaking world, on the meaning of a very widely used word. In language, the masses always win in the end.

A very rough guide would be a more accurate statement. I've never seen it described as a reliable guide. Maybe you could rely on it to give you a rough idea.

Most people would use the word logic to describe how a conclusion is reached, following arguments made using evidence that you are invited to agree with. It's a persuasion thing, whereas formal logic tries to make an unbreakable case along the lines of this is true, therefore this must be true, therefore this must be true. I lost all hope for it after listening to William Lane-Craig try to make the case for a god. It's so easy to abuse it that I would never trust any claim derived by that method. Maths is great, but as soon as you involve words, you introduce fuzziness. Charles Darwin used what most people would describe as logic, to make the argument for natural selection. Listing lots of evidence, and describing why you think it means this or that.

I don't think that there's an essential connection there. Chimpanzees and Baboons kill prey and eat meat whenever they can, without cooking it. And human ancestors were using primitive "choppers" well before any evidence of fire use. That's not to say that a connection didn't develop at some point, but I haven't heard of any major connection. There have been claims of fire being involved in the process of flint knapping, on occasions, but I don't think it's a necessary part of it.

It certainly was, one of them anyway. But the use of fire wasn't one single invention, it was a process of gradual tiny improvements in technique, over a huge time scale. It would have started just as opportunistic use of naturally occurring fires, followed by discovering ways of keeping the fire going longer, and then learning how to move a fire from place to place by carrying burning sticks, and then smouldering embers etc etc. Keeping a fire going might have been part of the attraction of caves. Out in the open, your firewood gets wet, and a downpour could put your fire out, and you might have to wait a long long time for the next naturally occurring fire. In a cave, you can keep a smaller fire going all winter, and your stored firewood will dry out. Actually creating a new fire from non-burning materials was a much more recent development.

I suppose I have to say yes and no to that. Baboons are hunter gatherers, and are very successful at it. While they are highly intelligent compared to most animals, they don't compare to us. On the other hand the males are well armed, and they are much more nimble and fast than humans, so that compensates. With humans, it's inventions that have changed our fortunes over the last 5,000 years. In today's climate, inventions come in a steady stream, and we are used to it. But before 5,000 years ago, people hardly invented at all. They just did what their parents did. Generation after generation. You get whole eras, that are characterised by a particular way of making a flint spear point, as in the Clovis people. Or a particular clay vessel, as in the Beaker people. Nothing changed in the designs for thousands of years. Then all of a sudden, people began inventing, and improving on inventions, and we never looked back. But it's just a question of attitude. Anyone can invent, but you have to have the mindset to try it. Or to be willing to try new methods that others have invented. It's not a change in intelligence, it's attitude.

Maybe it's philosophers who misuse the term "logic". Formal logic has always looked to me like a failed attempt to insert rules where they won't fit. Ok for the very simplest exercises, but doesn't hold up like maths does.

There is no accepted theory for the level of intelligence of ancestral humans. It has to be entirely guesswork and opinion. A lot of people go by the inferred lifestyle, judging by the quality of tools and building etc but really, that's down to culture. Even today, there are hunter gatherers living who build nothing out of stone etc, who's lives are hardly different at all from people living a million years ago. And yet they have fully modern brains, capable of the highest levels of modern learning and achievement. About 800,000 years ago was the last "burst" of brain size increase in humans, when Homo heidelbergensis appeared with a bigger brain than Homo Erectus. Their brain size was about the same as ours, they stood about 5ft 9 inches on average, and really wouldn't stand out much if you met them today, apart from a robust build and slightly sloping forehead. Their brains were about 1250cc as are ours, and Neanderthals averaged slightly more. Anatole France, a Nobel prizewinning author, was found to have a brain of just 1,000 cc on his death. And it's not inevitable that human intelligence should increase over the years. It can easily go the other way, if the selection pressures are not maintained. Brain size is a killer in childbirth for many humans who don't have modern medical help. According to wikipedia "Some studies suggest that the average brain size has been decreasing over the past 28,000 years.[8][9] Others suggest that the cranial capacity for males is unchanged, but that the cranial capacity of females has increased." Really, 50,000 years isn't a lot of evolution, for a long-live animal like a human.

Yep. And she said "have a nice day" !

The OP question is probably the wrong one. It would make more sense to ask if there is a LOGICAL reason for religion. Lots of rational people are religious. I'm not so sure about how logical their reasons for believing are. Does the belief follow on logically from facts they can be sure of? What happens is that people compartmentalise religion. They reserve a much lower standard of proof for religious beliefs than for other day to day information. I suppose a perfectly rational person can argue that religion is a good thing, whether true or not. But are they perfectly logical?

Durn it. Must be something I did in a past life, wrecked my chances of a +