{"id":43,"date":"2010-03-06T19:22:09","date_gmt":"2010-03-06T13:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ckraju.net\/blog\/?p=43"},"modified":"2010-03-06T19:22:09","modified_gmt":"2010-03-06T13:52:09","slug":"what-controversy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ckraju.net\/wordpress_F\/?p=43","title":{"rendered":"What controversy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently, someone who had invited me for a talk, wanted a bio, and sent in a short bio, evidently taken from the Wikipedia, which says<\/p>\n

“Much of Raju’s beliefs have been highly controversial, especially his claims that the philosophies that underlie subjects like time and mathematics are rooted in the theocratic needs of the Roman Catholic Church.”<\/p>\n

However, to go by the published reviews\u00a0 (and that is what a Wikipedist is\u00a0supposed to go by), my books have\u00a0been critically acclaimed in 9 out of 10 published reviews.\u00a0Some reviews with sources are listed at amazon.com at http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/-\/e\/B0039IC97<\/a>. There are numerous other favourable referee reports and unpublished opinions.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Concerning my ideas about time in physics, the only “controversy” I know of is that a leading mathematician claimed to have “independently rediscovered” the same ideas some 12 years after I had first published them. He was promptly informed of my work; nevertheless, third parties, in consultation with him, again claimed originality on his behalf even afterwards. The\u00a0 “controversy” clearly does not relate to the validity<\/em> of my ideas and is not what is being referred to.<\/p>\n

It is inaccurate to say that I claim that “philosophies of time are rooted in the theocratic needs of the Roman Catholic church”. There are many philosophies of time which are considered in my book, The Eleven Pictures of Time<\/em>, such as Buddhist and Upanishadic philosophy, which clearly originated long before the Christian church.\u00a0Also, the\u00a0key distinction\u00a0of concern to me\u00a0is not <\/em>between Roman Catholics\u00a0and \u00a0Protestants, (which difference came in the 16th c.) but between early Christianity and post-Nicene Christianity (in the 4th c.).<\/p>\n

Certainly, early Christian beliefs about time, such as those of Origen, were different from post-Nicene beliefs. This is a fact, which anyone can check with the references cited in the book. (Origen’s work is available online today.) As far as I know no one ever denied this. Didn’t the church curse “cyclic” time? Didn’t it curse Origen? Why<\/em> did it do that?\u00a0 No\u00a0one\u00a0asked this crucial question in 1700 years, or gave a clear answer.\u00a0So, I\u00a0do say that post-Nicene theology changed time beliefs to help the priest to rule, but no one has controverted that till now because there is no serious alternative theory.<\/p>\n

What the church\u00a0has tried to do is to prevent Christians from knowing anything at all about\u00a0this change in Christian doctrine.\u00a0\u00a0Why else was Newton’s 8-volume History of the Church<\/em> (which related to this change) suppressed these last 278 years? (The suppression of Newton’s work is a chapter “Newton’s Secret” in my book Eleven Pictures of Time<\/em>.)\u00a0One lie leads naturally to another, so\u00a0the Cambridge historian\u00a0Whiteside felt\u00a0\u00a0compelled to lie about the suppression of Newton’s work. \u00a0When I pointed out that a “cartload” of Newton’s manuscripts were suppressed,\u00a0Whiteside hurled abuses at me for exposing the truth.\u00a0But, as I told him, while it may be the tradition for\u00a0scholars\u00a0in Cambridge to settle arguments by abuse, my own Nyaya tradition says that when people start abusing, it is a sure sign that they have lost the argument. Anyway that issue\u00a0was\u00a0a bit different, and such abuses are not “controversy”; they are a sign of failure to controvert the argument and the facts. Now that the Imperial College has an official project to recover Newton’s suppressed manuscripts, the truth about their suppression\u00a0cannot be hidden so easily.<\/p>\n

Certainly,\u00a0post-Nicene beliefs about time did influence Newton’s mathematics and physics, creating a fatal flaw in it.\u00a0Is anyone disputing that Newton’s theory of fluxions was abandoned? or that he made time metaphysical in his Principia<\/em>?\u00a0Is anyone disputing\u00a0that Newtonian physics was replaced by relativity over a century ago?\u00a0Or that the central issue related to time? Is\u00a0that controversial? On the contrary, I have given a crystal clear picture of what happened, which clarity did not at all exist earlier.<\/p>\n

Religious beliefs about time\u00a0have crept also into the “physics” of Stephen Hawking. F. J. Tipler said so explicitly: that Hawking’s singularity theory can be used to show that “[Christian] theology is a branch of physics”! Tipler has published papers on this topic in Nature<\/em>, and this quote is from his book published by the publishers of Nature<\/em>. Has someone disputed my point in the Eleven Pictures of Time<\/em> that Hawking’s chronology condition and his arguments for it are\u00a0the same as Augustine’s view of time which is at the foundation of post-Nicene Christianity? Let someone dispute that the bottom line of Hawking’s (serious) book talks of the “the actual point of creation”. (So, creationism may be\u00a0out in biology, but it is in in physics!) All that Penrose could say, when I debated this with him publicly,\u00a0 was that he did not hold a brief for Tipler.<\/p>\n

Of course, Penrose is a Platonist, and for Plato, mathematics related to mathesis<\/em>, which relates to the soul. Any person literate in Western philosophy should know that. So who can controvert this connection of Western mathematics to religion? That is why\u00a0my articles on this\u00a0are published in\u00a0many places, because knowledgeable people immediately recognize that I am right.<\/p>\n

Proclus, a Neoplatonist gave this etymology, and explicitly advocated mathematics on the grounds that it leads to the “blessed life”. Didn’t the church declare Proclus to be a heretic? Didn’t\u00a0Justinian shut down all schools of philosophy? Why should the church be so concerned with mathematics? I have dwelt on this in many of my scholarly publications, and my forthcoming book Euclid and Jesus<\/em>\u00a0 explains everything for the layperson who\u00a0may have been hoodwinked by the priests.<\/p>\n

Of course, one well knows what will happen. Earlier\u00a0priests used to abuse and kill off\u00a0those who tried to bring out the truth; today\u00a0they lie about them. There is\u00a0only one negative review of any of my books,\u00a0one which is cited in Wikipedia (which does not cite\u00a0many other reviews which praise\u00a0my books).\u00a0The\u00a0fishy way in which Robert Thomas, \u00a0the editor of the journal, solicited this book for review has been elaborated by me in an earlier blog<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0“Yellow scholarship”.\u00a0The reviewer\u00a0Jose Ferreiros may be philosophically illiterate, because, he\u00a0writes in print, for\u00a0people to laugh at in perpetuity,\u00a0that the philosophy in my book is restricted only to the first two chapters, and\u00a0so that is what he reviews! I know\u00a0numerous such Western “philosophers” who know nothing of philosophy beyond their limited tradition rooted in their religion.\u00a0In fact, a critical part of my book Cultural Foundations of Mathematics<\/em> is the Indian philosophy of mathematics used to sum infinite series, which is explained only in chap. 3 of my book, while the philosophy of zeroism is described in chp. 8. Even a philosophically naive person could have seen that, just be reading the synoptic table of contents.\u00a0(Zeroism is also the philosophy used in my 5-day course on calculus without limits.) The other possibility is that Jose Ferreiros\u00a0was trained to tell\u00a0lies, and therefore Ferreiros deliberately lies that I was trained primarily as a statistician and computer scientist, meaning thereby that I did not learn mathematics or philosophy!\u00a0<\/p>\n

So far as I am concerned, such\u00a0lies about my person, and misrepresentation of the actual contents of my book are not “controversy”; these are\u00a0just plain lies, as anyone can easily verify. Such lies\u00a0are an indirect acknowledgment that Western scholars\u00a0are unable to refute what I say, except\u00a0by lying about my person or misrepresenting my position.\u00a0People may not like<\/em> what I say, since I have exposed the lies\u00a0told earlier by\u00a0the church, when it altered Christianity, lies which are the basis of its power over Western\u00a0 minds.\u00a0\u00a0They may want<\/em> to controvert it, but they have not, in fact, been able<\/em> to do so. \u00a0The only published attempt by Ferreiros is pathetic. It is all firraoing!<\/em><\/p>\n

In summary, that is all that the supposedly best minds from Oxford and Cambridge could come up with so far to “controvert” what I have said: (a) claims of “independent rediscovery” of my ideas, (b) evasions, (c) abuses, and (d) lies!<\/p>\n

Looks like it is time to leave the West behind and move on!<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently, someone who had invited me for a talk, wanted a bio, and sent in a short bio, evidently taken from the Wikipedia, which says “Much of Raju’s beliefs have been highly controversial, especially his claims that the philosophies that underlie subjects like time and mathematics are rooted in the theocratic needs of the Roman Catholic Church.” However, to go by the published reviews\u00a0 (and that is what a Wikipedist is\u00a0supposed to go by), my books have\u00a0been critically acclaimed in 9 out of 10 published reviews.\u00a0Some reviews with sources are listed at amazon.com at http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/-\/e\/B0039IC97. There are numerous other favourable referee reports and unpublished opinions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-and-philosophy-of-mathematics","category-physics","category-wikipedia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckraju.net\/wordpress_F\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckraju.net\/wordpress_F\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckraju.net\/wordpress_F\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckraju.net\/wordpress_F\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckraju.net\/wordpress_F\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ckraju.net\/wordpress_F\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckraju.net\/wordpress_F\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckraju.net\/wordpress_F\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckraju.net\/wordpress_F\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}