philosophy mini-essay

Consider the following sentences from the March text in my "Don't Mess With Nature" calendar (with my emphasis added):

"The volcano was once thought to he the chimney of the forge of Vulcan, the Roman blacksmith of the gods. We now know that a volcano is actually a cone-shaped mountain or hill with a central vent that expels molten rock from below the surface of the earth."

I'm not myself a believer in personalized divinities, but there's no grounds above for holding the scientific account in contradiction with the ancient beliefs.

I doubt that a Vulcan-believing Roman would have had any difficulty were they to be informed that a volcano was cone-shaped, or that stuff came out the top from deeper down, or that the stuff turned to rock when it cooled. Modern scientific thought disagrees with ancient Roman thought in the explanation of *why* all this happens.

Phrase of the day, "scientific pluralism": the careful, systematic use of different thinking in different contexts to answer different questions.