Last Thursdayism
Last Thursdayism , in German literally: "Last Thursday ism ", mutatis mutandis, as the "doctrine of last Thursday," is a philosophical theorem , which can be traced back to the 1990s. This theorem provides on satirical manner, especially in the Judeo-Christian Creationism represented premise merely: Creationists theorize that the world, old interpretation scientists as several billion years, was created with all aspects of this age only a few thousand years in one fell swoop .
In Last Thursdayism this theory is satirically exaggerated: The entire world, as we perceive it at the moment, was actually created only last Thursday - including all people and their memories that make the world appear to them to be much older.
prehistory
The religious premise under attack is known in research as the Omphalos Hypothesis , named after Philip Henry Gosse's book Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot (London 1857), which attempted two years before Charles Darwin 's On the Origin of Species , to declare the fossils , which have meanwhile been regarded as evidence of a longer geological history, to be objects of divine creation. God created the world with these fossils, as well as with everything that science regards as evidence of a higher age.
The thesis has theoretically had a theological counter-argument since the 17th century: God must be a deceiver if he creates a reality that leads us to wrong assumptions (such as the higher ages) - but he cannot be a deceiver according to all the definitions that characterize a perfect being.
Philosophical aporia
The philosophical aporia , according to which we could theoretically mistakenly imagine the past, is familiar as a dream experience and part of the more complex solipsism model. It can be found played out by Bertrand Russell in The Analysis of Mind:
"There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that 'remembered' a wholly unreal past."
("There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world suddenly began to exist five minutes ago, just as it was in the moment, with a population that" remembers "a completely unreal past.")
The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges considers a variant in his short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940). In 1951, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein noted the option in his Thoughts on Certainty ( published posthumously in 1969) as philosophically interesting:
“It would seem ridiculous to me to want to doubt Napoleon's existence ; but if someone doubted the existence of the earth 150 years ago, I might be more willing to sit up and take notice, because now they doubt our entire system of evidence . It seems to me that the system is more secure than security within it. "
Current wording
As far as can be seen, the current formulation can be traced back to 1992:
“As everyone knows, it was predicted that the world would end last Wednesday at 10:00 PST. Since there appears to be a world in existence now, the entire universe must therefore have been recreated, complete with an apparent 'history', last Thursday. QED. "
("As everyone knows, it was predicted that the world would end last Wednesday at 10 a.m. Pacific Standard Time . Since there appears to be a world now, the whole universe must have been recreated, complete with what appears to be a" past, "[namely] last Thursday. qed ")
A parodic religion was developed a little later in several Internet postings.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Lit .: Wittgenstein, About certainty [1951] (1969), § 185.