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Posted by The Natural Philosopher on 09/19/07 10:05
Shelly wrote:
>
> Scientifically speaking, there is no experimental evidence for the existence
> of a god. It is a pure faith statement to assert the existence of god. You
> can hold your opinion, and you are entitled to it, but it scientifically
> without foundation. (Reminder: I, personally, believe in the existence of
> God as a matter of faith)
>
Scientifically speaking there is no experimental evidence for the
existence of any noumenous concept, that goes from God right down to
electrons.
At best these are ideas dreamed up by people that:-
- produce a simplified picture of what's going on and
- do NOT CONFLICT with experimental evidence.
- do something useful by way of prediction and
- are not excessively complicated (Occams razor)
Now if you ditch all science, God is indeed a very useful and simplified
description of what is going on. Sadly the ways of god passeth mans
understanding blah blah, which gives God essentially no predictive power
as a concept whatsoever. So religions fail on step 3 as being
scientifically meaningful.
They pass all the other criteria though.,
- Some big authority doing it all for purposes of is own, is indeed a
nice simple answer to everything.
- you can't prove it ain't so, so there is no conflict with evidence.
- It about as simple as it needs to be to get into the brains of very
simple people. "Its just like a Big Daddy in the Sky"
You can even argue that it has psychological significance: It makes
people feel better about themselves and the shit life deals them.
However it fails miserably in a scientific context to predict anything
with any accuracy at all, which is why we use computers to calculate
e.g. airframe stresses, not prayer wheels.
God is not something for science to attempt to disprove: That can't be
done since no one really knows what they are trying to disprove. Science
merely says that God is a useless concept in doing what science sets out
to do, which in the end boils down to predicting the future.
Science sets out with on a priori assumption: That there is a
correlation of a permanent (time invariant) and causal nature between
phenomena (Laws of Nature). Insofar as that assumption allows it to
reduct with varying degrees of accuracy the phenomena in question, we
hold that the assumption is so far extremely valid and powerful. We do
not BELIEVE it to be true: It is always there, open to question. We
merely note that it *works* as a basis for scientific investigations..
You may say that Laws of Nature = Gods Will, and cry triumph...but
science is not interested in semantics, or why an old bearded gent who
wrote on stone tablets now seems to be a whizz at multidimensional
tensor calculus..Science is "NOT INTERESTED" in God, because as a
concept it is too woolly and ill defined to be anything more than a
comfort blanket.
Ti be an atheist is not to deny God, it is to merely pass the whole mess
off as *irrelevant* and *useless* in the pursuit of all but
anthropological data and theorems.
And to note how upset Believers are, by people who don't believe in
AANYTHING. Far more so than by people who believe in the Wrong Thing (TM).
At least with the Wrong Thing, you still have a person who might be
persuaded to Believe in the Right Thing. Someone who doesn't believe in
ANYTHING, is immune.
This is what scares the pants off the fundamentalists: not, as they
avow, that science and atheism are merely different *religions*. Its the
fact that they ignore religion as irrelevant altogether.
Its like walking into a bar where there is a big baseball game going on
on the TV, and the drunks jostle you and yell 'which team d'ya support
buddy?' and you mutter 'I don't do baseball'
You are likely to get beaten up by BOTH sets of supporters. Your reply
introduces the ghastly possibility that what they are doing with such
intensity and ferocity, is possibly completely irrelevant and
meaningless. No one likes to feel that way.
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