Do you believe in god?

[Sri Lumpa]

superchunk said:

Actually I wanted to add one more tidbit. Some theories say that as the universe expands it will one day retract and possibly return to the single mass where a new big bang will occur and in fact that may be a continuous pattern forever.

"The Day that We roll up the heavens like a scroll rolled up for books (completed),- even as We produced the first creation, so shall We produce a new one: a promise We have undertaken: truly shall We fulfil it. (The Noble Quran, 21:104)"

This verse describes this idea and also demonstrates the idea that this is not the only creation of God and in fact there are more and will be more, forever.

Now, I am not using these quotes to prove/disprove the Qur'an or Islam. I could care less what religion, if any you specifically follow. This is simply used to demonstrate that God and Science don't have to be enemies.

EDIT: AGain the word translated above as heavens could also be Universe. Same word in Arabic.

Science does indeed not have to disprove god, nor does it have to prove it. Science just has to do its best to explain the universe and give us cool gadgets in the process as an added bonus .

However, like your use of our current scientific understanding to support a belief in a specific god show, most religion make numerous claims on how the world is, and the more claim a religion makes that are disproven the more likely it is that religion is false.

For example, the Greek religion believed 12 gods are residing in a palace on mount Olympus so a simple trek to Mount Olympus with a thorough search of it is enough to cast serious doubt over that belief as a palace would be quite noticeable.

Now greek pantheon apologists would probably claim that they wouldn't make it visible to humans or some other excuse but all they are doing is redefining their religion when and where it is proven wrong. Enough such redefinition and the resulting religion bears as much resemblance with the earlier version as we do to our aquatic ancestors in the evolutionary tree.

For example, most christians today bear little resemblance to christians of the middle ages that believed the Earth was flat, covered by a fixed firmament, orbited by the Sun, standing on pillars that shook when god was angry... because the church said so on basis of what the bible says.

As our understanding of the universe expands one has the choice to hold fast to thousand year old beliefs as they become outdated (not all of them as some are not in the same domain as science and others will be right as even a broken clock is right twice a day) which doesn't make sense (very few people have enough faith in the bible's innerrancy to still believe the earth is flat) or to keep cutting away at their beliefs until only the non-disprovable core remains and their deity goes from a breathing, visible, talking old man in the sky who takes an active interest in his believers well being to a nebulous, invisible, silent, spiritual entity that sits back and does nothing but promises a lot in an hypothethical afterlife.

As such, the more claims a religion make on the natural world, the more disprovable by science it is, so while science cannot totally disprove every and all forms of gods it can and does disprove plenty of them beyond a reasonable doubt.

The deity most unlikely to ever be disproven is the deist god as he only impacted on the world at its creation (big bang) and we are unlikely to ever be able to know enough about things that far back to reasonably prove/disprove such a god.