Is God's existence objectively verifiable?

[nuckles87]

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Scoobes said:

Norris2k said:

nuckles87 said:

Thanks, you saved me a lot of work.

From what I can gather, Frank, your singular argument for God is "only God could have created a universe with rules."

If you want to credit God for the creation of the universe, fine. We have evidence for the evolution of the universe leading all the way up to the "Big Bang" but nothing beyond that (at least as far as I know. I'm no scientist). You want to credit God with the big bang? Go right on ahead. No one in the scientific community is stopping you right now. Just know that not knowing something isn't "proof" of something's existence.

Man has been wrong plenty of time when he used assumptions or superstition to fill in the gaps in his knowledge. We used to think the world was flat, because that's how it appeared to us. In reality, when greek mathmeticians applied math to the idea, they discovered that the Earth was curved, and therefor must be round. We used to assume that the Earth was the center of the universe and everything revolved around us. But then through astronomy we discovered moons around other bodies, came to realize we were orbiting the sun, and eventualyl realized our solar system sat in the spiral arm of a milky way galaxy. We assumed that was the only galaxy until we discovered other galaxies in the 1930s. We once assumed that the universe was created by God as described in the Bible, until we eventually began to discover evidence for a "big bang" which culminated in our discovery in the background radiation that gave us a look at how the universe was near the very beginning.

But there are flows in your own explanations.

-  You tell "I'm no scientist", then why do you believe in science ? There are proves, but beyond your understanding, told and written by people you don't know, that you probably never read, but if you would, it would be at a simplistic level that doesn't prove anything. I mean I graduated in a sciences, but I don't know much about Carbon 14, just the basic concept of datation. I've never seen C14 (you can't really even see it in a direct way), I'm not able to understand or prove by myself, but all my knowledge of datation depends on it. Still I'm not a unbeliever, C14 and all, the dinosaurs, the age of the Universe, I believe it to be true... but really, our belief in science and scientists is not very different than listening a priest quoting the Bible, if not faith, at least it's a very high level of trust.

- You tell that "Man has been wrong plenty of time when he used assumptions or superstition to fill in the gaps in his knowledge", with an analogy to the discover of galaxies, understanding of the moon. But there is a pretty strong chance the understanding of "before" the big bang is impossible, outside the scope of what science can explain. It's beyond observation, probably impossible to simulate, test. So it could really not be a "we don't know yet". We know that science progress, very fast, but we don't know at all were are the limits, we could progress exponentially forever to nowhere.

- "Man has been wrong plenty of time when he used assumptions or superstition to fill in the gaps in his knowledge". Sorry but I can seriously write "Man has been wrong plenty of time when he used mathematical demonstration and science to fill in the gaps in his knowledge". Because you know, Newton calculations are not really a knowledge. They are just that, calculations, models, that happen to work for a limited number of cases, if things are not too fast, or not too big, or not to small. The guy was a genius, and it's good enough to send a rocket to the moon, but it's not a knowledge, a real understanding. Science really accepts to be always proven wrong (at least in the sense that its field of application is drastically reduced), but still there is this strange feeling that science claims any step is dead certain. Do you think Newton said "and I could be wrong in some or even most cases, because I'm working in a such limited set of examples, a bunch of apples, 5 planets, and the moon... and I mean it's the 17 century, come on, we don't even have a laser to measure anything, so don't take me too seriously, I'm not meaning every priest is telling fairytales, next step in science could be that the Earth is flat" ? Everyone is cock sure, theists and atheists, they get it right at any point of the time.

- Science answers to how, not to why. Even if it answers to why, it's in the form of a "how". So, should the scientific method which is basically to understand how, applies to a question that is fundamentally "why" or "is there a why" ? Wether I can feel pain, or I can't, wether I can feel love or not, I don't have a need for science to prove or disprove it scientifically (even if it's great to understand how for medecine). I don't feel there is a God, that's why I'm an atheist. Let's stop BS about someone knowing more that the other... we know nothing and my belief is that we will probably never know anything at a significant level !

As someone whose studies science you should also know that unlike faith and "belief", there is peer review, experimentation and critique. Even then, concepts are constantly reviewed, revised and updated. I don't think you can really compare a religious belief to the constant rigor of testing and self-improvement the scientific method has. Whilst I might not understand everything in science, I can view the data directly and discuss with people who work in the field. If I don't know about C14, I can go online and find a whole plethora of data from various instruments and learn how to interpret it.

Your third bullet is even making the same point. Science is contantly adjusting its models to an increasingly large pool of information whereas god/religion is a simplistic explanation that can never be tested or improved upon.

I'll quote this one to make sure it doesn't get lost. But yeah, the above gets to the heart of things way more succintly than I will...but I'll answer anyway:

If I were to rely purely on my own experience for my knowledge of the universe, I would be a woefully ignorant person. I am an agnostic Jew. Beyond some cursory knowledge of my own people's history, I know very little about any religion. I have never seriously studied a science. I have never seriously studied a math. So I'm not entirely sure what your point is here. Should I just accept that I know nothing about the world around me, save for my own experiences?

I TRUST (belief is not the right word, as science is not a religion) in science because I am surrounded by it. Everything I use is built on scientific principles I only have a basic understanding of. I trust in science because science is peer reviewed by thousands of people, each and every one of them with a reason to prove everyone else wrong with some data point or piece of evidence that all of their colleagues have missed.

Religion can have some vigorous philosophical discussions, but there is no discussion of data. There is no peer review. There is no evidence beyond some ancient (and not so ancient) books that tell fantastical, almost entirely unverifiable stories. So no, it is VERY different from a priest quoting a Bible. Certainly, a religious figure can provide some unique insight and ideas based on existing religious work. But you'll never have a rabbi try to prove Kabbalah by pointing to a newly discovered piece of data. But you can have a scientist sequence human DNA and discover that some of us have a bit of neanderthal in us from crossbreeding.

 

Yeah, I agree with you on the Big Bang. Certainly, we may never know what happened before the big bang, or what caused it. We can hypothesize a "big bounce" or just stick God in there. But my point was that we have constantly been expanding our knowledge beyond what we thought was possible through our own narrow world views, that we naturally have as tiny organisms on a tiny world. Who knows what technology may nor may not reveal to us in the next 10,000 years.

 

I won't presume to talk about Newton's humility, nor will I presume to talk about the arrogance of modern day scientists. Newton may have been wrong about a lot, but he helped set the foundation for our understanding of the modern world.

 

As I noted earlier, I'm an agnostic jew. The "jew" part refers to my ethnicity and heritage, while the "agnostic" part refers to my faith, or lackthereof. I think there is a possibility of the existence of "A" God. I will not say with certainty that a creator(s) does not exist. I doubt the existence of a human-created Gods, largely due to my understanding of man's theological past. I don't see any particular God that is worshipped today as anything special or wholly different from the myriad of extinct theologies that our current Gods replaced. It seems ridiculous to me that any modern is any more likely to be real than any dead God, and that man can really know a higher being that would seem to exist beyond our plane of existence. But this has nothing to do with my trust in science. This is just my own, personal philosophy.

And...well, yeah, science has no interest in "how". "How" isn't for science, it is for philosophy.