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There is no way of disproving a metaphysical deity, religious people will just tell you that science can't comprehend 'god' and that it would be impossible to prove 'god' exists with science, you just have to accept that 'god' exists. However, no religion has ever met the burden of proof for scientifically proving that their 'god' exists. This is a more important question. Bertrand Russel once said in regard to religion that you might as well believe that there is a teapot orbiting the sun, nobody can prove it, but there are many ancient texts and stories that claim that it truly exists, telescopes aren't powerful enough to see it, surely that exists, there is no way of disproving it exists. | |
The Cambrian explosion is a big one too, lots of fun things to think about with it. | |
science isn't out to "disprove god". indeed the idea that science is opposed to religion (or rather that religion is opposed to science) is virtually something that's only gained ground in the wider population and seeped out of the US historically recently (and imo probably owes more to rampant anti-intellectualism than anything else). most religions have had few problems incorporating and/or even supporting and encouraging scientific enquiry. 1. "perfect for life as we know it"...er ye "as we know it"...atm..."correlation does not imply causation" 2. "life tends towards order"...i take it you've never slept in a jungle..."life" is anything but "order"...you might think that living next to a tarmaced road in square edged house with a metal box to travel around in and while you fondle your perfectly ergonomic phone but "life" given have a chance would tear all that transient "order" apart. | |
Anthropic principle there...also, the amount of planets that have, do or will exist is rather huge. (As an aside, the Goldilocks zone tends towards rather woolly science, the Earth has had massively different climates without the orbit having changed. Presumably, there is only a limited band in which our sort of life could exist, but as to what is is...arguably, Mars and Venus fall within that range, if the conditions on those planets were different) | |
Well, if they conceptually accept the possibility of disproving God and are jsut refuting that has happened, they basically defeat themselves. You'll need to try and incorporate it into specific scientific examples, but it's quite easy to knock down the arguement that scientific insight has strengthened or hurt the case for the divine. If you bring it down to the question of how reality would change if God spontaneously appeared or dissappeared (depending on where you are argueing from) the answer is always "don't know, probably nothing." Science is exercise in evidence, specifically experimentally contrasted to controls, and as such, as far as science is concerned there is no way to determine a factor that is either in everything or nothing. I usually pull these things out to counter people who would claim science would suggest there is no God, but it works perfectly well against those who would claim science supports God. Edit: You might get better response from people if you include the other half of the question. Since you are trying to specifically counter their arguements, information on whether science has strengthened the case would be more helpful to you. | |
Science can not be said to have "disproved" god (as far as that word can used) because god is not specific enough a concept. If by "god" you mean a thunder god who rules the sky from above mount olympus then the answer is "yes". Science can demonstrate that thunder has a natural cause and there is no palace full of powerful gods above mount olympus. But that only eliminates one god. As with any god concepts you have to first determine what this god is like and what you need to demonstrate its true/false. For example there are specific claims about the christian god (mostly from the bible) that indicate he doesn't exist (world wasn't created in 6 days, there are no signs of a global flood and space travel has demonstrated the sky isn't a different realm where the palace of any deity resides) - but that doesn't mean there isn't a god or gods out there. Science can only test what can be tested and investigate what can be investigated. While I don't believe any gods exist I am only drawing on the fact that the few gods I am aware of have been shown to be mythical creatures conjured up by human minds. The fact that those ones are myths leads me to extrapolate that all god concepts are myths until someone comes up and demonstrates that their specific one actually has proof - I'm not lazy I just don't have time to examine every proposed god. | |
-Science cannot conclusively disprove god or any other paranormal being, save in terms of specific cases of what said beings are supposed to have done/do, such as in the specific case of Zeus as mentioned by Electrojosh above -Science's purpose is not inherently at odds with religion. Both are in the business of explaining the way our reality works, with religion filling in the gaps science could not yet touch. Religion took over most of such explanations for a long time, but more recently the balance has tipped the other way. Both science and religion change their viewpoints over time to fit new information that is presented. the fact that the latter tends to do so much more slowly is a failing, but not a fatal one. The only problem occurs when a person holds to beliefs in either category with the assumption that it is the one and only possible truth. -It is still feasible (if not necessarily likely or recommended) to see the hand of a creator force in the universe, several gaps in our understanding of both biology and quantum physics would be explained by A god figure or other force that has effectively the same effect. We may or may not fill in those gaps in the future with proven concepts, but we cannot assume we will. The problem with this admission from the perspective of your friends, is that while this can be taken as support for the existence of a creator figure, absolutely nothing about it supports their god, or even one closely resembling it, over the infinite other possible variations. In other words, the only kind of "proof" science has FOR god, can apply to the existence of Shiva, Ahura Mazda, Coatilcue, and/or the flying spaghetti monster just as easily as Jehovah. | |
I don't think that God can ever be proved or disproved. No machine or equation could ever tell us that. | |
Discredit the idea of science proving God? That's easy. Where is the experimental data for God? No data for God? Then science hasn't proven God. End of discussion. If anyone whimpers about how that's unfair, you can always ask how science (which is a disciplined way of observing and measuring the material universe) is supposed to measure something beyond space, time, and energy. There may be lots of things in science that to a religious person suggest that there is a God, but this is no more evidence for God than seeing a cloud that really, really looks like a dude with a white beard is evidence for God. The proposition that science could disprove God is equally false. There is no possible way to prove that anything does not exist. | |
Thats a very bold claim - an equation (or series of formulas) may not be as far off as you think. I honestly suggest reading a Brief History of Time (by Stephen Hawking) - which demonstrates how much maths and technology have helped the progress of Astro- and quantum- physics (up to around 1987) and gives a very good history of how our understanding of the universe changed dramatically in the last 400 years. Then slowly move from there to more recent reads like Universe in a Nutshell (also by Hawking) and Just Six Numbers (by Martin J Rees) and you will get a better picture of just how much of the universe is explained by equations. | |
I understand that science and technology can do amazing things, but I think proving/disproving the existence of a being that nobody can see, hear, or generally have a form of two-way communication with. I also appreciate the way in which you responded. Not many responses I get are this polite. | |
Gonna qualify that with CHRISTIAN god? Because that is what you want to talk about. | |
Thats a fair point because the basic lack of things to measure this particular god concept are out of the realms by default. However this god could still exist but our technology to observe it may not be advanced enough (it may be that this god is in a universe seperate to our own or a six-dimensional being or some such thing that, for now, we can't see). I'm not arguing as to whether or not this god exists (which you probably are quite aware of). Instead I am saying that the maths needed to describe it and the technology required to observe it might, one day, be possible. | |
I think this is /thread right here | |
a "unified field theory" or "theory of everything" doesn't prove or disprove "god". all it says is "these are the laws of the universe". even Hawking himself has said he's preprepared to accept "god" may have set them in motion but the crucial thing for people like Hawking is that even "god" himself doesn't appear (from all the available evidence) to be mucking around with them. in short "god" may have made the rules but he still follows them. now if he kept popping up and doing inconvenient things like turning sperm whales into bowls of petunias in front of everybody for shits and giggles then Hawking and the like would have a serious problem with what they are trying to do...but he doesn't...not even at the other end of the universe. | |
God, being a being of unlimited power and beyond our understanding, can never be proved or disproved by science, one way or the other. If somebody does somehow find evidence that disproves god, believers will either ignore it, or say that it was "put there by God to test our faith" (see creationists arguments when they are presented with evidence of evolution). | |
I was not suggesting that these ideas did prove or disprove a god. The point I was responding to was around the statement that:
My point with those books was to show that, in the last 400 years, mathematics has been able to describe and technology has been able to reveal far more about the universe that we imagined. So its possible that they will get to the stage that they will be able to prove/disprove (with as much certainty as science allows) whether a God exists. | |
Science is never trying to disprove god, the idea that science is opposed to religion and all of it's ideals is absurd. Science is man's attempt to understand the world around them. | |
well if science is able to some how find out things that are omniscience i will be very impressed considering that it would at least validate the ideas of Omniscience objects. | |
Really, this question can not be answered. Not to cop out of replying to the topic, it's just that you simply can not just clap your hands and say " God is dead!" God/ Jesus/ the Holy Spirit / Vishnu ect are all metaphysical beings. In layman's terms, they both can and can't exist( think like Schrodinger's cat.) These beings can lay in between real and not real, and science can't explain away something like that. | |
you cant disprove god scientifically...thats the whole point | |
In the portion of the universe which we think we understand, we have not found any conclusive evidence of God. However, we cannot be sure that there is no God in the part of the universe which we do not understand. We also cannot be sure of our understanding of the part of the universe we think we understand. We can present compelling evidence to disprove many of the ideas of the religious community that the world was formed according to whatever religious text they follow or that some divine event happened, but let's not forget that there is an absurd amount of things we do not know about existence | |
Not only does this not make sense, it's basically contradictory to what we know about the universe: life itself has potentially the smallest chance of probability of actually existing anywhere in the universe. Obviously, we know that it does. Probability is worthless when dealing with absolutes. | |
...and is also somehow objectively good... | |
God was invented in tents by primitive tribes people and sheepherders guessing the world was just a few generations old. God does not need to be disproved. God needs to be dismissed. | |
I find discussions like this tend to cause more frustration than actual good as A). Those who thing the two go hand in hand will only moan and groan at the two extremes clashing. Heck a number of the greatest scientific inventions and discoveries were done by men of the cloth or mainstream Christians over the Centuries, and thought their beliefs were increased with the splendor they found. and B). And the people who are already adversarial are going to go at each others throats anyway anyways. To play devil advocate for the science side, I hope it doesn't end like this | |
The Christian church stopped attempting to hold any kind of serious stake in science quite some time ago, and religion has now (conveniently) redefined itself as an entity that is completely seperate from science, and therefore exempt from any scientific scrutiny or probing. The Bible is no longer an explanatory framework, it's a fairly nebulous text that sometimes supports the Christian idea of faith, which by definition is a belief in something for which no evidence exists. Cue the usual shitstorm about "burden of proof" - on the one hand you have people like Christopher Hitchens who make eminently commonsense statements like "That which is asserted with no evidence can be dismissed without evidence", but to the theistic viewpoint that just isn't good enough. Why abandon the promise of Heaven, and potentially risk earning yourself a place in Hell, without good evidence? And here, I grudgingly concede that given this irrational, but socially-embedded set of starting-conditions, they have a point. To me and other atheists, it's completely irrelevant as I don't think Heaven or Hell exist. But to somebody who does believe in Heaven and Hell, it's no longer a moot point.
As somebody else mentioned, the Goldilocks Zone is just one of the incredibly "lucky" long-shots that just so happen to allow us to exist, and is rationalised by us, post-priori, as being a fortuitious or even benevolent set of circumstances. And hey, nothing that beneficial happens by random chance, so it must have been God, right? This is the Anthropic Principle. A similar set of circumstances is the thousands-to-one chances of you ever being born - after all, your father produced a heck of a lot of sperm. Isn't it amazing that YOUR sperm was the first one to the egg! It's statistically staggering! Praise Jebus! Again, it's only impressive in hindsight. If your sperm hadn't been successful and another sperm had taken its place, then a different person would be standing here in your place feeling the exact same sense of egocentric pride in their existence. And if not them, somebody else would exist, and so on. The outcome doesn't exist where an unfertilised egg or unsuccessful sperm has the opportunity to reflect on its position and say "Huh, I didn't ever become a foetus. Sucks to be me, I guess - but hey, this was the most likely outcome". The Thermodynamics argument is also completely fallacious. The system in which thermodynamics takes place is THE UNIVERSE. Not an individual organism. Yes, as organisms evolve they tend towards complexity which is seemingly in contradiction to the increase of entropy. But, look at the bigger picture and you'll see that actually, the more complex the organism, the larger the net increase in entropy in the surrounding system - the more processes that are going on, the less "efficient" the system is, so to maintain a dynamic equilibrium the organism processes more energy and creates more entropy. I have a personal feeling that thermodynamics is basically the driving force behind evolution: life produces more entropy than non-life, multi-cellular life produces more entropy still, and intelligent life produces even more. Living organisms are energy-exchange mechanisms; we are basically "agents" of entropy. Well, that's my crackpot theory, anyway :) | |
No, but I think science has done something much more important; eliminated the need for God. Gaps in knowledge are no longer big enough to merit explaining them with something supernatural. For me the question has always been: do we need God? Instead of the usual: does God exist? | |
If they accept many scientific theories you have no basis to argue against them on. They can easily say that god created the big bang and let life develop from there. But what you must understand is that the burden of proof is on them, they have to prove god exists and not the other way round. They can not do so with attributing something as evidence such as the existence of life which you can argue against using the science we know now, so in this case how the early earth provided the right conditions for amino acids to form and blah blah blah I am sure you know the rest. good luck my friend. | |
Of course it can't. Hypothetically if a scientist set out to try and disprove God that scientist would quickly leave the realm of science behind. Science can't disprove God and doesn't or shouldn't care to. Religion can't prove God and doesn't or shouldn't see a need to. Honestly this reoccurring "Can science disprove God" topic got old a long long time ago. | |
Science in general do not care about disproving god in the same way it does not care to disprove "Jack and the bean stalk". It cares about finding explanations and evidence to back those up. Those evidence just happens to nullify any religious argument for the Universe and everything in it. It is expected that many religious see it as the enemy. Evidence crossing any faith is an attack on it by default. But some believers who actually looked at the evidence tries to shape up some sort of hybrid science/religion thing to keep the hope of eternal life in the ever after or what ever floats their boat alive (as it where). | |
I see what you did there...
Stop, think about what you just said, rephrase appropriately. Saying you've proven a probabilty is like saying you absolutely maybe know something, and that doesn't get you anywhere. I'm sure you meant something more significant than that.
Of course there is. You investigate the entire universe and see if it's there or not. Is that a practical method? No. But does it theoretically work for any percievable thing? Yes. It just doesn't work for things that are not percievable. | |
Even this is untrue. You cannot prove anything about a probability of a phenomenon you do not know anything about. Science can never prove a negative. So science can never say that, for example, Moses didn't part the Sea of Reeds. The best science can ever do is say that there is no credible evidence to convince us that Moses did part the sea, and in the absence of evidence any claim that he did is completely unscientific. The best science can do is give us alternate, credible possibilities to explain stories from mythology. It can tell us nothing about the God or gods involved in that mythology, and nothing about the probabilities of them being real. | |
No, it can't disprove him. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, and all that. Then again, it's hardly stunning evidence in favour of existence either. | |
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SO the Christian union at my university is holding one of their usual 'science and religion' discussions next week, I've gone to a few of them so I figured I'd head over and see what they have to say.
The topic is "Has science disproved god? Or strengthened the case?". Now usually these things are just the usual religious types agreeing with each other that yes god can exist alongside modern science. But I want to go in with some solid arguments against this view.
So can anyone think of solid arguments that can be used to discredit the idea of science proving god?
An important point is that this is not your average group of religious people claiming X,Y&Z without any real reasoning and a lack of understanding of science.These are smart, well educated people who fully accept things like the big bang and evolution so these things wont cut it.
Some things i've thought of are:
1. The 'Goldilocks Zone' - the region of space Earth inhabits, perfect for life as we know it. Often used as evidence of god as the chance of a planet being in the right place is tiny. Obviously that only works if we assume life as we know it is the only form possible.
2. Life tends towards order - Thermodynamic systems tend towards disorder, and yet life creates order, seemingly going in the wrong direction. Only takes into account a localised region, where entropy can decrease.
Any others?