- cross-posted to:
- lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://startrek.website/post/10912845
Glad I was too dumb to finish college…
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There may be singular scientists doing work like that, but big S Science doesn’t care one bit about any god. Unless this person thinks scientific discovery itself diminishes their belief somehow, which is stupid in a whole other way.
That’s how I talk about evolution or the big bang with religious people, science explains what we observe. What’s so bad about studying how god did it?
An excuse I’ve heard before is that God’s mysteries are not for man to understand. The ultra-religious would absolutely rather have followers live in ignorance. That way they stay followers and don’t think to question things that don’t make sense.
Agreed, most scientists figure there’s no way to prove it disprove the existence of god. What idiots like this object to is science proving things that contradict a literal interpretation of the bible - not because they set out to, but because it worked out that way. Evolution is an example: some people figure that if we can see the evolution of man over millions of years, then god didn’t snap his fingers and create man in a day. So that makes scientists assholes.
Proof can be a mathematical thing, in which it’s a line of logic derived from a set of axioms, and is proof beyond doubt.
Proof can also be a forensic thing, in which evidence is used to indicate someone committed a crime (or is responsible for a wrongful incident.)
Proof doesn’t happen in science. Science is about making mathematical models that reflect observations in nature. When those models are able to consistently predict outcomes, they become established laws such as the law of falling bodies. If you have a tuckfun of evidence that your model is consistently accurate, then it becomes a theory.
But we can’t prove ghosts or fairies exist. We can only show there’s no evidence for them, despite having looked a lot of places. We can’t prove God doesn’t exist. We can only show we’ve looked in a lot of places and haven’t found one.
Some folk have asserted God must exist to fulfill certain roles, such as the creation of the universe or the thing that runs natural mechanics. Some of these are beyond event horizons of observation.
But then the answer is to say we don’t know what’s over these horizons. Scientists will guess (hypothesize) what is over there, typically based on our observations of what’s over here, which usually means assuming those phenomena we don’t fully understand (ball lightning, unidentified areal phenomena) are also natural and ordinary.
Given that those things we associated with faeries and ghosts have demonstrated to be ordinary, we expect those things we once associated witg God to also be ordinary. We don’t know, but so far, we’ve had good luck assuming everything is normal.
That’s not always true. Feynman thought if there was more intelligent life we’d see more evidence by now, so we may be rare, or they may be hiding, or we just dont have communications with enough reach to talk to them. Also light is slow.
Science can’t prove that God doesn’t exist. Logic, however, can prove that many popular conceptions of ‘God’, such as tri omni super being, is logically inconsistent and thus can’t exist.
This is reflects a common presumption among apologists, that if they can somehow prove that god exists, or even presume one does because the negative cannot be proven, that they can presume it is their god from their pantheon.
Even if we were able to assert logically that a god exists (which Thomas Aquinas and Descartes tried to do and failed based on common presumptions of their era) it still would mean a vast number of possibilities other than the Abrahamic myth on which the Church and modern ministries depend. To be fair, a recent video on Aquinas’ arguments for God as they were understood when he wrote them were beyond my comprehension, and it didn’t address at all how he got from a generic creator being to the Resurrection of Jesus. The thing is, if Aquinas’ logical flow can be explained in modern terms, I should be able to understand it, even if I suck at calculating integrals. (I could follow Greene and Hawking well enough.)
When considering theistic possibilities, I prefer to look at the simulation hypothesis and Azathoth’s dream. As neither of them assert a divine interest in us personally (either the planet or the species, let alone us individually) they aren’t popular among those who depend on religion, but they make way more sense as philosophical examples. Both of these also don’t assert an afterlife. (The latter is, in fact, cosmic horror intended to allow the reader grasp how ephemeral their own existence is, that the entire universe will vanish and be forgotten when Azathoth wakes once again.)
Popular religions tend to follow ideas that are popular among humans (that we’re extra important, that justice within human society is important, that we’re not going to die) which is evidence they’ve been honed towards appealing to populism, and not honed towards accurately reflecting what is true or real.
