You really should read the Bible some time. Especially Genesis and Exodus. Ya think God talking to Abraham and Moses might be counted as sensing God?
Anyhow, you don’t try to find God directly, you just look for his scat, as it were.
Never met a scientist in your life, have you? Scientist are always trying to prove themselves and others wrong. You on the other hand seem to think you know exactly what a deity who has never been even sensed wants. Don’t make a lot of sense, does it?
Maybe you look for God the way the guy in Dylan’s “Talkin’ John Birch Society Paranoid Blues” looks for the Commies.
Look up my chimney hole
Look down deep inside my toilet bowl
They got away
No, but the reverse is true: science is a (hypertrophied and particularly successful) branch of philosophy.
Anyway, science can’t, and does not attempt to, disprove the existence of God. However, science has thoroughly undermined most of the reasons why people originally did believe in a god or gods. Furthermore, although many scientists are and have been religious, science relies on the methodological assumption that even if there are any gods or other supernatural powers, they do not intervene in (at the very least) that aspect of reality that the scientist is trying to study. if miracles were routinely occurring, science would be impossible. All this has put the burden of proof squarely on the side of the believers (and I see no sign that they can even come close to meeting that burden).
It is thoroughly dissimilar. What a group of people tell themselves about the existence of God has no bearing at all on the question of God’s actual existence. (Any more than if a group of people get together and tell each other stories about Orcs and Hobbits.) On the other hand, Oxford University does objectively exist, even though it is not the sort of thing you can point at (from within Oxford, anyway).
That’s nothing. I’m willing to operate on the assumption that sheep are spherical, provided it leads to interesting functional applications or at least a half-decent joke.
A God that does not interact with anything in any way that can be quantified or measured is, from the point of view of science, nonexistent.
I mean, if a physicist proposed the existence of a particle that interacts with nothing, is invisible, unmeasurable and in all ways undetectable and completely without physical effect, we’d be asking “Why did you bother? What made you imagine there was such a thing?”
Science can’t prove or disprove something that is explicitly claimed to be outside the rules of our reality.
However, the minute ‘God’ is claimed to interact with our world, that claim becomes testable. For example, if you believe that God answers prayers in a physical way, say by saving people from illness or injury, then we have a claim that can be tested empirically. We could look at rates of cancer remission among communities of faith vs communities that do not believe in praying for health, for instance.
There have been a few such studies, and I’ve never seen one that found any significant effect at all.
I don’t understand why religious people seem to be so antagonistic to science or feel the need to justify their God through science. The whole point of ‘faith’ is that you are supposed to believe without proof. If science ‘proved’ God, there would be no reason to have faith.
Yes. But, e.g., an ethical proposition does not interact with anything that can be quantified or measured is, from the point of view of science, nonexistent. It’s invisible, unmeasurable and in all ways undetectable and completely without physical effect.
Yet it’s not irrational to concern ourselves with ethical propositions, to reflect upon them, to investigate them, to assess them, to accept or reject them. We just don’t employ the techniques of science very much to do this. But that tell us more about the limitations of science that it does about the reality, validity, importance or rationality of ethical propositions.
I don’t suggest that God is necessarily analogous to an ethical proposition; my point is just that there is a class of propositions whose truth cannot be investigated by science, but that may nevertheless be important and meaningful. Hence showing that God cannot be investigated by science does not necessarily refute or marginalise the propositions of theism.
What you say here, I cautiously suggest, implicitly does proceed on the assumption that God is analagous to an unobservable particle - or, at least, that an unobservable particle is a better analogy for God than an ethical proposition is.
This isn’t radically different from arguments that proceed upon the implict notion that God is analagous to an invisible pink unicorn, a flying spaghetti monster or an interplanetary teapot. All those arguments fail to persuade, I think, because you don’t have to examine theistic notions very closely before you realise that the the unstated assumption is, in fact, not a very sound one. The God postulated by mainstream theist traditions in the western world is not really analagous to a particle, a unicorn, an agglomeration of pasta or a teapot.
It can and has, as much as it can disprove anything. That’s why the believers have created a version of their god tailored to be as untouchable by science as possible, for use in discussions like this one. They’ve been forced to retreat again and again in their claims about their god until it has shrunk into something that is indistinguishable from nothing.
Few people IMHO actually believe in the totally undetectable, totally non-interventionist god that gets used in arguments like this; it’s a tactical god that exists to defend against the criticism of science. And when the discussion is over and the skeptics are elsewhere, people go back to the god(s) who answers prayers and so on.
Nor can science disprove the existence of a deity that holds views exactly opposite to those Pjen, **cornopean **- heck for that matter every religious person out there - believe their god/s hold.
The answer to **Pjen’s **headline question is “no”, but this is relevant in no way whatsoever to anything other than empty musing. The OP and thousands like it are pointless and utterly sterile wankery. Science can’t disprove an infinite number of unfalsifiable, entirely contradictory propositions. So in the absence of positive evidence as to which propositions are actually true, there is no basis for assuming anything about those propositions for which there is not, to an equal extent, a basis for assuming the contrary.
Religion manages to be a lot more illogical than that. Religion is the equivalent of inventing hundred of different particles and finding no evidence that any of these particles actually exist - and then arbitrarily concluding that one of the particles exists and all of the other ones do not.
You put too much thought into it. I operate as if the existence of god is a meaningless question for people who like philosophical dead ends to debate and am much happier for it.
That’s because ethics is entirely made up. It’s an invented concept - we might achieve some kind of consensus on the things we thus make up (in the same way that Star Wars fans may reach consensus on what is and is not consistent with that fictional universe) - but it’s still made up - even if it has utility.
