I agree - God’s a pretty unappealing notion if you don’t start off assuming it’s a good thing. But that has nothing to do with string theory. Your comment seems to have been idle snark, and I guess it sounded good to you, but I don’t think it meant anything. You could’ve said “four dimensions and no room for God.” What does that mean?
String theory is an attempt to explain why the universe looks the way it does and what it’s made of. The theory has drawn its share of criticism and we’ve yet to see if it will really hold up. But it’s not something that people cooked up just to deny the existence of God (or any gods). There aren’t a lot of theories or philosophies that exist just to deny the existence of deities. I know some religious types are fond of returning to this point, but it’s kind of self-centered. Most things that scientists do (or atheists, or skeptics) has nothing to do with gods. It’s not a denial, an affirmation, or a response.
That’s an unfair distortion of the scientific position. A correct description of it would be: anything which has some evidence for it is more appealing than anything which does not. Science deals with the empirical; if they found some empirical evidence of God, scientists would be perfectly happy to accept it. The fact is, they haven’t - as you know.
They’re not against any form of factual knowledge as long as there is evidence to support it. Some of the theories you’ve cited might sound fantastical - and, hell, they do - but it is possible to mathematically model these things. It is not possible to mathematically model God, so why on earth would you criticize scientists for not doing so?
It is an action undertaken for reasons that have nothing to do with any god. String theory isn’t intended to prove a god exists, it’s not intended to disprove the existence of gods, and it’s not intended to replace them. It’s intended to explain the makeup of the universe and address issues like why matter has mass. What I am saying is that religious people (usually fundamentalists) are in the habit of assuming that atheists and scientists are constantly going out and doing things to replace God or reject God, and they’re wrong.
It doesn’t address the subject at all. It’s not a denial, affirmation, or indeed a response any more than this post is a denial, affirmation, or response to my friends’ dislike of Star Wars.
The universe at its moment of creation was a pretty disordered place. And the order that has arisen in the billions of year since creation is the product of some fairly well-understood natural processes: gravitation, thermodynamics, natural selection.
Now compare the disordered chaos of the universe immediately after the big bang with the highly ordered structure of any hypothetical deity. A God that can think and plan and do things must be a *complicated *thing. Invoking a more complicated thing to explain a simpler thing doesn’t make any sense. If the universe is too ordered to have appeared spontaneously, then so is God.
Entropy increases *globally *with time. However, the current universe has *localized *structures that are more complicated than anything present at the time of the big bang, even though the universe as a whole is more disordered.
