I do a bit of reading up on some of the alleged “proofs of God” etc, and one thing that atheists often argue is that there is no scientific evidence of God’s existence. Theists try and argue things like “intelligence design”, or point to what they call “the creation”, but this often gets rejected as not being evidence of God’s existence, and more importantly, not scientific.
One thing I’m curious about is what would atheists regard as “scientific” evidence of God’s existence? Or does God’s nature make him inherently unprovable through science?
If we take a hypothetical situation:
Let’s say CERN’s particle accelerator produces a previously undiscovered particle, and when some property of this particle is converted in to binary, it reproduces, say, the Qu’ran, to the letter.
Would this be “scientific” evidence of God’s existence?
I think something like that would be evidence, and pretty good evidence.
You aren’t going to reproduce the text of the Koran from a fundamental constant (unless your method of translating numbers to letters is specifically chosen in advance to map that constant to that text.) The odds of producing that long a string of text from a random number are inconceivably small.
Infinite monkeys do not apply – we don’t have infinitely many fundamental constants.
Like the example given, any conceivable scientific “proof” of a god’s existence that I could think of would rely on the assumption beforehand that a specific god exists. Of course, like all decent atheists, I’m willing to be convinced. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Trying to think up a specific example of something that would prove a god’s existence is missing the point. More importantly, experimentation with reliable, repeatable, objectively observable results would be necessary but not sufficient. Alternative explanations would have to be ruled out by careful examination and experimentation. Observer bias would have to be accounted for, among other things.
First up, it would have to be an endlessly repeatable phenomenon, i.e. scientists wholly unconnected to the CERN project can perform the same experiment with the same results.
As for me personally, I’d probably go “Huh, that’s weird,” but nothing short of a head trauma or the onset of mental illness is likely to make me worship God.
But if the binary conversion spelled out “We Apologize for the Inconvenience” exactly 42 times, it might prove that God needs a towel worse than Elvis needs boats.
I’d have to become politically active to try to counter those who would use this odd phenomenon to promote some form of Sharia law in my beloved Canada, true north strong and free.
What do you mean “in binary”? The Qu’ran is going to have to be in some language, and you’re going to need some metric for converting binary into that language, and the only way the two are going to line up is if that metric is created specifically to interpret the masturbation of the particle accelerator as the Qu’ran. Come on, you’re being more than a bit naive.
No, since like other religious documents and myths the Qu’ran and Islam make no sense. A scientific proof would have to be logically consistent.
As well; that would be proof that either the data or the laws of physics are being screwed with by something, which means that scientific methods won’t work well because they assume that nature is honest and purposeless. This would be more like reverse engineering and codebreaking; analysing an artifact that may or may not be designed to deceive.
And no, that doesn’t mean that religion is right; religion has a history of being wrong, relentlessly, whenever it has the chance to make an assertion about the real world. The time to trust religion is never, because it’s just that bad at describing reality. Even if there WAS a God, and he talked to people, I wouldn’t trust a believer to accurately relay what God said without editing it according to his delusions.
And there are better explanations than God - mainly because God is such a silly idea that virtually anything is better. We could all be in a simulation and that’s an Easter egg written into the fake laws of physic yesterday by the builders; it could be the result of time travel; it could be some religious conspiracy manipulating the data; it could be aliens with physics warping technology and a weird sense of humor, or I could be insane or drugged and this dicovery in my imagination. An illogical ego fantasy like God doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.
Der This -> That’s an incredible response. You would refuse to accept that the particle was doing what it’s alleged to be doing, rather than, say, take another look at whatever religion’s text it’s belting out over and over?
Even if it was a scientifically backed consensus, the world over?
Irrational is irrational. If someone came up with “scientific proof” that gravity is imaginary and we are really being held down by the ankles by invisible goblins, I wouldn’t buy that either.
Unlikely as it is, a worldwide conspiracy by scientists to deceive us is more plausible than God. As is nearly anything else. God’s an ego driven fantasy, one that violates numerous physical laws and makes no logical sense; and when someone comes up with “proof” of an ego driven fantasy, especially one that ridiculous, it shouldn’t be trusted.
As David Hume pointed out long ago, with any miraculous proof, the standard has to be to such a high level that the proof being wrong would be more astonishing than the miracle being proved.
And the existence of a god would be such a staggeringly astonishing finding, that you’d have to first rule out every possible way that this proof could be wrong, such as trickery.
Why doesn’t god just show himself, and make himself obvious to every person on earth? Is he embarrassed by all his bad behavior in the Old Testament?
As I think Bill Maher said on his appearance on the Daily Show something along the lines of “why doesn’t god, in his infinite power, just take over all broadcasting systems and announce to the world ‘Yes I’m real! But you have it all wrong! Taoism is where it’s at!’”
Look at the obverse of this. Imagine that your hypothetical particle popped out of the accelerator at CERN and broadcast in clear, unaccented tones to every radio, television, computer and iPod within 1000 miles;
“There is no god. All religions are false.” and further treatises on the non-supernatural origins of everything.
And even more fantastically, it was heard in the native language of whoever was listening to it. And every time CERN cranked the accelerator up to 11, another similar particle was generated.
Would you accept that as proof of the non-existence of god?