why don't we know either way whether god exists?

Great Debates
1

or - why must religion adhere to scientific rigour?

why is there such an acceptance of the lack of need for proof when it comes to religion? even on these boards, where scientific proof is almost unfailingly required for every single issue or contention raised, when such proof is asked of religious beliefs, the poster is consistently told ‘it cannot be proven either way.’

(this thread contains many examples of such responses)

of course, i do not see a reason for religion to adhere to scientific examination; any request that it does is inherently contradictory. however, other posters obviously do, as the issue has been raised any number of times, and there will always be people who attempt to scientifically ‘prove’ god’s existence.

so why this persistent belief that there is really no evidence either way to prove or disprove the existence of everyone’s favourite deity? despite the overwhelming amount of scientific evidence that explains the universe perfectly well without such constructs, when it comes up against religion, however, it is deemed to be very much short of the absolute truth, only a very vague approximation of our limited understanding of the universe.

yet, everywhere on these boards, this ‘vague approximation’ is cited over and over to answer questions, support opinions and ultimately, to fight ignorance.

we can accept that newton’s theory of gravity explains why we don’t fall from the face of the earth. if someone came in here telling us that we don’t fall from the earth, because the earth is sending out mind control waves instructing us to fall back to it when we attempt to leave, they would be asked for evidence. they wouldn’t be told, ‘well, we don’t know one way or the other because science is only an approximation.’

even more confusing is the ‘scientific’ proof given when it is demanded, such as the old favourite – ‘the order and beauty of our universe must have been created by an intelligent being’ – a statement so scientifically flawed that were it used to prove anything but religious belief, its proponent would be dismissed as simple-minded and most unintelligent.

there is nothing wrong with it as a philosophical exploration of religion, but it is most certainly scientific.

must we continue to expect religion to adhere to the rigours of science? why do the scientifically minded expect it to, and why do the religiously minded ever attempt to explain it in such terms?

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’ Do too much, and people become dependent on you; too little, and they lose faith. If you’re doing your job right, nobody even knows for certain that you did anything at all."–God as quoted in Futurama

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i meant this thread.

4

Gex gex, it’s a fair question. However, it’s impossible to devise a mathematical proof of what happens when muriatic acid and lye react. It’s impossible to describe using the discipline of physics the events of a political campaign. Each discipline has its own system of proof and descriptive terminology.

God, for whatever reasons He’s seen fit to do so, is not inclined to make His presence and intentions obvious to many people, but has done so to the satisfaction of others, at any given time. So whatever results you get from analyzing the question are based on whether or not you yourself accept the evidence on hand to you as an individual.

I’d be the first to say that it’s reasonable for an objective person to question the evidence of the Bible, and hearsay evidence of God’s work in another’s life would depend on how much I trust that other person and his/her ability to reason past emotional questions that may influence his or her views.

I’ve seen pseudo-trollish posts from Christians and from atheists, and I’ve seen logical posts from believers in a variety of faith traditions and from agnostics and atheists.

I’d be happy to give you the reasons why I believe – but I doubt they’d constitute grounds for you to believe.

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My understanding is that the “you can’t prove it either way” attitude is a fairly recent one. In medieval times, scholars like presented proofs for the existence of God that were generally accepted (although they don’t comply with what we today expect from scientifically well-founded evidence, this shows that medieval man did believe in the provability of God). Later on, with the rise of modern science, it became somewhat hip to be an atheist - followers of progress laughed about everyone who still believed in God despite the newly required knowledge, and the belief that God’s nonexistence has finally been proven became widespread. Yet many people continued to believe, so the argument didn’t cease, especially when scientists who were convinced of God’s existence, like Einstein, entered the stage.

The problem was that, whatever argument one party came up with, it could easily been disproved by its adversaries who based their thoughts on other assumptions; a believer might tell you about the beauty and order of the universe, which, from his point of view, is a good point, but the atheist can counter with scientific explanations that explain the universe without assuming there must be a Supreme Being. The believer will respond saying that the very discoveries of science and laws of nature prove there must be an intelligent being behind all this, and so the quarrel goes on and on forever simply because they’re in some way missing each other’s general idea. I think this is why the both sides finally agreed upon the “you can’t prove I’m wrong and I can’t prove you are” notion; it spares them a long-winded discussion that wouldn’t result in anything new anyway.

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Jesus, I forgot to insert the result of my scholars search :wink:
I wanted to mention thomas of Aquin but I wasn’t sure about his name, so I wanted to ran a search and then forgot about it. Sorry.

7

…is that there are certain truths that can never be revealed through science, math and logic alone, at least that’s what a computer science professor once showed me.

It all centered around Turing’s Paradox AKA the “Halting Paradox.”

If I remember right the lecture went something along these lines (bear in mind this was four years ago or so, so the details are rather fuzzy):

The metamathematic movement was started with the belief that all of life’s mysteries would eventually, given enough time, be solved through a rational application of math and logic. Essentially Metamathematics was the philosophical applications and implications of the principles applied in math and logic.

Then along came Alan Turing and his “machine.”

Turing’s machine was rather simple in concept. It was nothing more than a universal machine that could take any input and produce the appropriate output given an algorithm to follow. It was essentially the precursor to computers.

The machine itself was represented as a black box. The internal mechanizations of the algorithm were largely irrelevant to the result. There were multiple ways to reproduce the same algorithm.

The paradox went something along the lines of this:

There are machines that operate under a simple algorithm of given an input of X, one gets Y as output, or given an input of Y, one gets X as output. All other inputs and outputs are ignored. After the machine has processed its input, it stops, and waits until the next input.

Now Turing’s black box is arbitrarily defined as a matrix of all such machines that exist in the world that follow the input/output scheme detailed above. However, the input of the Turing’s machine is at any instant only connected to the input of one machine in the matrix, and likewise the output of of Turing’s machine is at any instant only connected to the corresponding output of the machine connected at the input.

Which machine in the matrix is selected is irrelevant, they all have the same input/output results, although they may have different internal mechanisms for determining the results. So we assume that a machine is picked at random.

Now we basically have created a Turing machine, that itself acts as a “X becomes Y, Y becomes X” machine itself. So by the original rules of this universal machine being a matrix of all machines that follow the input/output scheme, we now must include our own Turing machine in the matrix as well.

This really presents no problem until we happen to randomly select our own machine as the machine we want to wire our input and output to. Are universal machine has now “blown up” in our faces so to speak. We now have encountered a halting paradox.

Or for those of you more code oriented, I found a pretty good pseudocode representation of the halting paradox at http://www.csc.tntech.edu/~srini/DM/chapters/review3.3.html. It is the last paradox mentioned on the page.

Basically if we assume that the universe can be entirely reduced to algorithms, we have to assume that there is a way to accurately reproduce each of these algorithms. Turing’s machine in concept does so. Yet certain algorithms can not be represented by Turing’s machine due to the halting paradox. Therefore our original assumption is false.

So if science and math can’t explain everything, what is left?

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:confused:

So, we have a hypothetical machine network, witch can take input and provide output but not on the same machine.
If we take the wrong machine to feed our input it will blow up.

And this disproves that science can explain everything?

I must reread this paradox, I think, 'cause I don’t get it.

9

Ahh, here’s a subject I can speak to with some authority.

The halting problem (there is no paradox involved, merely a proof by contradiction) tells us that in a certain formal system there exist undecidable problems. That formal system is important, because it is believed to capture mechanical computation.

It’s important in Computer Science to know that undecidable problems exist (in this particular formal system), and to have an example. If we suspect that a problem is not decidable, we can prove it by showing it to be equivalent to the halting problem (or any other known undecidable problem).

Extending this to the sciences on the other side of the quad, in the Physics and Chemistry buildings, is problematic. How do you reduce a question about the natural world to the halting problem?

The halting problem is about an arbitrary Turing Machine (I can provide more details on the halting problem if anyone cares), but in the natural sciences, they study particular things. The halting problem doesn’t claim that we can’t ever know anything about particular instances, so even if you (mistakenly) apply it to the natural sciences, it doesn’t give us license to stop investigation.

Perhaps what you were thinking of was Godel’s incompleteness theorem. There exist things that are true in any sufficiently powerful formal system, but that cannot be proven true in that system. There are truths we cannot prove, and falsehoods we cannot disprove.

And that is precisely why this topic probably engenders such debate. We can’t “prove” it, but we still want to draw conclusions. So we do. And we talk about why we did.

kg m²/s²

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It won’t literally blow up (hence why I put that in quotes). It will just never stop. Essentially its input becomes wired to itself.

There is nothing illogical or false in the premise.

To summarize the points:

  1. The assumption is that all the universe can be represented by mathmatical algorithms.

  2. The Turing machine is a way of mechanizing these algorithms, essentially the premise was that a Turing machine given an algorithm to follow can be programmed to execute the algorithm the same way a human would (hence, the so-called Turing test used for Artificial Intelligence). This is no different from your modern day computer. All the computations computers do can be done by hand, they just take a lot longer. The machine in question is only hypothetical in that it can handle any algorithm. Current computers are limited by how they are programmed. The Turing machine is essentially what a computer is if time and money weren’t a limitation. There is nothing wrong with having a theoretical machine that can handle any algorithm. If a human being can formulate an algorithm, a machine can be built to emulate it.

  3. The current input/output result is given “X we get Y, given Y we get X.” Or if you prefer, lets limit the input to only 0 or 1. The output will be its inverse. I.e. 0 becomes 1, 1 becomes 0. There are no doubt many different algorithms that can be written to achieve this result.

  4. We build a machine that represents the matrix of all the machines in the universe that operate based on the input/output requirements, regardless of algorithm they themselves use. Our machine essentially emulates a machine that meets the input/output requirements. Any machine we select at random to connect to, will produce the desired results.

  5. So now our machine has itself become a machine that now operates based on the input/output requirements. So by the rules of our machine as described, it needs to be included within its own matrix.

  6. And then we happen to randomly choose our machine as the one we want to emulate. There is now nothing to trigger the halting of our machine.

P.S. The URL posted above got a period at the end, so I’m reposting the URL without the period. If you want to see another explanation visit it: http://www.csc.tntech.edu/~srini/DM/chapters/review3.3.html

11

Your description is a little fuzzy, and I think wrong.

A Turing Machine is an abstract model of computation that is intended to capture what we mean by “mechanical computation”. Mechanical computation is defined informally. The Church-Turing thesis claims that Turing Machines (TMs) correspond to our notion of mechanical computation. If you accept Church-Turing (and that’s not really controversial among Computer Scientists), then you can treat Turing Machines as defining mechanical computation.

So, can a TM compute everything? Can everything be computed mechanically? The answer is no, and the halting problem is an example of such an undecidable problem.

Turing Machines can halt and produce an answer on a particular input, or they can run forever. The halting problem is this: is there a TM that takes a description of a TM as input and answers “yes” exactly when that (the input) TM halts on all inputs and “no” when it fails to halt for some input?

The answer is “no, no such TM exists”. The proof is by contradiction: assuming that such a thing exists leads to a contradiction. There is no paradox. Assuming that the halting problem is undecidable, while it may lead to some astounding and non-intuitive results, does not lead to a contradiction.

That means that some things cannot be computed. It doesn’t mean that we can’t determine that a particular TM halts on all inputs or not (I can easily exhibit one that does). It also doesn’t mean that we can’t determine that a TM halts on particular inputs of interest.

But scientists don’t work that way, Hoopy Frood. What they’d do is capture a TM, take it into the lab, and feed it a bunch of inputs. If it halted on all of them, they’d hypothesize that it halted on every input. If it ran for a long time on some input, they might hypothesize that it didn’t halt on that input. Then they’d draw conclusions and make predictions based on that hypothesis. As soon as they observed directly (by watching the TM) or indirectly (by finding an incorrect prediction) that their hypothesis was wrong, they’d modify the hypothesis.

12

Well, the way I understand it, Turing was mostly concentrating on countering the Metamathematicians, who believed that all nature was made up of mathematical algorithms. Physics and Chemistry were higher-level studies of the results of those algorithms, but were still at their essence little more than math an logic.

Turing showed them that not all things can be reduced to a simple algorithm. Some algorithms can not be represented universally due to inherent contradictions.

It was more a nail in the metamathmeticians coffins than any attempt to prove an existance of a higher power.

But if chemistry and physics aren’t based on only math and logic, what are they based around. What fundamental concept links all of science? Does one even exist? Math itself is simple. It’s nothing more then a set of rules. It has its own self-defined existence. It is a completely human-invented contstruct to quantify the world around it. The number system only exists because we have determined it does. Most of science relies on mathematical concepts in some form, but being that they are extensions of this, they have other concepts thrown in.

But where do these concepts originate from?

This is where the whole Einsteinian concept of God comes into play. Einstein didn’t necessarily believe in a cognizant higher power at work. His God wasn’t the omniscient thinking deity most people associate with the word. His God was represented by the unanswerable in science. The general feeling that there is some higher purpose at work which humans will probably never be able to fully comprehend. Science being a creation of human minds won’t have all the answers, because we humans will never have all the answers.

13

One clarification: The statement above refers to the Metamathematic belief, I don’t hold the belief (and never have) that anything other than math and logic themselves can be reduced down to purely math and logic. After reading my post again I realized that it could be misinterpreted as a statement by me claiming that Physics and Chemistry are simply math at a higher level.