Topic: Why Science Does Not Disprove God - page 9. (Read 7927 times)

It is absolutely possible to reason about god or . . .

any other subject science can't explore including the study of the very large (I.e. the universe as a whole), the very small (subatomic and quantum levels), extremely rare events (e.g. Alien encounters, UFOs, God manifesting the body of a single individual, etc.).  

 Science, aside from being a method, is simply one of many theories of knowledge acquisition, and by no means is it the best

Misplaced Burden of Proof

What if you were to say this to your friend: “I think God exists and I can prove it using logic.” Then your friend were to say, “How could you possibly do that?” Then you were to say, “How? Well, how can you prove God doesn’t exist using logic?

What’s happened here is tricky, and it happens often in conversations without either person realizing it. If you make a claim about something, it is on you to prove that the claim is true. If you say something is the case, you must show how it’s the case. What happened above is that you shifted the burden of proof to your friend, when in fact it was on you. You claimed that you could prove God exists using logic, so it was on you to do so. Your friend never claimed that he could prove God didn’t exist.

This is misplacing the burden of proof. We make claims all the time about the world, and sometimes people ask us to explain how we know the claims we are making. When this happens, it is on us to explain it, not them. A common form of this argument is known as the appeal to ignorance. The appeal to ignorance basically says, “You can’t prove it’s false, so it must be true.” Or it says, “You can’t prove it’s true, so it must be false.”Again, if you make a claim that something is false, it’s on you to show how it’s false. The fact that someone else can’t prove your claim to be true doesn’t make it false. This fallacy exploits the things about the world that we don’t know.

Notice that both of the following are fallacies: “You can’t prove God doesn’t exist, so he must exist.” “You can’t prove that God does exist, so he must not exist.”

Often, people who understand logic well—like lawyers and politicians—will deliberately misplace the burden of proof to make their opponent look bad. They know the burden of proof is on them, but they want to shift focus away from themselves so they purposefully commit a burden of proof fallacy to catch their opponent off guard. Now that you’ve taken this class, you can arm yourself against such people!

A tiny correction there: it should have read hypothesises. A theory is a hypothesis that has already been strengthened by multiple empiric experiments. This is one of the reasons why people detached from the scientific process have trouble with, say, the theory of evolution, calling it "just a theory".

They are so stupid... And still trying to prove or disprove something that couldn't  be proved or disproved.  

You can't "disprove" existence of Cthulhu or Flying Spagetty Monster through using a scientific approach. Science can't disprove existence of God because this statement does not apply to scientific knowledge. These two areas couldn't be overlapped, any attempt to merge scientific and religious knowledge doesn't make any sense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

Science is science, religion is religion. That's the point here.

Science can, and does, disprove that god made the universe.

Science cannot disprove god any more than the flying spahgetting monster.

Science can, and does, disprove that god made the universe.

The whole discussion if "God" exists or not is so moot and worn out. It's a philosophical farce.

To be able to discuss this subject, you'd first have to define what "God" actually means. That's where 99.9999% of all (internet) discussions fall short in the first place already. If "God" means the bearded man in the sky, then I guess we're all atheists, even the pope. If "God" simply means "all there is", then we might well all be theists.

Ultimately it boils down to the question why "existence" "exists" in the first place.

A better discussion might be what consciousness is. Is consciousness a product of matter, or is matter a product (or projection) of consciousness?

.....great British mathematician Roger Penrose has calculated—based on only one of the hundreds of parameters of the physical Universe—that the probability of the emergence of a life-giving cosmos was one divided by 10, raised to the power 10, and again raised to the power of 123.....

I know there isn't. But if religious people want to meddle into science, they should start working on an effort of backing up their faith with facts, like everyone else that comes forward with theories.

"A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage"

Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you.  Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself.  There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

"Show me," you say.  I lead you to my garage.  You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle -- but no dragon.

"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely.  "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.

"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."

Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."

You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick."  And so on.  I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all?  If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists?  Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true.  Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder.  What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.  The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head.  You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me.  The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind.  But then, why am I taking it so seriously?  Maybe I need help.  At the least, maybe I've seriously underestimated human fallibility.  Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded.  So you don't outright reject the notion that there's a fire-breathing dragon in my garage.  You merely put it on hold.  Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you're prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you.  Surely it's unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative -- merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of "not proved."

Imagine that things had gone otherwise.  The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch.  Your infrared detector reads off-scale.  The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you.  No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons -- to say nothing about invisible ones -- you must now acknowledge that there's something here, and that in a preliminary way it's consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.

Now another scenario: Suppose it's not just me.  Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you're pretty sure don't know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages -- but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive.  All of us admit we're disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence.  None of us is a lunatic.  We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on.  I'd rather it not be true, I tell you.  But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren't myths at all.

Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported.  But they're never made when a skeptic is looking.  An alternative explanation presents itself.  On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked.  Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon's fiery breath.  But again, other possibilities exist.  We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons.  Such "evidence" -- no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it -- is far from compelling.  Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.

There is no burden of proof. If there was, it wouldn't be considered "faith"

Of course science doesn't disprove God. But scientists aren't the ones with the burden of proof in the first place.