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Science Cannot Prove the Existence of God
StartsWithABang writes: This past weekend, Eric Metaxas lit up the world with his bold article in the Wall Street Journal, Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God. As a scientific counterpoint, this article fully addresses three major points of that "case," including what the condition are that we need for life to arise, how rare (or common) are those conditions, and if we don't find life where we expect it, can we learn anything about God at all?
It's a takeoff on the Anthropic Principle, which says that the Universe has to be set up for intelligent life because otherwise we couldn't be observing it. The idea is that, since there's a whole lot of ways the Universe could be set up in ways that would make intelligent life impossible, God must have set it up.
One problem is that this, by itself, means nothing. We don't know how many Universes exist in some sense, and it's quite reasonable that infinitely many do, with all possible variations. (This is, of course, unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific, but if true it would completely nullify the divine argument.) It's also possible that physics is set up without all of the independent parameters. It may be that there's a necessary relation between the charge on an electron, the mass of the bottom quark, the gravitational constant, and Planck's constant, so that they aren't all independent. It wouldn't be the first time that physics had found ways two things depend on each other.
Fundamentally, though, it's an appeal to ignorance. The author doesn't know why all this would have happened without God, so there must be a God, right?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Someone made up that supernatural/natural thing. Science can certainly prove the existence of god, if you care to define god in any kind of concrete terms, in principle. He might have to cooperate though.
If some dude shows up one day who can perform real magic, create planets out of thin air, and make it rain a lot, then science can examine him closely and be pretty sure god exists.
If a kid appears who can, without technological aid, turn water into wine, walk on water and reconstitute himself after dead, there's the new testament god.
Science doesn't require that the phenomenon it studies be "natural." Only that they be observable and consistent.
You forgot about infanticide (Psalm 137:9)
I think you're misconstruing what is actually meant when physicists talk about the universe possibly being a hologram.
They don't mean the contemporary "Star Trek Holodeck" type of hologram. They mean that all of the information about the 3D volume of the universe can be contained and encoded within a 2D boundary.
This is not a mathematically rigorous concept of the universe, but if they can nail it down it might have some application in explaining how gravity works and the ultimate granularity of the universe (e.g. how small the smallest possible fundamental particles can be). But in no sense would this prove, or even really be evidence supporting, the notion that our universe is a simulation within some "larger reality."
=Smidge=
From what I understand, most American Christians are Evangelics.
Nope. They're a tiny minority. They're just extremely vocal and aggressive.
Events that are exceedingly rare ( say 1 in a billion chance of occuring ) happen frequently given our large population, if you collate them up ( as is very easy to do today ) you can easily fool those not skilled in statistics to believe in god-based miracles. I support all faiths and mean no offense to your beliefs, but that doesn't mean I should turn a blind eye to logic.