Slashdot Mirror
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 not that hard. Somehow I make sure that I use the science part to understand the physical world and not poison living things or get hit by a bus, and I simultaneously use the spiritual part to understand people can behave and how to treat them better. But I don't make the mistake of using science to worry about which bed linens might be Jesus' and I don't use the religion part to pray my way out of jams or explain why butterflies look nice. I know science is always subject to new data, and that the Bible was a milleniums-long game of telephone (OT) and written by at least four people each with an agenda (NT). So take it all with a grain of salt and read for deep meaning - it's not a day planner.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
But hey, the word has a meaning.
Only by consensus...
All language, as an artificial construct representing ideas and not being the ideas or things itself, is based on consensus. "What sequence of noises shall we make to represent the object of that brown furry large thing there? b-a-er? All in favor say aye." The abstraction then moves a level up - 'ah-ni-mul'. 'Mah-mul'. 'Sentient'. 'Eee-goh'. 'Id'.
Nobody has yet seen a "black hole", but astrophysicists have a good idea what they are, and mathematicians can chat about "string theory" without having seen these mythical strings. I.e., the fact that language is a consensus created by humans does not prohibit the existence of things to which words have been applied that are not fully understood, or that can be fully understood. It was a long time before "star" was as fully understood as it is today, and aether is still a concept despite it not being what we thought it was when the word was coined.
I'm not Christian. Never claimed to be. So stop lying about what other people have said. Atheists seem to do that a lot.
You seem to be have some kind of demonic picture in your head about what an atheist is. Simply not believing in a deity does not magically transform everyone into a cunt, you know.
It supports the wonder and joy of being human. Further affiant sayeth not,
You are welcome on my lawn.
If you, along with everyone else, in addition to everything that can or ever could be knowable by mankind, were figments of some higher being's imagination, and you had determined a framework that existed in this imaginary realm that described its behavior and appeared to offer some predictive power within that framework, which you decide to call "the laws of physics", but in actuality is nothing more than a description of how the being happened to decide to imagine everything, how, exactly, would you begin to extrapolate from your so-called laws to explain the nature of the being that actually imagined that enter framework in the first place?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'