Slashdot Mirror


WSJ Refused To Publish Lawrence Krauss' Response To "Science Proves Religion"

First time accepted submitter Kubla Kahhhn! writes Recently, the WSJ posted a controversial piece "Science Increasingly Makes a Case for God", written by non-scientist Eric Metaxas. Noted astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss wrote a simple and clear retort in a letter to the editor, which the WSJ declined to publish, but Richard Dawkins did.

2 of 556 comments (clear)

  1. A Simple Retort by thedonger · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The nature of God is such that it cannot be proven. Otherwise, we lose the choice to believe.

    That said, science has yet to prove what the universe is, so how could we expect it to prove something outside of it?

    Note: My philosophy is "when you die, you're dead."

    --
    Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
    1. Re:A Simple Retort by sbaker · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You have that a little wrong. God *can* (in principle) be proven. If the sky breaks open, choirs of angels break forth, a 10km-long arm reaches down from the skies and an 8km golden-haired, bearded face looks down upon humanity and utters words of unshakable truth...then God is proven.

      God cannot, however, be DISproven. It's an unfalsifiable hypothesis. So, you're right, science cannot ever say, definitively, that god doesn't exist. It also can't disprove the hypothesis that the universe was created by an invisible pink unicorn...or any other random idea that humans might come up with that entails a literally omnipotent/omniscient being.

      But that COMPLETELY misses what this is all about. The original WSJ article is a non-scientist claiming that science has indeed proven the existence of god. That's quite clearly incorrect...and I think you'd have to look very hard to find a competent scientist in the fields involved who'd agree with that claim. So WSJ (essentially) published something that's completely untrue, incorrect, misleading - just plain *WRONG*...and journalistic integrity says that they should now be working very hard to fix that...not rejecting a perfectly sensible response from someone who knows exactly what he's talking about.

      So bad on WSJ...and at least we can make that badness clear by discussing it here.

      --
      www.sjbaker.org