Science Refutes God

[The Grand Nudger]

Is there any pressing reason that such a god (that, to be blunt, annihilates the very notion of a god all on it's own) needs be disproven? Still, you haven't actually presented such a god (even in this non-descript form) as our very human flights of fancy aren't exactly unknown to science, or impervious to it's interrogation. Have you ever pondered over how difficult it would be to actually come up with a concept of a god that could not -even in principle- be subject somehow to some sort of observation or test? You, as a creature living within a world composed (if not only, at least very much crowded by) of material, testable things. Working out this conjecture with (at least) the aide of your very material and very much testable wetware- cradled in your very material and very testable hardware. All of your frames of reference and conception erected from all of this material testable stuff.......well, you can see why I might be skeptical that we're actually as competent at creating an unsolvable "immaterial" riddle as you seem to think we are. What I do see, is that you feel that if we are made to accept a bare assertion of something, and play by the rules of the one asserting it, that this somehow makes the problem intractable. It does not. We do not have to accept any assertion, we do not have to play by the rules that are dictated to us, this is not just a matter of logic or reason, but of empirical observation and repeated tests that can elaborate upon just why we do not have to wander so blindly in the dark just because another talking animal insists we do so.

[fr0d0]

Well science is the study of the natural world, and god is a supernatural idea. I'm not sure that they can really overlap (1). But we can say that there is both no evidence and no need for God (2), that the natural can certainly exist without a God (3).

Given #1, you cannot say #2 or #3. Unless you mean to talk nonsense.

[Dee Dee Ramone]

Well science is the study of the natural world, and god is a supernatural idea. I'm not sure that they can really overlap (1). But we can say that there is both no evidence and no need for God (2), that the natural can certainly exist without a God (3).

Given #1, you cannot say #2 or #3. Unless you mean to talk nonsense.

I am sure they can't overlap. (1). So etc. etc. #2 & #3 are correct. Unless you mean to talk nonsense, ofcourse.

[Whitewolf]

Really? From what I've seen, refuting the claims about peoples gods or the claims of gods themselves can be refuted by Science in many aspects. In the sense that god only exists in their heads anyway, the universe already has a naturalistic answer for the origins of life without a god intervening and once the idea is gone, most likely because of Science, the idea of god is pretty much implausible, is it not?

I think the people saying Science won't explain away gods are the same people who say Science has limitations in some area (like explaining away god or sickness). This sounds a lot like the doubters of Science throughout history, we'll never cure sickness, we'll never get around faster than horses, we'll never fly in the sky, we'll never go into the cosmos or we'll always have major gaps of knowledge, I don't buy that.

Science will more than likely close most or all of the gaps in our knowledge (and ignorance) and then god concepts will no longer be plausible. I don't see how Science couldn't one day completely rule of the idea of a god creating anything when physics can show there are many examples of something coming from "nothing" and no examples of something or anything out there creating things willfully and that wouldn't be a god, there would be a scientific explanation for that. Any advanced species or technology is indistinguishable from the supernatural.

And why does it matter that he isn't talking about the theists colloquial use of nothing? Did he say something towards a theists position? It's only a straw man if he says theists use the scientific usage of nothing in this case, did he say that or something similar? Maybe I'm missing something but apparently some have said been saying "fuck Dawkins" so maybe Krauss will be next.[/i]

Well, what I mean is there are really two different sorts of "God." You have the God as described in the stories of religious texts such as the Bible. In these stories he's essentially just a superhuman interacting with the earth. Science can disprove that sort of God. You can disprove the creation myths, the flood, the origin of Israelites, etc. Once you disprove all of that stuff, you really don't have much of reason to believe in such a God any more than you can believe in Zeus.

Then you have the "God" of the philosophers who through thousands of years of "making stuff up" by man has been defined in such a way as to be impervious to any sort of scientific testing. There's no way you can disprove such a being through science because its defined as being immaterial. You can only critique their logical arguments for such a being.

Krauss' book is specifically written to address the theist's argument that "something can't come from nothing." It's probably a very informative book (I've only seen his video lecture on it) but the "nothing" he has in mind and the "nothing" the theists have in mind are very different. The theist "nothing" is completely immaterial (like God, lol) and its completely impossible to be tested scientifically.

We just disagree because I think Science will close the god of the gaps argument once and for all if it hasn't completely done so already and show how implausible the god idea is (yes, the supernatural parts especially which just become part of our natural understanding) and we can already do that with some of their claims, like omniscience or omnipresence which contradicts itself and is easy to argue against. And like I said even if there were advanced lifeforms poofing things into existence, that's not a god, maybe god to us by perception bias, but not a god by definition.

If something is immaterial that doesn't move along the discussion and is just medieval conjecture to me. If it's not physical and just conceptual than it gets us nowhere and that's where logic comes in and refutes the idea. And again, I don't see why it matters that a theist uses the colloquial version of nothing, we've never observed nothing, there's no such thing as empty space so that's a non sequitur anyway.

[Anomalocaris]

I don't think science can ever refute God but it can refute all the stories about God.

Also, Krauss's famous book is a huge strawman. His "nothing" is not the theist's "nothing."

Science can refute obsurd propositions. But science can not enlighten obsurd minds. God lives in obsurd minds. So god would always be immune from science.

[Dee Dee Ramone]

If a creator happens to exist, the horror, I am pretty sure he'd be the product of evolution anyway.

[Cyberman]

That's essentially what Richard Dawkins was trying to say in that execrable Expelled thing: that even if it were shown that life on this planet was deliberately created by some external intelligence, such an intelligence would have had to have come from somewhere else. Eventually you're still faced with the original creator having to have arisen via some Darwinian-type evolution anyway, and we only have the life of the Universe so far to play with.