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Has Science done away with a need for God?
#55
RE: Has Science done away with a need for God?
(July 27, 2015 at 12:57 pm)lkingpinl Wrote: What I am showing is that we see something with complexity, function and purpose and we immediately assume a mind behind it.  Do you not look at something as simple as a letter and assume someone with a mind produced it?  

I find it fascinating how we can take something simple as the internal combustion engine and assume there was a mind behind it, but see something infinitely more complex as the universe and say its pure chance with no need for an intelligence behind it?  I don't find that logic very convincing.

I think that human history shows that we did apply that thinking to the world around us early on; anything that could not be explained (mostly due to a lack of knowledge and understanding) we ascribed to supernatural powers of some kind. Weather, disease, natural disasters, fire, lightning, and so on. As human knowledge and understanding grew, we learned more. We then sought out more knowledge and understanding and eventually developed the scientific method to try and make our learning more efficient. Throughout the greater part of that history, people believed in gods and spirits and the supernatural, to the degree that scientists who made discoveries that did not support religious beliefs had to deal with their own doubts, as well as possible persecution from religious and political authorities.

It is in that context that men who sought after knowledge kept coming up with discoveries and theories and inventions that moved the world forward. But they never came up with god. And that's the thing. Real science --applying the scientific method in order to learn more-- is neutral when it comes to god. If science found god and verified his existence, this would not affect science in any way. It might affect individual scientists --such as those who didn't believe in god, or those who realize that they've been following the wrong one-- but the application of the scientific method to help us learn more would continue unabated. The fact that we keep coming up with explanations that neither include nor require god is notable in light of human history and our desire to find god.

It's not that we can't find god because we're skeptical. We have become skeptical because we never find god.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."

-Stephen Jay Gould
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Messages In This Thread
Has Science done away with a need for God? - by Kingpin - July 27, 2015 at 11:29 am
RE: Has Science done away with a need for God? - by Lek - July 29, 2015 at 12:22 pm
RE: Has Science done away with a need for God? - by Tonus - July 28, 2015 at 7:51 am
Has Science done away with a need for God? - by Kingpin - July 31, 2015 at 10:20 pm
Has Science done away with a need for God? - by Kingpin - July 31, 2015 at 11:36 pm
RE: Has Science done away with a need for God? - by IATIA - August 1, 2015 at 9:46 am

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