Science Refutes God

[Whitewolf]

Full debate with Lawrence Krauss and Michael Shermer vs Dinesh D'Souza and Ian Hutchinson.

There's a vote at the end. Guess who wins...

[YOUTUBE]RKNd_S3iXfs[/YOUTUBE]

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

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."

[CapnAwesome]

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

[Annik]

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."

His lecture regarding the book is very enlightening. I watch it every couple months or so.

[Cyberman]

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

That's hardly Lawrence Krauss's fault, though. If anything, the theist's "nothing" is the real strawman, since there can never be a sample of that "nothing" to examine, so any attempts to make any sort of conclusions about what sort of properties it can have falls squarely in the middle of that most famous of theistic disciplines called Making Shit Up.

[Lion IRC]

..there can never be a sample of that "nothing" to examine.

Exactly!
Glad we agree on the definition of nothing.

[The Grand Nudger]

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

Probably not nearly as supernatural as one might like, and so what if the idea of god was supernatural? We've been wrong before.

No leeway for assholes. Make em do the work before you hand them their wages.
(not you bud..lol)

[Cyberman]

Exactly. God is in fact so supernatural that its stuck to using only natural phenomena to do anything at all and apologist mouthpieces for the rest. Even Superman can leap tall buildings in a single bound.

[Whitewolf]

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."

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.

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

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."

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.

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.