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God and Science

Creationists and theists in general like to believe that scientists, by their exclusion of God as a possibility, begin with a bias against all possible alternatives.  If God were known to exist, then God could be a possible alternative.  However, if God hasn't been proven to exist in any direct sense, then how can it be any more of a possible alternative than a fanciful imagination like saying maybe aliens did it.  Actually, the concept of God excludes God as a possible cause even to a further degree than aliens because God isn't an explanation, it's a substitute for explanation, in that God by definition is a cause that cannot be understood or explained.  It therefore takes us to both a scientific and philosophical dead end of enlightenment.  If we believe God is a possible cause, we would also be left in the dilemma of not knowing at what point cause and effect ends and God kicks in?  We would have no way of knowing when further investigation and understanding is futile.  It is the very concept of God that renders it to not be considered in science.  Its factual existence isn't known and its concept isn't helpful. 

If a God really does exist, then scientists would just transition into the mind of God without ever realizing it in their quest to give explanations to everything.  We would just be logically deducing the cause and effect that is going on in the mind of the intelligent Being that made everything.  To discover an actual creative Being with a sort of body, an invisible one, would require coming to the realization that certain principles of logical cause and effect that we are exploring are unified or distinguished in a certain way that renders them fundamentally different from the cause and effect we see in our normal experiences.  If God is there he will be discovered naturally by the very act of exploring causality -- but of course his thinking must actually be understandable.  One need not believe in something first to discover it, but the discoverable must be understandable.  

Must Science be Atheistic?

Yes, because none-belief in anything is the default position. Unless there is direct evidence of God, then there simply is no valid logic that can support believing such a Being can constitute an explanation for anything. Furthermore, God by definition is unexplainable or incomprehensible. The very reason people believe he exists is because they believe there is no comprehensible ultimate answers to things -- so there must be this incomprehensible Being who just decides everything. Now, how could anyone expect a true scientist to use something that cannot be explained or understood as a valid explanation for anything? The very essence of science is to advance us toward greater and greater knowledge, not toward "it can't be understood." Thirdly, we would have to ask "At what point does cause and effect stop and God kick in?" In the assumption of a God, we would never know where it is futile to look further. For instance, when people thought lightening was in fact being thrown down by gods, that constituted an explanation, and if it had never gone unchallenged, we would have never had a mechanistic understanding of lightening. Lastly, all valid theories in science must be predictable, demonstrable in some way, and falsifiable. None of these things would apply to God. God, in relationship to science, is merely imagination. When scientists do sometimes speak of God, like alluding to trying to understanding the mind of God, it is a poetic statement that underscores the profound difficulty in addressing ultimate issues. God in science is not an explanation, but only a substitute for an explanation.

 

 

   

Scientific reasons given for not believing in God

Science is based on the observation that the universe is governed by natural laws that can be tested and replicated through experiment and is used as a reliable and rational basis for prediction and engineering. Like a scientist, a scientific skeptic aims to decide claims based on verifiability and falsifiability rather than accepting claims on faith or relying on unfalsifiable categories, by utilizing critical thinking. (Opposite of what is known as the true-believer syndrome.)

Most theistic religions teach that mankind and the universe were created by one or more deities and that this deity continues to act in the universe. Many people, including both atheists and theists, feel that this view is in conflict with both the discoveries of modern science (especially in cosmology, astronomy, biology and quantum physics) and also the fundamental principles of science; Science and theistic religions are mutually exclusive philosophies. Many believers in the validity of science, acknowledging this contradiction, do not believe the existence of a deity or deities actively involved in the universe.

Evolutionary science describes how complex life has developed through a process of mutation, adaptation and natural selection. It asserts that every species of life on this planet, past and present, are products of a stochastic process. Similarly modern humans have only existed for the last 0.0015% (approximately 100,000 years) of the age of the universe, the Earth's Sun is one star among billions in the Milky Way, which is a galaxy among billions of others. It is also now known that humans share 98% of our genetic code with chimpanzees, 90% with mice, 21% with roundworms, and fully 7% with the bacterium E. coli. This scientific perspective is quite different from that of most theistic religions, which give humans a unique and central status (anthropic principle). In the Abrahamic religions, for instance, humans are thought to be created 'in God's image' and to be of a qualitatively different order of life than the 'beasts of the Earth'.

Scientific progress has been offered as a means to disprove religious claims. Most religions that involve supernatural entities and forces are linked to unexplained physical phenomena. In Ancient Greece, for instance, Hades was the god of the dead, Helios the god of the sun, Zeus the god of thunder, and Poseidon the god of earthquakes and the sea. In the absence of any scientific theory that could explain a given phenomenon, people who sought an explanation attributed its cause to supernatural forces, an argument that has come to be known as God of the gaps. Throughout history, most of these phenomena have been explained through the scientific method and found to conform to natural laws.