PROTOCEPT00 WRITES:

Your article is very thought provoking as are the comments. The question of an Almighty God is so very fascinating. I found this statement to be the most profound...can you imagine God Himself moving through us? That's what I believe with all my heart, mind and strength and it keeps me going, hopeful, joyful and peaceful.

PROTOCEPT00 WRITES:

Science is Almighty God's handiwork. God is the Author of both natural and supernatural truth and there is no contradiction between them. Both proceed from God in their respective orders. That there is an opposition between them today originates either in the error of scientists who put forth unprovable hypotheses as undoubted facts, or in the mistakes of theologians who teach their own false opinions as Gospel truths.

A moment's reflection should convince that we are surrounded with great mystery in this world and the universe. Mystery btw, is in no way peculiar to true religion.

Science may make continual progress and tell us of countless new facts, but the how and the wherefore of them is utterly beyond its range.

Take for example, science tells us that the earth without support of any kind circles around the sun once a year and we know the rate, etc,. and that it never departs from the imaginary line traced for it by Divine geometry. Or that the sun is x amount of times heavier and more voluminous than the earth, and that the moon is held to its orbit by earth's attraction, and contantly brought back to its course, and we know all kinds of facts about the sun's gravitation, and the traveling speed of a ray of light...OK...but when science attempts to explain these facts, it can do nothing but coin phrases which only veil the ignorance of their framers. Newton put it this way: "I know the laws of attraction, but if you ask what attraction is, I really cannot tell."

In fact, man only comprehends what he himself has made. He can understand perfectly the mechanism of a watch, a computer or an airplane becasue it is his own work.

But his finite mind cannot comprehend the mysteries of God's world either of natural truth or supernatural truth. Perfect comprehension and intelligence belong to God alone.  

Reading the Bible!!  That's blasphemy!

For me, God certainly exists. Just like when Beethoven composed his 5th symphony, the 5th symphony came into existence. The first time a man tought of God, God came into existence. God is what people use as some sort of dust bin: they throw in stuff they don't understand and then say that He did it. Of course, that IS an explanation. It's just a very bad explanation from a practical viewpoint. You can't do anything useful with such kind of explanations, other than comfort yourself in times of emotional stress.

So for me, God is a very real thing: it influcences how people behave and think. Question remains what God is, exactly. For me, it's for sure not the creator of the universe or anything. In the end, religion (and for a large part also philosophy) tells us a whole lot about how people think and very little about the actual universe.

*bites tounge*

I may add: in some respect, Science has become some sort of replacement for God in our new society. A fundamental flaw in the human way of thinking, is that we want to explain everything. Even if we really have no way of explaining things. Like when you want to hammer a nail in the wall, but you only have a screwdriver and you attempt to use that instead. If people can't find a good explanation, they'll use a bad one. Bad, in this case, means unpractical and unconstructive. You can explain lightning by saying that it's Thor banging on the clouds with his hammer, but that still doesn't get you anywhere. You still don't know when lightning occurs or where it will hit.

Scientist tend to face the same problems. Often, they're expected to give explanations to certain phenomena (for political ends, for example) while they actually don't have a real answer. That usually doesn't stop them from giving that answer, though and that usually gives a lot of problems in the end. The problem with science is: we have a pretty good grasp at the fundamental rules of the universe, but we have no real ways to exploit that knowledge to analyse big scale, real world problems. The mathematics quickly get way to complicated for that. You cannot explain how a plant grows by using quantum physics, simply because the problem is too complex.

Still, our society needs some sort of authority to base itself on. Most people cannot accept that sometimes there are no explanations that are entirely statisfactory but we refuse to say "I don't know". That's when we reduce ourself to religion (God did it) or sloppy science. It's a pitfall that most scientist are prone to, I'm affraid. And I have seen it, I study physics myself. Even within the framework of scientific facts (which should always be treated with doubt), scientists are easily seduced into making bold statements that simply do not hold up against scrutiny. And in that regard, science has become the new religion: always giving answers, much too often believed and much too little doubted.

Disproving God is impossible by all scientific methods. Many scientific theories are based upon evidence, but equally important is the lack of contradicting evidence. A theory is sometimes only considered "proven" by the common-man's perspective when it has not been disproven over a significant amount of time.

For example, the physics that dictates the workings of our Universe could vary by astronomical constants on a local scale, ie relativity is different across different portions of the galaxy. This is very valid theory and very hard to disprove. A physicist will say "well, all measurements of the cosmos indicate that our universe has a certain set of static astronomical constants". The other physicist will say "But have you tested each and every point in the Universe for this compliance?"

Well, obviously we can't measure this with current technology, so his theory still stands not disproven, even though most physicists agree that the constants do not change across our Universe.

Many theories exist on this basis, such as the infamous String Theory. I dare anyone to go ahead and try to reject the String Theory on these boards. If you successfully do, you will be famous. This is because while String Theorists can't yet measure the vibrational components of energy that is the basis of their theory to prove it to you, you also can't measure the lack of these, and thus the burden is on you as well as them (because they will continue to believe it unless proven otherwise!).

More examples of this include the Flying Spaghetti Monster, if you are familiar with this.

I believe in a certain religion. Equally important is that I realize that I can try to prove the effects of God's existence through many unrelated, esoteric claims and that science will never be able to be applied to disprove God because of the omniscience clause in most dieties prevents the use of our limited measurement and analytical skills (ie you somehow find out that God isn't present in this Universe. Someone can just say that he messed with your equipment to test us).

This nature of religion makes it totally dissociated from science in terms of analysis but not necessariy in terms of existence. What it really comes down to is a balance of faith and science. As a scientists, I believe in evolution. There is no reason that my God could not have used it as a mechanism to craft organisms. But some people are not ok with this and get very jumpy when science might contradict some dogmatic belief created around their religion.

So all of this means, in my opinion, that I shouldn't be a douche and try to push religion on people who don't believe because religion is a loophole through science that bypasses the entire logical process. Equally so, I think agnostics, athiests, and people of different faiths should respect each other's beliefs, because you can't disprove someone elses faith and you will just waste your time. Religion should stay out of the theory side of science, but people should consider both realms.

The religion argument will go on forever. People will hate each other over it. Kill over it. Craft governments, lifestyles, and cultures around it.

Just try to be a better person and respect others for what they believe, the kind of person that their beliefs make them, and how they balance these two realms in everyday life. I would rather marry a caring athiest than a literal-biblical, judging, inflexible christian. In the end it comes down to what you do with the religion (or lack of religion) you believe in, and how it makes you a person.

Just be a good person.

/endrant

You should look at what I was responding to.  I only brought up that I went to Catholic school because the poster I was replying to said "You should try reading the bible", as if I knew nothing at all about it and had only read a bunch of anti-religious literature.  I wasn't saying that I know everything there is to know about religion (I don't, nor do I care to).  I was just saying it's not a good idea to assume that atheists are just people who are ignorant of religion.  I'd say it's actually the opposite in the U.S. - most people who decide to call themselves atheists do so because they spent a lot of time in their childhood learning enough about their family's religion to start finding holes and asking questions.

This is the kind of thing religious people talk about a lot, but I feel like this is a huge misunderstanding about the way science works, and the way people use words like "prove" or "disprove", and especially "theory".  A theory is not a random guess, or a hypothesis.  In science, a theory is a very solid model, highly agreed upon by near-unanimous consensus, supported by all available evidence.  All scientific theories are rigorously tested by the scientific community before they can ascend to the status of "theory".  Theory is the top of the food chain in science for large models.  You don't "prove" a theory; a theory can't graduate and become something "more true" or better proven than a theory.  It's unfortunate that scientists use the word "theory", because it also has a second meaning that many people confuse it with: a guess.  A scientific theory is not the same thing as a guess.

So a scientist could not say there are different astronomical constants and have that be an actual Theory.  A theory needs to have a large body of supporting evidence, peer review, and agreement by consensus that all evidence available points to the theory holding true against all applicable domains and tests.  There is absolutely nothing that points towards relativity being weird at different spots in the universe; in fact, there is a huge amount of data that says that it's impossible for it to work like that.  Space-time is a fabric, a unified thing, if it were actually a bunch of separate space-times (which is what it would have to be if different laws of physics were in different sections), then the entire universe would look much different.

Some of this argument is basically "Russel's Teapot" (see wikipedia).  He said that he could claim that there was a teapot floating around a planet ten billion light years away, and that since no one can see that far, no one could disprove him.  Some of this confusion comes with the word "disprove".  First, let me go back to science: in science, it's not enough to make something up and have it hard to disprove.  Science does not work that way at all.  See The Scientific Method or wiki "science" in general to understand how ideas are advanced in science.  Usually the word "disprove" is used (in science, and in many cases) to mean the act of showing that something previously thought proved is actually false.  Scientifically speaking, you can't "disprove" something that has never been assumed proven.  You don't need to - science does not deal with random ideas that have no basis in reality.

There's a problem too where some people think "disprove" means "convince me that I'm wrong", and that's entirely a social problem.  I could say that the sky is green, and you could sit there yelling at me saying that it's blue all you want, but I could still say you haven't "disproved" that it's green just because I can be as stubborn as I want to be.  Scientifically, nearly every definition of god has been "disproved", but people keep changing the definition or covering their ears and saying that it's not true.  There's really not much that can be done about that.  If we take "disprove" to mean "convince a hardcore christian", then it has nothing to do with logic, science, or physics.  It's only psychology.

This, at least, I can agree with.  However, I still think religion is part of the problem.  As long as people think that there is some ultimate moral authority telling them what to do, who conveniently never actually says anything and has to have his commands relayed by politicians and priests, people will use this as a crutch to not have to think through their own actions.  Actions should be thought through carefully, with consideration towards what effect it will have on other people.  People should determine the moral worth of an action based on compassion, reason, and careful analysis.  Too many people (not all, of course) simply take their orders from religious authority and walk away with a clean conscience without ever putting any thought into the actual effects their actions have on others around them.  That's the main problem I have with religion - the entire reason it exists is as a shortcut for dealing with moral quandries and guilt.

Many of the main battles on the religious front in the U.S. today are in fact about stopping careful analysis or learning about the state of the world.  Christianity is trying to shut down biology in schools because evolution isn't convenient to them.  They are trying to shut down sexual education because it makes them uncomfortable.  They are trying to shut down access to free media because they worry about what people will do if they hear non-Christian points of view.  They are constantly trying to ban, censor, and discredit information that might hurt their faith.  This is not the way to lead a moral life - the only way anyone can make a truly moral decision is to try to be as well-informed as they can about what is going on, and then decide what course of action to take.  Purposely blinding yourself to outside information and refusing to learn is, to me, as immoral as willingly choosing to hurt others.

Makeshiftwings,

You are entirely right about the theory common misconception, and perhaps I wasn't being clear when I used the word theory. It seems whenever I try to argue my colleagues about how evolution is true, they spout the "it's just a theory!" argument, to which I promptly facepalm and try to explain that a theory is, exactly as you said, highly supported. It is misused all the time by people who are not familiar with scientific methods. Thus, I tend to use it as more of the commonplace meaning, as I have given up on using it as it was intended.

Although I used the astronomical constant as an example, it is actually a subject up for much debate. Stephen Hawking has grappled with this problem several times, although there is a consensus (as I mentioned) that the numbers are the same throughout our universe (avoiding singularities). It should be noted that while theories and Laws are very evidence supported, they can still be disproved (ie Newton's Laws by Einstein, although many call it a "corollary" instead of a total reconstruction...). But you do demonstrate my point - Religion doesn't have enough supporting evidence to be a strong, scientific argument, and neither do people who try to counter religion. It doesn't exist in the same plane as science. I believe string theory, despite its beautiful math, should be lumped into this category of faith as well, at least until they get the LHC ready and can actually qualify string existence (or absence). 

I do disagree with you when you say that every definition of God has been "disproven". I will say that they haven't been proven, either. No one is capable of doing either, and so to each his own.

You are right, religion does contribute to many problems. However, religion also gives people a moral basis and justification for good deeds. Not to say that athiests do not have a moral basis, but when you actually get down to philosophy of their moral basis, it doesn't exist.

I took a philosophy course last year and tried to rationalize good moral behavior by athiests, but my professor kept countering. From my understanding of that argument, it usually comes down to the concept of selfishness and gene-preservation. Although I don't want to believe that this is true, I haven't heard a counter the philosophical reasoning behind this moral behavior (although I'm sure one exists). Religion does give many people a good moral doctrine to follow, however. This isn't always a bad thing.

Bad things occur when idiots try to wield religion as a tool of mass indoctrination (Advent lol), and spout twisted beliefs that "God" told them. I have no respect and only digust for these people. Would we be better without religion? Who knows. But I guarantee you there will never be a world without it. Humans naturally try to question the origin of the universe and the meaning of their existence, and some people will always conclude that a religion holds the answer.

One thing that irks me about all these "God vs cience" threads..

At some point, someone brings up the Bible.."just pick up a Bible and read it.." etc..

The Bible is the holy book of 1 religion, 1 of the predominat 3, out of HUNDREDS of religions in existence. Even IF God were to exist, assuming he is the one portrayed in the christian Bible is a bit arrogant.

in response to "pick up a Bible", pick up a Koran, pick up a Torah, pick up the Bhagwat Gita, study Buddhism, study Shinto, Study the mythology (religion) of the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians and the multitudes of other religions and god views out there.

I liked science and spend a lot of time on it when I was young, I even got a degree and a minor in two of them.  What turned me off is hypocritical sciences that we have today.  We have science that are very biased and seem to have some kind of agenda (social, political etc..).  If religion indoctrinate people so does so called science.  They present theory that they can't prove as facts.  When you look closely there are a lot of assumptions and maybe even errors.  But they don't want to be questioned.  Its like a herd mentality.  The sad part is that many scientist see that as well, but they are afraid to speak up.  I thought science was suppose to encourage questions?  Science has become science fiction or even a religion.

Okay duno what thsi will add to thsi hot topic but i will start with this.

I do not know if god does or doesn't exist. Neither do I think humanaty has came to the point were they can prove or disprove god.

How ever, going into the ideas that god is and has created the world/universe (creationisme) if he did do it he did not decide on how things would be such as humans will have pink, black, brown, yellow skin. That the sky would be blue and that humans were made in the image of god (very pretencious of us). Science namely the theory of origin of species (evolution) clearly shows that. Also geologie shows us that god didn't "carve the montains a certain way. They were push uppward snad  eroded a certain way.

What god created was simply the rules that gouvern our physical realm. Rules sush as magnetisome, gravaty, attration or attoms etc. Rules witch we humans explore throught science and descrive in mathematical equations such as the famous:

E = MC^2

So to me it bottles down to this, if god exist and did realy create the world/universe, then we humans by seeking the knowlege in science are only striving to understand god, understand his work and understand our own place. Science is in sort the study of god. Maybe one day we will gain sufficent knowlege to prove that good exist or maye it will be the contrary, albe it science must continue to move forward and not be hindered by religious belifs founded by people who couldn't even fathom what we concider today commond knowlege. Those men were simply trying to give answers to people of the time with what they could understand of the world at the time.

Thus i belive that if god does exist he is othing like that told to us by teh various religious instituations. And pretending to know what god is, wants, demand is just pretencious of those people. Simply trying to booster them selves to seem close to god then to the mere mortals that we are.

I think the main difference between String Theory and religion is that String Theory, like all science, was formulated as a tool to try to understand the actual universe, and attempts are being made every day to find evidence supporting it.  (Like you said, the Large Hadron Collider and similar works.)  Religion is formulated not as a tool to understand the physical universe, but as an attempt to imagine things outside of the universe.  For some it is an attempt to understand the universe, with gods being responsible for anything from thunder and lightning to the creation of human beings out of clay, but those ideas aren't what most people are talking about when they say their god is above science and provability.)  And there is no search for supporting evidence; in fact, after making up a religion and gaining a few followers, most preachers are happy to say that looking for proof is actually a bad thing, and that you should just have "faith" that they're right and everyone else is wrong.

I mean that every version of the gods that had them actually doing anything useful in the physical world has been disproven.  Originally, for example, Christian God lived up in the sky dome on a cloud and the world was flat with hell underneath.  God would poke holes in the sky dome where the stars were and rain would come through the dome from some water source above the flat earth.  Eventually people started studying the skies and the earth, figuring out that these things weren't true, and eventually, despite the Church murdering as many scientists as they could, people eventually had to accept that this version of God couldn't be real.  So those qualities were retconned to be "metaphors", but God still kept certain qualities: he had created man out of clay and a woman out of a rib and they hung around until a talking snake gave them an apple that made them smart and then they inbred and gave birth to the human race.  Eventually, people started to find holes in this story as well, and despite the Church murdering and silencing as many scientists as they could, the majority of people had to accept that this story wasn't true.  God was retconned so that those qualities were actually just "metaphors".  More and more, every physical quality that God was supposed to have, and every physical act that he was supposed to be responsible for, was proven to be false.  More and more of the Bible had to be interpreted as "metaphors".  We are now at a point where, at least in philosophical circles, even the religious people tend to admit that God doesn't actually affect the physical world in any noticable way, and has no actual physical qualities.  This new version of God is nothing like the original version: the old one was an actual physical guy who did things; the new one is more of a linguistics riddle and a vague happy feeling.

There are lots of non-religious moral philosophies.  The closest one to a religion would probably be "humanism", which actually has a sort of church of atheists.  But other than that there are moral systems like moral relativism, noncognitivism, emotivism, and utilitarianism.  These all accept, more or less, that there isn't One True Morality (this is objective morality, which is what major religions profess), but that there are various ways to interpret the moral impulse in people.  Personally, I'm sort of a noncognitivist: I don't think there really is such a thing as right and wrong; I only know that certain things make me feel sad or guilty or angry while others make me feel giving and supportive.  I study a situation and try to determine what I think is the most moral way to deal with it.  I realize that there is nothing objectively right or wrong, and that my morals are only my opinions, but I still act as ethically as I can under my own standards, and work to refine my ethical system as I learn more about the world and the people in it.

There are good things about it, but like I said, it seems like more of a shortcut.  People don't want to be bothered putting too much thought into the consequences of their actions, so they just follow a leader with a rulebook on life and assume that he's always right about everything.  I don't think our religions are quite as bad as the Advent yet.   But in my opnion, the best way to avoid Advent is to encourage a constant open-minded search for answers, rather than a close-minded faith that your chosen leader is right and the others are wrong.

Do you have some evidence to back up these accusations?

...Wait, are you talking about the Republican party's global warming conspiracy theories?  I'd rather not go into that; it's a thread derailment waiting to happen.   Is there something else that you're alluding to above?

He's speaking the truth. Like I said in a post one page back, science has taken on the job of giving people the certainty to know things. Even when we don't know something, scientists will not easily hesitate and just give some random answer that is based on sloppy science. I've seen that before and I come from that world. In physics, things aren't so bad yet, but social/medical sciences (the ones that have the most impact on our everyday life, I may add) have the tendency to do this. Especially statistical results often get misinterpreted. How often does it happen that some researcher looks for correlations between a certain disease and a certain lifestyle and then exclaims that you get cancer from this or that? More often than you want to believe, there is no causal relation at all (correlation =/= causality http://www.xkcd.com/552/). Especially if such evidence supports a certain political or economical agenda, scientic scrutiny can go right down the drain.