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Originally Posted by Strange Famous
saying you dont believe in God is a judgment
saying you know there is no God is a leap of faith - because you are saying you know something that cannot be proved.
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Yes. And saying there is an invisible pink unicorn behind my head is also a leap of faith -- because you are saying something that cannot be proved.
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since Dawkins makes so much of his claim to be a scientist, people that support him should have a little respect of the scientific method... science can only prove that things are true, not really that things cannot be true - unless every circumstance can be controlled.
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It can describe things that tend to be true. It can also provide a means to determine if a statement is meaningless blather.
Science is simply the practice of figuring things out that actually works. It includes means to detect stupid questions (What if there are invisible pink unicorns pushing the rocks around? It would look just like the experiment!) as well as means to determine if a question has been sufficiently answered (statistics, reproducibility, etc).
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If you observe a pond and see 100 white swans, then you can say you have proved that a swan can be white, but it isnt so easy to say that it is impossible for there ever to be a black swan.
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You can say "there is no evidence of a black swan". If someone says "I had a dream, and in it there was a swan that was black -- so there must be a black swan", you say "can you show me the black swan?"
If they can't produce one, then "I have no belief in the existance of a black swan" is a belief.
If someone showed up with a black swan, or even if someone did genetic analysis on the swans and demonstrated that 1 in 10000 swans will be black, this might change one's beliefs.
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If you want evidence for God... try naming a single known society, modern or ancient, that had no concept of the supernatural? If you cannot, then for what reasons is this belief so universal?
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Every single known society has many wrong beliefs. Belief in the supernatural can be explained simply, as application of human's social intelligence to non-social parts of the world.
That isn't that hard an explaination. It is plausible. It makes predictions about the kinds of supernatural beliefs people will have. It even makes predictions about what parts of the brain religious thought will invoke.
In other words, it is a meaningful statement.
Belief in the supernatural cannot be disproven. The invisible pink unicorns could simply play with any tests so they look like there are no invisible pink unicorns. So "something supernatural exists" is a statement that has no consequences (it implies nothing) if it is true -- ie, it is a meaningless statement. If it had consequences, you could simply test to see if the consequences happen, and you would be able to confirm the existance of the supernatural. But with the IPU's hanging around, you can't do that test!
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If you want to say that it is IMPOSSIBLE that God created the universe, then what evidence will you provide that matter was CREATED FROM NOTHING through another method? Or if you would prefer to explain the concept of eternity within our present knowledge of time, that would also be fine.
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There is no need for the God hypothesis. If God created "the universe", what created God? If God created God, why not say "the universe created the universe" and do away with the God hypothesis?
Basically, saying "X created the universe" doesn't do anything to solve the problem of "what stared stuff".
There are lots of theories how the universe came into being. Many of them make testable predictions, and they are being poked at.
As an example, there are "virtual particles" which pop into existance all over space-time. They come from nothing, and their duration of existance is purportional to their energy balance, afterwhich they go away into nothing.
One theory is that the universe is just a large collection of "virtual particles", and that the sum energy of the universe is actually close to zero.
Of course, that leads to the problem of "where did spacetime come from". But we continue to learn new things, and we continue to push back the edge.
Meanwhile, there is a constant pattern of "God does X" being pushed out of reasonableness. The "God does X" predictions made in the past have failed time and time again, and what is left at the core is a statement that is without meaning.
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I hope you will not be offended if I say that "you are 100% wrong, and I do not need to even argue with you because my position is correct" is a statement that souns quite characteristic of faith, or even "religion"
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If someone told you "things fall up -- just let go of something, and you will see!", or "tin foil hats save me from the hampster chicken overlords.", would you feel justified in saying "you are 100% wrong, and you really aren't worth arguing with"?