A common misunderstanding about science and religion...

It seems like everyone just doesn't get it, so please pay attention:

Religion and science are two completely different and unrelated studies, and you cannot bring them together into one debate!

Religion is about the person who made the universe.
Science is just about how the universe works.

To use an analogy: religion is like a biography of J.K. Rowling, and science is like a biography of Harry Potter. One is about the creator, the other is about the creation.

So...

• You can't 'prove' or 'disprove' God with science, since God is not part of the universe and science does not apply to him.
• You can't 'detect', 'find' or 'reveal' God with science, since God does not have any kind of physical existence in our universe, so science will not show him.
• You can't say that science 'proves' or 'disproves' anything in The Bible, since The Bible never makes any scientific assertions.
• Likewise, you can't say that The Bible disproves science, since The Bible never makes any scientific assertions.
• You can't say "God didn't do that — science did!" because God made the laws of physics, and anything that science does is caused by God.

Common confusion
Where people seem to get confused is that because God talks to us, they make the mistake of thinking God lives in our universe, and is a part of it. And if he's a part of it, then the laws of physics must apply to him, and he must have physically created everything in our universe at some point in the past.

But the truth is that God is the creator of our universe, and you cannot be part of your own creation! God does not live inside our universe, he is not bound by the phycisal constraints of our universe, he did not physically make everything in our universe, and he did not create our universe in the past.

The book analogy
The best way to understand this is to think of God as an author and the universe as a book. If you write a book, you do not live inside the book! You are external to the book. That doesn't mean you can't communicate with people in the book. If you want to talk to the main character, for example, you just write "then Dave heard The Author speak to him". Or you could even write yourself a part in the book, so your own character represents you and does the things that you would do (this is a bit like who Jesus was). But the point is that you are merely the author.

Likewise, you are not bound by the rules you write in your book. If you write in your book that everyone has gills and can only survive underwater — that doesn't mean you can only survive underwater!

Also, if the characters in your book are brilliant scientists, they will never be able to discover scientific evidence of you — since you are not part of the book. The book is self-contained.

And of course, if your book says that all the characters in the book evolved from monkeys, that doesn't mean that you didn't create the characters! And if the characters in your book wonder who made them, and look for evidence of creation in the past, they will never find it, because you are the creator and you didn't write the book in their past, you wrote it in your past, which is a completely different thing.

Conclusion
Please try to understand what I've written here. Science and religion cannot be confused. It's not just a linguistic technicality, it's an essential distinction in understanding the nature of God. I really hope this sinks in with some people, because over and over I see people completely wasting their time and effort having lengthy conversations based upon this misunderstanding.

If what I'm saying doesn't make sense, please ask and I'll try to clarify.


Thanks for your time!

 

Well, I think that science without spirituality is sociopathic, and spirituality without science is willful blindness. They need each other.

 

Not all religions believe that God is 'a person who made the universe'. Not even all christians.

 

Your conditions are nothing more than presuppositions. If you can make up your own laws of the relationship between God and Nature, cannot I do the same inversely, or similarly negate what you claim to serve my own interpretation of reality? You cannot base your logical arguement on something epistemologically unverifiable, it requires antecedents of fact and verifiable certainty.

 

you cant just say God is beyond all knowledge so there is no way you will ever be able to prove/disprove him. what a fucking lame way to dodge the question 'is there a god' you cant answer an intelligent question that may disprove god so you say well hes beyond all reason, you just cant understand. that is bullshit.

Its very easy to say God created physics because we dont know why it exists. just because we dont know why doesnt mean there is a magical being that created it. do you realize how stupid that logic is?

 

"But the truth is that God is the creator of our universe, and you cannot be part of your own creation! God does not live inside our universe, he is not bound by the phycisal constraints of our universe, he did not physically make everything in our universe, and he did not create our universe in the past."
Isnt god omnipotent? If we cannot disprove god with science, how can you say "you cannot be part of your own creation"?

 

"The Bible never makes any scientific assertions."

Really?
how about that creation business?
or that jesus fellow being concieved without any sex?

or the catholic church and their wine-to-blood trick at mass?
that could be scientifically tested.

seem like pretty tall claims to me...

 

You're right - that attitude is just a cop out - an evasion of the real questions.

 

Actually, I think dizzy man is dead on and here's why:

Statements about God are obviously not based on sensory experience, so they can't be a posteriori.

If they're not a posteriori, then they must be a priori.

But the natural sciences don't deal with a priori statements. Only math and logic do.

So, science can't prove or disprove the existence of God because science deals with empirical phenomena, and God cannot be empirically perceived. Math and logic might be able to prove or disprove the existence of God. But that's a whole other topic all together.

P.S. Using inductive inferrence, which scientists use all the time, could confirm the existence of God but inferrences can never prove anything, at least not beyond all possible doubt.

 

Presupposition. I say that He can, but has declined to do so.

 

Actually I differ and say that virtually ALL statements about God are based on sense experience - they are usually just a repitition of formulas learned from books or from others.

But I don't think the existence of God, or a higher than sensory realm can be either proven or diproved either by the religious or the logician.
I stop short of saying that no scientific proof will ever become available, because increasingly, some scientists are taking seriously phenomena such as out-of-body-experience etc. and seeking by scientific means to investigate them. History proves that what seems impossible to-day may tommorrow be commonplace.

There is also the whole thing of mysticism - people who say they have seen God. That isn't neccesarily based either on reason or science or scripture. It can happen spontaneously, as in OBE's.

 

The matter of whether God could be perceived or not is irrelevant. There is no reason to postulate the existence of something you have never seen. It's bad science and exactly what a real presupposition is.

But reading the bible is different from seeing God. If you read a bible verse about God and take it to be true, then you infer that verse is about an actual existent being. Inferrences are not empirical matters of fact. You can use sense experience as a premise to make all kinds of inferrences, but all of them could, at least potentially, be false.

I thought about it a little and I agree with you. I left open the possibility that mathematics or logic might be able to prove the existence of God. I'm now closing that possible for the following reason. It all goes back to Hume, basically. Math and logic are incapable of proving the existence of anything. They only show the inter-relation of concepts and ideas. For example, "two" doesn't exist in the same way a table does. You can have two tables; you can see two tables. But you can't see just "two" because "two" is a concept, an idea, not an existent thing. So, you could use logic to show that if a God did really exist, he would be omnipotent, omniscient, etc. because the word "God" entails all of those things. But you can never actually prove that God does exist using logic. The only way to prove existence is to either see the thing, or use some kind of inductive inferrence, which are always fallible. On the plus side for all you religious types, by my own logic you can't prove the existence of, say, atoms either. However, I'd say that there are more inductive inferrences to back up the existence of atoms than the existence of God, so, if that is the case, then the existence of atoms is more likely to be true than the existence of God. But I could, of course, be wrong about how many inductive inferrences confirm the existence of God in relation to how many confirm the existence of atoms. How could I ever really count all those statements?

Well, I'm still standing by my conviction that science can't prove the existence of God because I'm unaware of any real scientists, as opposed to pseudo-scientists, who take things like ESP seriously. In short, I think you're confusing science with make-believe.

I'm sure you can understand why I remain sceptical. I'd really like to see some links though, at least so I can try to demonstrate why that stuff isn't real science.

 

Colours, (and like-minded people),

It's not a 'cop out', you obviously just don't get it!

It's the natural human assumption to assume that if God exists then he must 'be' somewhere in our universe and he must have some kind of physical presence. But that assumption is wrong. Quite the opposite is true. God does not exist in our universe. He has no physical form. He is not a part of this universe.

At the risk of sounding repetetive, I'll stress this again: God made our universe, so God cannot be a part of his own creation. If God was a part of the universe he created, then God would have created himself! One cannot create one's self!

The notion that God has a physical presence is easy to imagine, and seems natural. But it is actually a dumb notion.

Your beleif in God falls into one of the following 3 categories:

a) You don't believe in God
b) You believe in God, or you believe there could be a God, but you don't necessarily think he wrote The Bible
c) You believe in God and you think he wrote The Bible

Obviously, if you fall into either of the first two categories, then this conversation doesn't apply to you. This is a Christian forum, and we're talking about the Christian God. The reasons for believing in Christianity and becoming a Christian are not at issue here (there are a great many threads dealing with this). This is a thread specifically for Christians, or people who are here to discuss the Christian God, as described by The Bible.

And The Bible says that God created the universe. You don't create a universe and exist inside it! That is impossible. If God were to create a universe, then somehow find a way of transferring himself into that universe, so he was bound by its physical laws, then he would be trapped inside it forever and would never be able to return to heaven. Since we know God inhabits heaven, this is obviously not the case.

Trotsky,

God didn't make our universe using science! Science only affects the internal workings of a universe, science does not apply to anything beyond a universe. You can't build a universe with physical methods. God would not (and could not) use such crude methods. Could you write a book with science? Of course not. Creating a universe is much more like art than science.

Yes, all the events described in The Bible are physical occurances, which could (theoretically) be scientifically disproved. The same could be said of any historical record, such as the tape of the moon landing. But my point was that The Bible is not a book about science. It never once tries to tell us anything about the workings of science, or explain how anything works, physically. The Bible is not about physicality, however, we are physical beings, so naturally, The Bible is full of physical events.

You can't blame the author of a book for its ignorant readers!

The Catholic Church is, in my opinion, way off the mark. Their practices are based only loosely on what The Bible says. (There's nothing about wine turning into blood in The Bible). My apologies to any Catholics reading this, but I think Catholicism is something of an embarrassment to Christianity. I don't remember Jesus telling anyone to elect a leader to be in charge of Christianity!

Common Sense,

Thank you! It's nice that one person can understand what I'm saying. (Even if I am wrong!)

 

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I'm not interested in entering into such a discussion. I didn't say anything has been proven, but only that science is beginning to look into these areas, and I prefer to retain an open minded attitude about the possibility that science will throw up some answers to these questions in the future.

However, there's still the mystics. Obviously the only verification possible in the end is to experience spiritual reality for oneself. If one had such an experience, intellectual abstractions etc. would become redundant.

 

Yep. I'm very lucky because I've had exactly such an experience! I had faith and asked God nicely and he showed me the way! And I highly recommend it!

 

But I don't assume any of this!

It is a cop out because your saying that for science is one truth, for religion another. But that can't really be so. Both the scientist who theorizes about the big bang and the fundamentalist who believes the literal truth of the 7 days story can't be right.

You also seem to know a heck of a lot about how God is limited - But in fact He is infinite, and can be both wholly outside of, and transcendental to the universe, and yet at the same time intimately present in every atom.
It is simply flawed and limited logic that can't comprehend that God is beyond all our conceptions.

 

I believe in big bangs, and I also believe the literal truth of the 7 days story. There's no contradiction. Big Bangs are scientific occurances. It is said that when two membranes collide, you get a big bang, which would be the start of a universe such as the one we live in. The 7 days story is a story describing the progression of Earth, from nothing to a planet full of life. The chronology of the 7 days story in Genesis is spot on with the chronoogy of what happened.

But bear in mind that although the 7 days story seems chronological, it doesn't have to be. It may just be describing how God built the universe, rather than what happened. There is no disclaimer at the start of The Bible saying "the following reads as a chronological sequence of events". It's just God telling us about creation. Whether the 7 days story is God's creation of the universe, or merely the physical creation of the universe, it makes no difference.

NB: by the way, don't confuse God's creation of the universe with the physical creation of our universe (an easy mistake to make). The physical is just the physical way that universes are created, which is no doubt part of an infinite cycle (ie there was no beginning to the universe). Whereas God's creation of the universe is the actual creation of our universe, whereby God decided to make it, then he made it, then he modified it, etc, until we arive at what we know as 'reality'.

I'm not exactly sure what you're saying, here. The only 'limitations' I set upon God was that he didn't create himself. I would hardly call this a limitation. I'd call that common sense!

To go back to my book analogy, when you write a book, you are not creating yourself! You are not living inside the book. You're just writing a book, plain and simple. You do not need to 'go inside' the book's universe in order to write it. You write it from the outside. God created the universe from the outside; he didn't need to be inside it to build it. Being inside it (ie having a physical form) would be totally pointless. It says all over The Bible that God inhabits heaven. Heaven to us, is like real life to a book.

Let me just try to get back to my original assertion that science and religion are unrelated by asking a question:

How could you ever physically or scientifically 'find' or 'prove' God? I mean, how could that ever be possible? That would require God to have deliberately placed something there for us to find, surely? And since what he places for us to find is his choice, we can't assume he has placed anything there. Right?

 

That's too bad. But I still think that science is utterly incapable of proving metaphysical (synthetic a priori) statements because science just doesn't deal with a priori statements. If it did, it wouldn't be science anymore, it would be logic or math.

But why would God only choose to reveal himself to a select few? Why can't anyone come to the conclusion that God exists much like anyone could come to the conclusion that 2 + 2 = 4? What is the difference between the mental state which take place when a mystic has a genuine religious experience and the mental state which takes place when, say, a drunk sees pink elephants? If religious experience can be objectified in any way, then these questions have to be answered.

 

Dizzy Man, we dont even know all there is to know about the universe, so how can you assume that God is outside of it?

 

dizzy man...


i really liked that.... and i can absolutely understand the point of view. cop-out or not, the analogy worked very well to reason science and religion as completely separate.

i've never heard, or maybe just never really thought of, the offbeat, imaginative, god-as-author idea, where he "writes himself in" to the story when he wants to take part. it definitely leaves us in the Author's complete control, doesn't it?
however, i believe that idea leaves out free will. is the author not creating even my day to day life?

in any case, my reasoning is that whether or not my life is being written by a hand in an alternate universe as we speak, this author has still not provided me with enough reasonable evidence to believe in his existence. the definition of science can be narrowed down 'to the study of nearly everything'... and since we are given logic to use, we will study nearly everything. if there is a god, and he is completely out of the picture, that is, the rational, logical, observable picture, then what can we do? there is no way to know of the author's existence.

i mean, there could also be magical invisible fairies in some alternate universe that we don't know about, but because the whole idea is currently so unknowable, there's no reason to sweat it. many things are possible when we're left to imagination; we can't say they're true, or false, just unknowable. who knows if there's an all powerful author-god writing me? who knows if there are magical fairies we'll never be able to observe? we're here, and that's all we can know for sure.



sophia