quote=Ex Nine
I'm not sure I understand, eXistenZ. Wouldn't God, if he exists, be an empirical fact?[/b]
Nice observation Ex Nine. I was arguing that even though you could falsify the existence of God, you cannot discard his essence. I'm not running away with a new definition of God, I'm restating what I claimed before. God might be something beyond our current methods of proving/disproving things. We cannot talk about truth and untruth, but method to verify or falsify truth and untruth. Science is the current light torch used by us human beings to rationally discover things. The span of this light is limited, as everything that is human.
I believe in science, but I would not ask science to prove something that is beyond the aim for which it was born.
And we should remember that the current state of science is likely not the final one. Quantum physics, for instance, seems to falsify many previous common scientific \"beliefs\". If science is \"eating\" its own fundamentals, I wouldn't put such a weight on its shoulders like an \"experimentum crucis\" about God.
We should certainly do research about God also through science, but this will not give us the final answer, at least not today.
I can think of a hundred empirical experiments that falsify the existence of God. It's easy because we are talking about something that can exist everywhere and therefore should be able to be observed everywhere. It doesn't matter where or at what time the observation is made. It's not like disproving the existence of fairies, which may be very small and only exist in some far corner of the universe in another dimension, etc.[/b]
I wouldn't be so sure. One should first establish what is the \"substance\" whose omnipresence he's trying to test. Then he can test the omnipresence feature of this substance. I would have hard time in the first stage, that is the fundamental one.
Most importatntly, it's even easier given God's benevolent and powerful nature. He should be eager to help with the observation, not run away from it. [/b]
This is a judgement about what God should do or not do. We couldn't conduct valid experiments based on wishful thinking.
The argument that God should be eager to show himself can be used as a reinforcer of a hypothesis, not as a hypothesis by itself. You correctly wrote \"it's even easier\", that is a qualifier statement, so I'm not saying that you meant that claim as a hypothesis.
But God's believers cleverly redefine God into a slippery concept and a mysterious one at that. And they are not to be taken seriously, for they exist in a state of trouble. Nothing can be so dangerous for a person - to rely on something through means of subterfuge against your own self.
[b] I agree with you here (although conditionally): sometimes those who try to keep "their" God away from science just keep redefining him. You prove something and they say "Ok, but God is something else". Not a real scientific debate... But one can notice that, on the contrary, religions and believers who do not fear verification are eager to leave science free to do its research. They wish that science could give a final sentence on that. So I wouldn't put all the believers and religions in the same category of adversaries of science.
I observe that the equation religion=no-science or even religion=anti-science is growing, notably in the US. I think that they can go together.
eXistenZ
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