Originally posted by: Athanasius
Still, you misunderstand my point. I have said several times that I cannot "prove" God exists. My main point is that belief in God is neither rational not irrational.
The act of believing in God MUST be either rational or irrational. Stop using Netopia-reasoning.
I have said that many in different scientific fields have come to a very rational position that science has really done nothing to resolve the question of God one way or the other.
Let's just put it this way -- there is a multitude of empirical evidence to suggest that the biblical account of how life originated (eve ripped from adam's rib, a bunch of animals got stuck in an Ark, etc.) is highly unlikely and far-fetched. With respect just to the existence of God, irrespective of the biblical account of everything else, I have already stated that it is impossible to design an experiment or conduct empirical observations to either prove or disprove the existence of God. Therefore, it is inconsequential of you to cite quotations from scientists that state that science doesn't help to prove or disprove God. I do NOT dispute this. However, to reiterate, science DOES do a good job in suggesting that the origin of life, as explained by the bible, is virtually impossible.
You see, it is the poet, the philsopher, the religious man who looks up at the night sky and sees Beauty and Transcendence. Who infers (not observes) that there is something beyond.
The acorn falls on Henny Penny's head, and she looks up to the daytime sky and infers (not observes) that the sky is falling.
Man is not objective, for He is never truly outside of himself. Even in quantum mechanics there is a persistant belief that merely observing an experiment taints the experiment.
Damn, you're smart -- this is called "experimental bias." They're supposed to teach you this in remedial high school science courses (or advanced upper div courses
here. This is why science employs safeguards to minimize the amount of bias in an experiment, including double-blinding, placebo control, objective measurements, etc.
By the strictest paradigms of modern science, you really can't prove anything except that you are thinking. If you study human consciousness, it becomes clear that there is no clear distinction between the "internal" world of our minds and the world "out there."
Nobody has asked you to provide proof to such a deep level...that would be unreasonable. So how much "evidence" is enough? For the sake of argument, let's consider cigarette smoking. The most unequivocal evidence that smoking causes would be to conduct a double-blind placebo controlled study which would entail two groups: one that smoked cigarettes and one that smoked a placebo. Patients would be randomly assigned to either group, researchers collecting data would be blinded to what group a patient belonged, etc. If we tested thousands of people and found that the smokers had much higher incidences of lung cancer than the placebo group, we would be convinced that smoking causes cancer.
But guess what. NOBODY has done this double-blind placebo-controlled study of cigarettes and cancer. You can't. It would be unethical to do for obvious reasons. All we have are a multitude of studies using inferior methodologies...we do case control studies and look at large groups of people who have lung cancer and those who don't...we we find that there's a much higher percentage of smoking in ppl with lung cancer vs. ppl who don't...and we try to get large samples and correct for confounding variables (like age, comorbidities, other exposures, family history, etc.). We do cohort studies to look at ppl who assign themselves (no randomization) to smoking or non-smoking and we find that ppl who smoke have much more lung cancer than those don't. Finally, we analyze the contents of cigarettes and we notice that they contain high levels of substances KNOWN to cause cancer. Do any of these studies constitute PROOF?? Absolutely not.
So tell me, if Smoking Sam considers all of this evidence and says, "There's no proof that smoking causing cancer, and therefore I don't believe that it does," is this a rational conclusion? After all, there's no proof. I stipulate that there is no "proof." Would this be a good conclusion to make? Can we say that despite the overwhelming evidence that smoking causes cancer, we have no definitive proof and therefore conclude that smoking does NOT cause cancer? This is essentially what Christians are doing with respect to the origin of the universe and creationism. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that creationism did NOT occur, yet there is no definitive proof (because again, it is not possible to conduct an experiment that constitutes proof)...but it's still perfectly rational to believe in it anyway? I would argue that it is not.
Valsalva