Subject:
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Re: Holy crap! Four out of five scientists claim....
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Thu, 16 Oct 2003 16:26:56 GMT
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Viewed:
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739 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, John Neal wrote:
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But even if science doesn’t ever resolve the question, that doesn’t mean
that God is the answer. To assume that God is the answer is a fallacy on
numerous levels.
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WRT to the origin of the universe, you say that “...we don’t have the tools
to verify our hypotheses. All in good time.” Are those tools even
theoretically possible?
That aside, let’s go back to the very beginning of the universe. Stuff comes
from stuff, but where did the first, initial stuff come from? It is an
illogical, infinite question, completely outside the limitations of logical,
finite Science. To even suggest that Science has a prayer (figuratively:-)
to even address such a question is sheer cheek in my mind, and this has
nothing to do with the status of our current technological abilities.
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Well, let’s disclaim once again that science isn’t in the business of proving
anything as 100% fact, so I reserve the statement that science will always
permit modification to existing theory.
Science hasn’t yet produced a supernova in the lab, but it has provided good
theoretical explanations for much of the process. Science doesn’t need to
recreate the universe in order to demonstrate a valid theory for the origin of
that universe.
I can’t say what the theoretical tools might be, but they will likely be
mathematical in nature, much like many of the tools we now use to explain the
physical universe.
And it’s not a statement of faith for me to say that science will likely have
those answers at some point, as long as A those answers are part of the
physical universe and B they can, in principle, be explained.
If they can’t in principle be explained, then that’s the end of that, but it
still doesn’t mean that God did it.
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Deists agree to let point 1 be “God”, and it seems to me that Science also
needs to let point 1 be something for which it has no explanation or any
hope thereof.
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I don’t think that science necessarily agrees that there is a point 1. For
that matter, point 1 may have been caused by point 2 (a statement which I
regurgitate here but cannot further explain, because it has to do with quantum
physics well beyond me, though I assert the point as another theoretical
explanation of origin).
Another way to look at it is this: deists sometimes assert that “anything that
began to exist had a cause.” Of course, “began to exist” is a clunky,
artificial phrase created expressly to put God in a category by himself, since
He’s the only thing usually allowed to have always existed. But there are two
problems. If God can always have existed, why couldn’t the universe? After
all, the universe is not a thing--it is the set of all things (just the set of
all numbers is not itself a number). To this end, the positing of God creates
an extraneous step (and a big one); if the universe can in some way have created
itself or could always have existed, then no God is needed.
Also, if God is the only thing that didn’t “begin to exist,” then to say that
“all things that began to exist had a cause” is circular (and also special
pleading (a double standard)), since it says “all things except God had a
cause.” On the other hand, if there’s something else that didn’t “begin to
exist,” then that thing was by definition not created by God and is thus not
beholden to God; therefore, God would not be infinite or omnipotent.
Dave!
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