Can God be Found By Science?

Would we recognise the physical signs if we found him/her?

Being just a humble cabbie I don't pretend to know much about science but what I do know of it is that we don't know half the questions let alone half the answers.

 

How would science or scientist go about discovering God?

 

I do not believe we can ever "know" whether or not there's a creator. I believe there is not, but I don't believe we can know. However, we can know some things, in an "IF -- THEN" format:

IF there is an all-powerful god, then he/she/it does not like us very much; and IF there is a creator who likes us, then he/she/it is less than all-powerful.

REASON: Routing the urethra through the middle of the prostate is a really bad idea unless you want to cause extreme suffering. If there was an "intelligence" behind this design, it either was a rather stupid intelligence, or it didn't give a damn how much we suffer. There are plenty of other examples, but having suffered through two prostate operations, this example carries special significance for me.

Of course, the principal monotheistic religions all assert contradictory qualities for their god which do not hold up under examination of the world as it is. But they could all be wrong and there could be a sadistic creator, or an incompetent creator, or a jokester creator, or a creator who just doesn't care one way or another. Maybe the world was created by a capitalist god, contracted by a customer, and the creator wanted the world to work for a while and then fail, so the customer would have to buy another world. A world that worked forever would be like a telephone that worked forever. They used to make those, but then they realized they'd make more money if phones worked for a couple of years and then you had to buy a new one. God could be like that. None of the arguments for the existence of a god speaks to the question of why a creator must be all-powerful or all-knowing or a generally nice guy who likes us.

Clearly, we cannot know if there is a god, but we can know that if there is a god, she/he/it either does not like us, or is less than a stellar designer.

 

Sorry. It's more like 50-50. Christianity and Islam together make up about half, but then you get into Buddhism, Shinto, Hinduism and folk religions, many of which are animistic and multiple gods/spirits. Even Christianity is pseudo-monotheistic particularly for Catholic and Orthodox branches, with all the major saints/apostles replacing Zeus's pantheon, the Virgin Mary being as important as Christ to a lot of adherents, and of course the Trinity.

I think any attempt at coherence between all religions is doomed. Basically you get that some things are scary and evil, some things are wrong, some are virtuous, and some random events are just what demons/angels/minor gods/spirits do in your life without your direct knowledge. (There's a quote I remember: "Coincidence is just when God does something and remains anonymous".) Creation stories vary widely, although the major religions tend to agree on some points. Symbols vary widely.

I saw an e-mailed slideshow with a picture from the Hubble telescope of a distant galaxy and it was shaped like a cross, and cross shapes can also be found at the microscopic level in human cells. The point of the e-mail was that this should be taken as proof of God's presence. However, crosses are not a difficult shape to produce, so I have a hard time accepting this as hard evidence, but it is in line with your basic question.

Kind of like that part in the book "Contact" by Carl Sagan (this part didn't make it into the movie for some reason), where if you looked at a certain segment of the infinite value of pi, in base 11, it gave a 11x11 grid of 0's and 1's that formed the shape of a circle. (This was fictional obviously). The idea there is that this was built into the laws of nature, but was obviously not just coincidence, so it was proof that some intelligence had created the universe.

If we could find something like that, it would be very interesting indeed, but what would it mean beyond that? We wouldn't know if it was an individual, a race, or a committee that created the universe. We wouldn't know if they were still involved at a galactic scale, let alone an earthly scale. I don't think it would bring world peace or endless prosperity or knowledge of the hereafter, so there would still be a role for the various religions on Earth.

 

Followup: I read the book "Spook" by Mary Roach, which involved scientific attempts to find evidence of a persons soul and existence in the afterlife. It's pretty interesting, and some were laughable. One person weighed people right at their time of death from TB, and he came up (in at least one case, but it was hard to repeat, since they had to die on the scale), that the body lost 21 grams when the person died (and the soul presumably departed), so he surmised the soul weighs 21 grams.

Most of this started in the late 1800's, and some experiments are still going on today. The latest is putting pictures facing the ceiling on top of cabinets in hospital operating rooms where open heart surgery was done, and then interviewing people who've had out-of-body experiences while they were technically dead, and seeing if they saw (and remembered) those pictures that weren't visible from the gurney.

Nothing has come yet that can really be peer-reviewed and declared as physical evidence of a soul.

 

Metaphysics, based on faith, cannot be reconciled with science. Science strives to disprove things and we only accept what we cannot disprove, and we keep on testing. Religion accepts a belief based and faith and dogma and goes no further.

 

Really? I grow deeper in my faith everyday as He makes himself more evident in my life. I guess it all depends on where and what kind of evidence your looking for.

 

The principal theological criticism of Muslims against Christianity is that it makes three persons out of god. Muslims (and Jews) are strictly monotheistic, and the Muslims see the trinity as polytheism.

 

Yes, but last time I asked you to relate that evidence, you couldn't.

 

Yes, ever since the mirror was invented.

 

This thread is getting too heavy and people with either view are not gonna change their mind so I thought the following clip might enlighten things a little (esp the last few words );

Bugger - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

#1. I said I do not believe that we can know. I take the usual definition of god as being outside the material world, interacting with the material world only by means of miracles, which experiments cannot prove, because the interaction is at god's whim.

#2. I never said that the evidence precludes some sort of intelligence. I said that the creator is either less than all-powerful, or else does not care about us. An all-powerful creator would not be hindered by the usual engineer's need to make compromises.

But when is a creator a god? Maybe the Earth and its life were created by ETs with abilities beyond ours but still fallible. Would they qualify as gods? I say no. Of course that's a matter of definitions. By definition I take a god to be supernatural.

FWIW, I have a very devout friend who once responded to the cruelty problem by saying "I would rather believe that god is not all-powerful, than believe that god is not all love." So, to her, the world was created by an eternal supernatural being who is all love, but is constrained by logic and laws which are above it and which it cannot alter. Her conception answers the problems I raised above by abandoning the common dogma of an all-powerful god. She's also a universalist, believing that everyone goes to heaven in the end, and the only reason to be good is that god suffers whenever someone does something bad, and if you love god as god loves you, you won't want got to suffer. This friend is a Catholic nun, though she does not belong to an order, and she was raised Quaker, and her theology is, as far as I can tell, far more Quaker than Catholic.

A more likely resolution of the problem, in my opinion, is that god routed the urethra through the prostate as an intentional and very cruel joke, and that he laughs himself silly over it every day. It is the height of hubris to imagine that the human race is somehow "higher" in god's esteem than other living things, or even non-living things.

An even more likely resolution is that there is no creator, and the world has a purely material origin.

The FSM, of course, doesn't care much about us one way or another, which is why instead of ten commandments there are eight I'd-really-rather-you-didn't's. But he's nice enough that after we suffer the nasty joke which is life, we all get a beer volcano and a stripper factory (whatever that is) in heaven.

 

No.

 

FWIW:

More than half of adult Americans report they have had a spiritual
experience that changed their lives. Now, scientists from universities
like Harvard, Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins are using new
technologies to analyze the brains of people who claim they have
touched the spiritual — from Christians who speak in tongues to
Buddhist monks to people who claim to have had near-death
experiences.Hear what they have discovered in this controversial
field, as the science of spirituality continues to evolve.

More: Is This Your Brain On God? : NPR

Secondly, there is reason to believe that believers and non-believers
are wired differently:

ScienceDaily (Mar. 5, 2009) — Believing in God can help block
anxiety and minimize stress, according to new University of Toronto
research that shows distinct brain differences between believers and
non-believers.

More: Brain Differences Found Between Believers In God And Non-believers

Lots more: Google search on god in the brain

 

Sorry, please forgive me, I have no recollection of you asking for evidence.

But, be that as it may, thanks for asking. I have been meaning to write up my testimony and now that I have some quite time, you have given me the motivation. All good Christian should have their testimony at the ready for times like these. But I suspect with a high degree of confidence that you will say that it proves nothing and is a bunch of hogwash and coincidences, etc. But that is OK, all I can tell you is what I know to be true.

Give me a few days...

 

You have read extremely little about NDE's if you are unsure of the connection. It's like saying that you are not sure what a catholic church service has to do with god. Proving "god" exist via science is a mighty big undertaking. Yet it appears that you want to do it in one step in one thread.

Let's start with one assumption that hopefully we agree on....god is not a human. What realm could he inhabit? Seems to me that proving or disproving that our present dimensionality is the only possible home for consciousness might make the discussion more interesting. Does not prove or disprove god, but would be a BIG discovery (either way). Most definitely would open or constrain what definitions of god could be further considered.

I'm sorry, but going to Wikipedia for an understanding of NDEs is like going to Wikipedia for an understand of god. Type in a the right letters, and you get a full understanding of the subject?

You start out this thread talking about using science and then resort to what you believe as providing the basis for discussion. I'm definitely not trying to antagonistic here, but science is a demanding discipline that requires a solid starting point. I still cannot figure out your starting point of what you mean by "god" and what you mean by "find".

Do you realize that quantum correlation have been proven to propagate faster than the speed of light? Obviously if they thought the gap was truly closed, then getting all the money to perform precise measurements of the neutrino propagation velocity would not have had strong supporters. A great deal of discoveries have occurred due to extremely precise measurements, so a great many experimenters focus on areas where the theoreticians say not to bother looking.

 

They were looking for something else. The speed of neutrinos was a byproduct of that research not the main objective. They thought the gap was truly closed. They still think the gap is closed, there is just a tiny doubt in their minds.