Hawking says there are no gods

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The Big Dog said:
Golly! You managed to type all those words without actually, you know, telling us what you so confidently declared, what was it again?

“I know what you were suggesting.”

Hmm, it has been quite clearly shown that you don’t because had you, you would have, you know, told us what you

“Know what you were suggesting”

Rather than typing out all that nonsense about, what was it? Oh yeah, what you had for dinner, which is hilarious. Let’s follow the conversation...

I know what you were suggesting!
O’rly, what was it?
No you!
Chuckling, we knew you were not going to do it.
I had salmon!

That is fantastic.
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Come on, little buddy, you can do it!
 
qayak said:
Come on, little buddy, you can do it!
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Hey! Nice, this time you totally dodged the question, again, but used less words.

Still sticking with the “no you,” which is surprisingly not a step up from telling us about what you had for dinner.

“I know what you were suggesting.”

No you did not, but keep lying about it.

Type “little buddy” again.

Fantastic!
 
The Big Dog said:
Hey! Nice, this time you totally dodged the question, again, but used less words.

Still sticking with the “no you,” which is surprisingly not a step up from telling us about what you had for dinner.

“I know what you were suggesting.”

No you did not, but keep lying about it.

Type “little buddy” again.

Fantastic!
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Keeping working, little buddy. Remember the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. You can do it!
 
Ron_Tomkins said:
I'm sure to some, this thread is meant to be some kind of Confirmation Bias for those who abide to Arguments from Authority, which sadly, is a logical fallacy that doesn't exclude Atheists. Surely Hawking knew the science better than any of us to reach a pretty good conjecture, but technically speaking, it is still a conjecture, not a definite assertion based on evidence. My position remains the same: The problem with the "God" argument is that the word itself can mean an infinite number of things. This is not in defense of theists, for in fact, I sustain the theory that even if we were to discover a "God", it would be so radically different from anything that any human being could even begin to imagine, that all religions would reject this "God" because it doesn't look anything at all like what they imagined in their Disneyland idealistic vision, to look like a God. What humans define as "God" is basically a projection of their own individual desires and fears. It's a God that humans created, not the other way around. If the question of "whether there is such thing as a God" were to be pursued with seriousness and intellectual honesty, it would be a scientific pursuit devoid of any emotional and personal biases. But it is not. This "debate" is basically a group of people with an emotional hunch about "something they define as God" being answered by another group of people who do not share does emotional desires for there to be one.

In short: God is dead. Hail Satan.
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If a word means anything, it means nothing. The first thing a theist should do is say what he understands by "god" and then we will discuss whether that god exists.

In the meantime, the best thing is to stick to the religions we know. Since these gods do not exist and no one has proposed a different concept of god here, it can be said that gods do not exist. And there I include the Holy Trinity, Yahweh, Allah, Jupiter, Huitzilopochtli, Odin, and so on.

NOTE: It is a fact that the attempts to make a definition of "god" to avoid a refutation, usually makes "god" a nonsensical word. This is another thing.
 
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psionl0 said:
That seems a little more evangelistic than I would have expected of a scientist.

Hawking seems to claim that the universe and all of the laws that govern it are knowable. Yet at this point in time, we can't even argue that the universe is deterministic (if it were then consciousness and free will would be myths). Most of the equations that we have to describe the universe stem from quantum wave equations (equations of probability). That screams "we don't know".
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Hawking's argument is supported by the current state of our knowledge. If you can explain the behaviour of certain particles with the laws of quantum mechanics, why do you need God hypothesis? A scientist introduces hypotheses when the situation requires it. What scientific situation requires God hypothesis?

In reality, the word "god" applied to cosmology is a void. It is an empty name to refer what we don't know. In history, many functions of God has been transferred to nature laws and the poor guy is getting put out of work. Therefore he becomes a haziness more and more.
 
David Mo said:
If you can explain the behaviour of certain particles with the laws of quantum mechanics, why do you need God hypothesis?
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We don't.

OTOH we can't rule one out because the "laws" of quantum mechanics don't explain anything. The are just a set of wave equations that allow us to get a probability distribution regarding the position and momentum of particles. They don't identify any mechanism that associated with said particles.

David Mo said:
Are you assuming that there are absolutely unobservable facts, which cannot be deduced from other observable ones? If so, how do you know that one of these facts exists?
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We know that subatomic particles are composed of something (because they exist) but we are limited in what we can determine regarding their composition because we don't have anything small enough to do so.
 
psionl0 said:
We don't.

OTOH we can't rule one out because the "laws" of quantum mechanics don't explain anything. The are just a set of wave equations that allow us to get a probability distribution regarding the position and momentum of particles. They don't identify any mechanism that associated with said particles.


We know that subatomic particles are composed of something (because they exist) but we are limited in what we can determine regarding their composition because we don't have anything small enough to do so.
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It seems that we have a different concept of “law” and “explanation”. See the Encyclopedia Britannica “The laws of quantum mechanics”:

Compton sent a beam of X-rays through a target material and observed that a small part of the beam was deflected off to the sides at various angles. He found that the scattered X-rays had longer wavelengths than the original beam; the change could be explained only by assuming that the X-rays scattered from the electrons in the target as if the X-rays were particles with discrete amounts of energy and momentum. When X-rays are scattered, their momentum is partially transferred to the electrons. The recoil electron takes some energy from an X-ray, and as a result the X-ray frequency is shifted. Both the discrete amount of momentum and the frequency shift of the light scattering are completely at variance with classical electromagnetic theory, but they are explained by Einstein’s quantum formula.
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The idea that existence implies to be a compound is not scientific. A subatomic particle may be a compound or may be not. The idea that there is something backing the empirical reality is philosophical, not scientific. Even if we accept this we don’t need to postulate a metaphysical reality. Even if we accept that this metaphysical reality exist we don’t need to accept that this thing-in-itself is knowable. That is to say, that God is still a superfluous hypothesis.
 
psionl0 said:
That seems a little more evangelistic than I would have expected of a scientist.

Hawking seems to claim that the universe and all of the laws that govern it are knowable. Yet at this point in time, we can't even argue that the universe is deterministic (if it were then consciousness and free will would be myths). Most of the equations that we have to describe the universe stem from quantum wave equations (equations of probability). That screams "we don't know".
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The universe not being deterministic doesn't mean we can't/don't know how it works.
 
psionl0 said:
And you think that little excerpt explains the meaning of life, the universe and everything?
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No. My interest was more modest. I just wanted to start a clarification on the meaning of "law" and "explanation".


I don't think the meaning of the universe is a scientific problem. And I don't think there's any explanation of what the meaning of the universe is. What's more, I think it's an unsolvable question (ill-considered) and we're not going to find it by giving it an arbitrary name, be it Odin or Huitzilopotxli.
 
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Darat said:
No it isn't.
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:rolleyes:

David Mo said:
No. My interest was more modest. I just wanted to start a clarification on the meaning of "law" and "explanation".
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You don't clarify something by obfuscating it. Having a handful of formulas that allow us to predict some behaviours in the universe is a long way from knowing all about it - let alone proving a negative.
 
psionl0 said:
:rolleyes:


.
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What's that Hitxhen quote? Something like that which is asserted without evidence can be refuted without evidence.

If you want to claim that reality not being deterministic means we can never understand it you really do need to you know *support* that claim.
 
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