Hawking says there are no gods

[psionl0]

Only if you keep asking the wrong question.

Wrong question because there is no evidence to base the hypothesis on: Do gods exist?

Logical question based on over whelming observable evidence, what explains god beliefs?

you're philosophizing again.

There is no known scientific test that can determine whether any gods exist.

 

[a_unique_person]

Stephen Hawking's Final Book Says There's 'No Possibility' of God in Our Universe

Not even one of those many Hindu deities? How could he know that?

 

[The Great Zaganza]

Hawking must has solved the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything - and it didn't have any deities in it.

 

[TragicMonkey]

You'd have a devil of a time proving or disproving the existence of a Gnostic-style god: a force without personality or will that exists outside the universe and never interacts with it. Fortunately for the tidy-minded there is no difference in impact if such a god exists or doesn't, the results are exactly the same, so nobody need bother with it.

 

[Darat]

I regret to say that you are like Molière's Bourgeois gentilhomme, who spoke in prose and did not know it. You are doing philosophy, as much as it kills you.

The existence of God is not studied in the faculties of physics, astronomy, biology, etc. It is studied in the faculties of theology and in some chairs of philosophy.
There is not a single respectable journal of science that has published a single article dedicated to prove or refute the existence of God. Do you know any? Can you say any theorem or physical law that talks about this subject?
A strange scientific subject that is not studied in science faculties or specialized journals.

The problem is that you are so philosophobic that you do not see what is before you. The existence of God is a philosophical problem and atheism is a philosophical issue. You are making philosophy. You will have to confess to your scientist confessor.

Not according to the those that believe in the god of the Jews, The Muslims, the Christians. They are gods that by their own claims are meant to interact with the world and have definite properties that can be "tested" by the "scientific method".

What you are babbling about is one of these definition of a god that no one actually believes in so totally and utterly unrelated to the god the believers say they believe in. It is just plain confusing to use the same word for different things.

Zeus was a god that many people believed in. The people that believed in him had a certain definition, one part of that definition was that he lived in a palace on mt Olympus, and please note not an invisible palace, not a palace that mortals could not access but an actual palace like a king or emperor of the time lived in. We know no such palace exists on Mt Olympus therefore Zeus as the god his believers believed in does not exist.

 

[The Sparrow]

If you want to maintain belief in a god who has never taken any actions in regards to our universe, you are free to do so.
However, once you claim god created the universe, it is YOU who are stepping out of philosophy and into physics.
Hawking says there is no room, requirement or necessity for such a god when explaining the origins of our universe. If you want to remove the attribute of "created our universe" from god, then you can keep on believing in it/him/her.

 

[JoeMorgue]

If your argument is "Science cannot disprove God" the "God" you believe in has to be totally and completely inert, unable to affect or alter the world in any way.

In other words he has to not exist in everything but pure semantics.

 

[TragicMonkey]

If your argument is "Science cannot disprove God" the "God" you believe in has to be totally and completely inert, unable to affect or alter the world in any way.

In other words he has to not exist in everything but pure semantics.

Things either exist or they don't, and whether we know of them or not doesn't change that. There is no scientific evidence for the existence of deities. There is no reason to believe they exist. But having an absolute conviction they necessarily cannot exist simply because we haven't evidence to the contrary is assumption: we don't have a scientific experiment to prove no deities exist. How would such an experiment be devised? Where would observation work to disprove the existence of gods? If there were a physical location accessible to us that we knew they occupied we could go observe it.

Again, and I restate because people here tend to get very boringly triggered on this, there is no reason to believe in gods. But lack of proof for the existence of a thing is not the same as proof of its nonexistence. The functional effect is the same: behave as if there are no gods.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Things either exist or they don't, and whether we know of them or not doesn't change that. There is no scientific evidence for the existence of deities. There is no reason to believe they exist. But having an absolute conviction they necessarily cannot exist simply because we haven't evidence to the contrary is assumption: we don't have a scientific experiment to prove no deities exist. How would such an experiment be devised? Where would observation work to disprove the existence of gods? If there were a physical location accessible to us that we knew they occupied we could go observe it.

Again, and I restate because people here tend to get very boringly triggered on this, there is no reason to believe in gods. But lack of proof for the existence of a thing is not the same as proof of its nonexistence. The functional effect is the same: behave as if there are no gods.

Much as with the "agnostic" argument I agree 100% on an intellectual level, but this is not a discussion happening in a vacuum and modifiers put on one topic not put on another always have ulterior motives.

If someone says "There's not a polka dotted elephant dancing the Charleston outside of Shay Stadium" and there's zero evidence for it the hairsplit between "False" and "Not proven false" doesn't come out.

You say, correctly, that on a street level we are to just plainly say "There is no God" but my point is we're never allowed to discuss God on a street level because God is different because people define him that way.

 

[TragicMonkey]

Much as with the "agnostic" argument I agree 100% on an intellectual level, but this is not a discussion happening in a vacuum and modifiers put on one topic not put on another always have ulterior motives.

If someone says "There's not a polka dotted elephant dancing the Charleston outside of Shay Stadium" and there's zero evidence for it the hairsplit between "False" and "Not proven false" doesn't come out.

You say, correctly, that on a street level we are to just plainly say "There is no God" but my point is we're never allowed to discuss God on a street level because God is different because people define him that way.

Firstly, that elephant is dancing the can-can, not the Charleston. Secondly, we can discuss concepts of the divine on any level we wish, particularly in this subforum. Thirdly, stop letting other people define your concepts for you. Not all religions have a capital G God who is the familiar fictional character from so many public domain works. Assuming all belief in deity must be talking about that guy is like assuming all pirates are Johnny Depp because he's the most familiar one...to people who don't make a study of pirates.

 

[David Mo]

Not according to the those that believe in the god of the Jews, The Muslims, the Christians. They are gods that by their own claims are meant to interact with the world and have definite properties that can be "tested" by the "scientific method".

What you are babbling about is one of these definition of a god that no one actually believes in so totally and utterly unrelated to the god the believers say they believe in. It is just plain confusing to use the same word for different things.

Zeus was a god that many people believed in. The people that believed in him had a certain definition, one part of that definition was that he lived in a palace on mt Olympus, and please note not an invisible palace, not a palace that mortals could not access but an actual palace like a king or emperor of the time lived in. We know no such palace exists on Mt Olympus therefore Zeus as the god his believers believed in does not exist.

I am afraid you are oversimplifying the problem:

A believer needn't to defend an absent god. Although there are some who have, alluding to "God's silence". Kierkegaard is a little more complex than Thunderer Zeus' cult. I doubt very much you can refute Kierkegaard with a mathematical theorem or the law of gravity. This is a philosophical debate about the concept of truth and the subjectivity.

But first of all, you must have discussed the five ways of St. Thomas/Aristotle. Another philosophical problem that you can only debate on the concept of cause in philosophical terms. Or the ontological argument of St. Anselm/Descartes, which resides also in a clarification of concepts and not in verifiable by science data.


Once these or similar problems posed by theologians and philosophers –for example, miracles—have been cleared up, you will have a philosophical concept of truth that will allow you to say that only science grants reliable knowledge about facts. Consequently you will be able to affirm as Laplace and Hawking that the concept of god is a superfluous hypothesis.

But let it be clear to you that none of the problems I have just mentioned will be dealt with in a book on experimental science or mathematics. You should think about this.

 

[David Mo]

Many scientists, including Hawking, have waded in on the god question. As soon as a theist makes a testable claim about god science can test it. All those claims have been shown to be false thus far. Proving god is up to those who claim there is one but all their other claims as to how the universe got to be the way it is are testable. God didn't do it.

Of course, but the assumption lies in the non-scientific claim that only science provides knowledge of things. This cannot be scientifically proven.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Everyone on this board owes me 50 dollars.

This question lies outside the realm of whatever you are going to use to prove me wrong because I say so.

Therefore I am correct.

 

[David Mo]

Things either exist or they don't, and whether we know of them or not doesn't change that. There is no scientific evidence for the existence of deities. There is no reason to believe they exist. But having an absolute conviction they necessarily cannot exist simply because we haven't evidence to the contrary is assumption: we don't have a scientific experiment to prove no deities exist. How would such an experiment be devised? Where would observation work to disprove the existence of gods? If there were a physical location accessible to us that we knew they occupied we could go observe it.

Again, and I restate because people here tend to get very boringly triggered on this, there is no reason to believe in gods. But lack of proof for the existence of a thing is not the same as proof of its nonexistence. The functional effect is the same: behave as if there are no gods.

I think you realize you're making a philosophical argument.

Much as with the "agnostic" argument I agree 100% on an intellectual level, but this is not a discussion happening in a vacuum and modifiers put on one topic not put on another always have ulterior motives.

If someone says "There's not a polka dotted elephant dancing the Charleston outside of Shay Stadium" and there's zero evidence for it the hairsplit between "False" and "Not proven false" doesn't come out.

You say, correctly, that on a street level we are to just plainly say "There is no God" but my point is we're never allowed to discuss God on a street level because God is different because people define him that way.

And you also.

 

[Darat]

Firstly, that elephant is dancing the can-can, not the Charleston. Secondly, we can discuss concepts of the divine on any level we wish, particularly in this subforum. Thirdly, stop letting other people define your concepts for you. Not all religions have a capital G God who is the familiar fictional character from so many public domain works. Assuming all belief in deity must be talking about that guy is like assuming all pirates are Johnny Depp because he's the most familiar one...to people who don't make a study of pirates.

Interestingly they form the minority of the religious believers in the world (albeit still a huge number of believers), the majority of the world population that claims to believe in a god believe in either the Christian god (billion plus of just the one denomination) or the Islamic god (not far behind the RCs), we know what god they claim to believe in as they are so kind to describe and define their god. And it is a god we know does not exist.

 

[JoeMorgue]

I think you realize you're making a philosophical argument.

Nope. I've created an epistemology I call uberosophy that I define as being broader than philosophy so I win.

I hope I realize what you are doing is just one small part of uberosophy.

 

[David Mo]

Nope. I've created an epistemology I call uberosophy that I define as being broader than philosophy so I win.

I hope I realize what you are doing is just one small part of uberosophy.

I'm sorry to tell you that what you call uberosophy is already patented since the 19th century at least.. It is usually done in many departments of philosophy. It receives the traditional name of positivism or the most recent of scientism.

 

[The Big Dog]

Everyone on this board owes me 50 dollars.

This question lies outside the realm of whatever you are going to use to prove me wrong because I say so.

Therefore I am correct.

I'm not certain that was hawking's point, but I see what you are getting at.

Those God deniers are a bunch of proselytizers...

 

[TragicMonkey]

Interestingly they form the minority of the religious believers in the world (albeit still a huge number of believers), the majority of the world population that claims to believe in a god believe in either the Christian god (billion plus of just the one denomination) or the Islamic god (not far behind the RCs), we know what god they claim to believe in as they are so kind to describe and define their god. And it is a god we know does not exist.

It's one of life's little ironies that most religious know very little of their own religion's theology and history. The average modern Christian has no idea that their theology owes more Aristotle than to Christ. The question is who are you setting out to disprove: Ms Jenkins of Finch, Oklahoma? Or Aquinas?

I don't believe in the theology of either, but I do know one of those has a lot more meat to it.

 

[Darat]

I am afraid you are oversimplifying the problem:

I disagree I am making it just as complicated or simple as it needs to be.

A believer needn't to defend an absent god. Although there are some who have, alluding to "God's silence". Kierkegaard is a little more complex than Thunderer Zeus' cult. I doubt very much you can refute Kierkegaard with a mathematical theorem or the law of gravity. This is a philosophical debate about the concept of truth and the subjectivity.

Which religion is that? That is of course a rhetorical question as his is not a god people actually believe in so has nothing to do with how the word god is used when believers use that word. He liked the comfort of his cultural religion but realised that the god that involved was of course a god that does not exist so tried to get the best of both worlds.

But first of all, you must have discussed the five ways of St. Thomas/Aristotle. Another philosophical problem that you can only debate on the concept of cause in philosophical terms. Or the ontological argument of St. Anselm/Descartes, which resides also in a clarification of concepts and not in verifiable by science data.

We shall have to agree to disagree - the whichness of the why isn't at all interesting to me.

Once these or similar problems posed by theologians and philosophers –for example, miracles—have been cleared up, you will have a philosophical concept of truth that will allow you to say that only science grants reliable knowledge about facts. Consequently you will be able to affirm as Laplace and Hawking that the concept of god is a superfluous hypothesis.

Yeah I know fans of philosophy like to make these grand claims - and they always seem to forget that they are built on the same foundations of any human endeavour. That fans think it is profound is their problem not mine.

But let it be clear to you that none of the problems I have just mentioned will be dealt with in a book on experimental science or mathematics. You should think about this.

Of course not - fiction is fiction after all, and I like fiction, but I try not to confuse fiction with reality. Which is why I know Zeus doesn't exist.