Hawking says there are no gods

[Chanakya]

GStan: Thank you! That was single, focused point in that post. Obvious, but necessary to spell out at that juncture.

----

Now, why I believe god "deserves" this greater precision, and the effort that that entails : that'll take more words than I can manage now, and I'll get to that when I return, and get my hands on my computer again.

 

[Nonpareil]

Nonpareil: Wait. That dragon, as I recall, has been said to be not detectable.

Then you haven't been paying attention.

Garage dragons are entities that are defined as undetectable. The name "garage dragon" comes from Sagan's "The Dragon In My Garage", in which the undetectable entity is supposedly a dragon.

"A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage."

Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle -- but no dragon.

"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.

"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."

Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."

You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick." And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists?

Bolding mine.

It seems, then, that when we say it is undetectable, it is only currently undetectable.

No. Garage dragons are defined as undetectable. Not "currently beyond our abilities", not "very hard to see". Undetectable. That is the entire point.

So no, undetectable does not seem to translate to non-existent, does it?

Yes. It does.

How does it impact the universe? Well, I'd say we don't know! Not "no impact", but "dont know"

And what you would say is wrong.

If something is undetectable, it has no effect on the universe.

Given that, if I say the dragon is not traveling with me in my car, why is this claim exempt from the burden of proof?

It isn't. It simply meets it, because garage dragons are defined as non-existent.

 

[kellyb]

Given that, if I say the dragon is not traveling with me in my car, why is this claim exempt from the burden of proof?

Because some things are too outlandish to require any burden of proof to claim non-existence. "So unlikely as to be virtually certain to not exist."

All claims of deities thus far fall into this category, along with invisible dragons, gnomes, vampires, werewolves, Sasquatch, etc and so on.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

All gods humans talk of are created by humans, therefore there is no creator god, which caused the universe.
The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise.

Not when you conveniently leave out half the sentence.

All gods humans talk of are created by humans, humans talk of a creator god, therefore the creator god which caused the universe is also created by humans (aka fiction).

Where else is your creator god coming from?

You cannot get around it.

 

[JoeMorgue]

"But invisible garage dragons are ridiculous!"

So close to the point and yet so far.

 

[Tommy Jeppesen]

Not when you conveniently leave out half the sentence.

All gods humans talk of are created by humans, humans talk of a creator god, therefore the creator god which caused the universe is also created by humans (aka fiction).

Where else is your creator god coming from?

You cannot get around it.

You don't get it. The universe caused you. You don't cause the universe. All our talk of a god or no god can't in neither case cause there to be a god nor cause there to be no god.
So if there is a natural universe(assumption) or a god-caused universe(assumption), we are caused in both to talk as if our beliefs in the one or the other decide anything. No belief in either god or no god decides anything.
You believe that our talking decides it. It doesn't. It is out of our control and all your reasoning can't decide that any way. That is true both for the atheist and theist. You either don't believe or do.
You don't get causation. You don't get that your reasoning doesn't decide anything. Nor does the reasoning of theists.

So I don't believe in gods. It only tells you that I don't believe in gods. And all your magical reasoning solves nothing, because it can't be solved by reasoning.
Your reasoning doesn't not cause there to be no god of a outside the universe creator god type. That is unknown. I am a skeptic and your are a woo-rationalist, because you think reason can solve it. You believe in woo. I honest, I don't know either way, but as per belief I am an atheist.

There is a limit to reason and you have hit it. And all your words solve nothing, because they don't cause there to be a natural universe. That is not how causation works. You believe in woo.

Now you are not alone. A lot of people believe in woo and something it gives them a better life, because it reassure them all will be well. In your case you get to believe that you know, really know and that brings you comfort, because you got it right! You know that there are no gods. You don't.

If you want to use reason, it has a limit, just like human mobility and the universe doesn't care, that you don't have unlimited reasoning powers. Just as the universe doesn't care for the reasoning power of theists. That is why it is called beliefs. And neither belief decides anything. Welcome to being a skeptic. Take your pick, because reason won't help you on that one.
That you care, is an emergent property of biology within the assumption of a natural universe and so is the beliefs of theists. They care to, just differently.

You are neither right nor wrong. You are just an atheist, who reasons differently than this atheist. Right or wrong for what the universe is, is unknown and your belief system works for you. It doesn't work for me, I do it differently. And you are only right or wring if you believe in that. I don't. I believe in skepticism and that right and wrong are human beliefs systems, that you don't have to believe just like gods.

 

[Nonpareil]

So if there is a natural universe(assumption)

Conclusion.

And all your magical reasoning solves nothing, because it can't be solved by reasoning.

Yes, it can. If something is true, it by necessity must be capable of being shown to be true.

Your reasoning doesn't not cause there to be no god of a outside the universe creator god type. That is unknown.

If there is a god like that, then it must be detectable. If it is detectable, there must be evidence of its existence.

Until and unless you want to start providing that evidence, trying to claim that it might exist carries no more weight than you claiming that Santa Claus might.

 

[Dancing David]

I seem to sense that an Invisible Pink Unicorn has been in my basemnet

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

You don't get it. The universe caused you. You don't cause the universe. All our talk of a god or no god can't in neither case cause there to be a god nor cause there to be no god.

Tommy, it is you that doesn't get it. You and other humans (because you aren't the first) conceived of your creator god. You made it up. It's fiction!

You believe that our talking decides it. It doesn't. It is out of our control and all your reasoning can't decide that any way. That is true both for the atheist and theist. You either don't believe or do.
You don't get causation. You don't get that your reasoning doesn't decide anything. Nor does the reasoning of theists.

In pondering the beginning of the Universe, people made up a fictional explanation.

We know this because there is overwhelming evidence ALL gods are human generated fiction and no evidence of any real gods.

You can go on and on, around and around, in the end there is still there is overwhelming evidence ALL gods are human generated fiction and no evidence of any real gods.

No decisions were made, rather, evidence based conclusions were drawn.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

I seem to sense that an Invisible Pink Unicorn has been in my basemnet

Invisible dragons and unicorns fly around until they get stuck in basements and garages.

 

[Roboramma]

Randomness just covers the gaps in our knowledge (just like the God of the gaps did).

How do you know? It may be that as you say randomness just covers the gaps in our knowledge, or it may be that reality really has a probabilistic aspect to it.

Are you saying that the Schrodenger equation (an equation about randomness) could be replaced by a "many worlds" equation that doesn't include randomness?

No, I'm saying that Many Worlds is just the straightforward reading of the Schrodinger equation. The randomness in QM comes in when we make a measurement, but the Schrodinger equation evolves deterministically, and Many Worlds just takes that seriously.

There is no "making a measurement" in the Schrodinger equation, so different interpretations treat that differently, but in Many Worlds it's actually just the fact that you have to include the observer in the system being modelled.

In Copenhagen an electron in superposition might be 50% up and 50% down, and when you measure it, if it turns out to be up, then it's up and there's no sense in which it's down, and so there's really just a random chance that it will be one or the other. In Many Worlds it was both before the measurement and it's still both after the measurement, but you are entangled with the electron, and so now you are in a superposition of seeing an electron spinning up and seeing an electron spinning down. There's no randomness there. This is actually how the equation behaves (think instead of "you" doing a measurement of an electron interacting with another electron and becoming entangled with it, now we have a superposition of, for instance UD, DU, the world in which the first electron is down includes a second electron which is up). There's no randomness there, just the deterministic evolution of the equation over time, but there is an appearance of randomness because we can only ever experience one branch of the wave function.

 

[psionl0]

The god we are talking about is claimed to cause effects in this universe and is thus falsifiable in this universe.

The conclusion doesn't necessarily follow from the premise. It doesn't rule out a God can choose to be unobservable (except to a select few).

Yes, you could also ascribe that property to the invisible dragon or Russell's teapot (assuming that they had the intelligence to do so) but an invisible God was said to exist long before science was anything but a branch of witchcraft. Such a God is beyond scientific testing and thus science can say nothing about gods.

It is up to the philosophers (masquerading as scientists in this forum) to try and make any sense out of this.

 

[psionl0]

How do you know? It may be that as you say randomness just covers the gaps in our knowledge, or it may be that reality really has a probabilistic aspect to it.

Maybe I should have used the expression "current gaps in our knowledge" though I would have thought that the sentence that you clipped would have made that clear: "I don't know if we will ever come up with a model that eliminates randomness thus it may never be determined if randomness exists in its own right."

No, I'm saying that Many Worlds is just the straightforward reading of the Schrodinger equation. The randomness in QM comes in when we make a measurement, but the Schrodinger equation evolves deterministically, and Many Worlds just takes that seriously.

There is no "making a measurement" in the Schrodinger equation, so different interpretations treat that differently, but in Many Worlds it's actually just the fact that you have to include the observer in the system being modelled.

In Copenhagen an electron in superposition might be 50% up and 50% down, and when you measure it, if it turns out to be up, then it's up and there's no sense in which it's down, and so there's really just a random chance that it will be one or the other. In Many Worlds it was both before the measurement and it's still both after the measurement, but you are entangled with the electron, and so now you are in a superposition of seeing an electron spinning up and seeing an electron spinning down. There's no randomness there. This is actually how the equation behaves (think instead of "you" doing a measurement of an electron interacting with another electron and becoming entangled with it, now we have a superposition of, for instance UD, DU, the world in which the first electron is down includes a second electron which is up). There's no randomness there, just the deterministic evolution of the equation over time, but there is an appearance of randomness because we can only ever experience one branch of the wave function.

The tl;dr version might be that we simultaneously exist in many universes but we can only observe one universe at any instant. An how do we know which universe we will observe when we do a measurement? Well we could use a probabilistic equation . . .

 

[Nonpareil]

The conclusion doesn't necessarily follow from the premise. It doesn't rule out a God can choose to be unobservable (except to a select few).

In which case either these select few can scientifically verify the god's presence in such a way as to satisfy others or there is no difference between that god and a figment of their imagination.

but an invisible God was said to exist long before science was anything but a branch of witchcraft.

No one cares how long the idea of gods has been around. It is utterly irrelevant to the discussion.

 

[ynot]

The conclusion doesn't necessarily follow from the premise. It doesn't rule out a God can choose to be unobservable (except to a select few).

Argumentum ad Emperor's-New-Clothes.

Garage Dragons can only be observed by Garage Dragon believers (a select few).

Pathetic arguments highlight pathetic claims/beliefs.

 

[psionl0]

* sigh * The point was not that there is actually an invisible god but that JayUtah was pretending to make a scientific argument.

 

[kellyb]

The conclusion doesn't necessarily follow from the premise. It doesn't rule out a God can choose to be unobservable (except to a select few)

Once you're talking about a god that chooses to hide from science as well as most people most of the time, you've entered the realm of the preposterous.

Like, we're in this world, now:
http://weekinweird.com/2016/12/08/bigfoot-is-a-ghost-interdimensional-sasquatch-tulpas-green-flash/

A god that chooses to be unobservable is unfalsifiable. The conclusion did follow from the premise.

 

[kellyb]

* sigh * The point was not that there is actually an invisible god but that JayUtah was pretending to make a scientific argument.

His argument was logical.

 

[xjx388]

Here’s the way I see the problem. Humans created God eons before the scientific method was conceived of. They both came from the same instinct -to understand the world around us. But since God was there first and some idea of it has existed since the dawn of man, it’s a particular tenacious idea. To this day, humans can’t let go of this idea.

Now, science has answered most of the questions that God used to answer. Everywhere science has found answers, those answers have replaced the mysterious actions of God. As Hawking said, there really isn’t any room for God to exist. All of scientific inquiry has shown that every fundamental question we have found answers to has been answered by “not God.”

What we are left with is arguments for God that amount to mental masturbation in satisfaction of a useless urge. I think that urge is some kind of cultural/social remnant, lore passed down and ever changing since the dawn of man. It’s very satisfying lore. It tells us that we are special, that there is more to life and existence. It helps us deal with the problems of evil, of suffering. Most importantly, it helps us deal with death. It’s extremely unsatisfying to know that when we die, that’s it. It’s much more hopeful to think that there’s something beyond where we will see our loved ones or experience some reward.

But that’s all it is. Stories to make us feel better. To give us hope. All the stories can’t be right, though.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[psionl0]

A god that chooses to be unobservable is unfalsifiable. The conclusion did follow from the premise.

That is a common logical error - mixing a conditional statement with its converse.

Observable god ==> falsifiable god (assuming JayUtah is correct)
Unobservable god =/=> unfalsifiable god.