Hawking says there are no gods

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Skeptic Ginger said:
You're still acting like the rest of us don't understand the principles of not being able to test the negative.

Give it up. More than a few people in this thread understand scientific principles just fine thank you.
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I'm trying to imagine a WHO committee talking about global Hep B eradication, and someone saying "Well, technically, we haven't ruled out GHOST Hep B virus, or the possibility that the mode of transmission is actually teleportation. Carl, can you pull up that powerpoint on the theoretical tele-transmission model of Hep B epidemiology?"

lol
 
kellyb said:
I'm trying to imagine a WHO committee talking about global Hep B eradication, and someone saying "Well, technically, we haven't ruled out GHOST Hep B virus, or the possibility that the mode of transmission is actually teleportation. Carl, can you pull up that powerpoint on the theoretical tele-transmission model of Hep B epidemiology?"

lol
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:D

Nice example. :thumbsup:
 
Jodie said:
My original comment was that religious/spiritual belief might be an evolutionary step for further development of consciousness regardless of the validity of the belief.
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It's an interesting thought, but there's no reason to think so. There are reasons to think it's an artifact of our unconscious cognitive biases, specifically agent detection, reinforced by confirmation bias.
 
psionl0 said:
It is not by using faulty logic.

JayUtah said that since God is supposed to be observable he is falsifiable. You reversed the logic.
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This is not what you said before.
psionl0 said:
Observable god ==> falsifiable god (assuming JayUtah is correct)
Unobservable god =/=> unfalsifiable god.
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Of course, if God is observable, God could be falsifiable… if you are able to determinate in what conditions God would be or not observed by independent observers. It is not the case. God manifest himself to faithful people, in remote or hidden places or in an unverifiable past. Do you know, miracles and so on. Therefore God would be falsifiable in theory and unfasifiable in the actual conditions. It is the classical metaphysical entity.
 
psionl0 said:
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."
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Absolutely, that just seems different from what you were originally saying. We don't currently know if the underlying reality probabilistic or deterministic, though our best model is probabilistic (except in the sense in which many worlds is deterministic)


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 . . .
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Basically, although it might be important to point out that we will only exist in universes that branch from our current one, we can never move into different branches of the wave function.

I think you understand that, it's just that your phrasing ("we can only observe one universe at any instant") seemed a little unclear on that point.
 
kellyb said:
A god that chooses to be unobservable is unfalsifiable.
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That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If I say that there is a star of similar mass to our sun in a galaxy 300 billion light years away, I'm making an unfalsifiable claim, but one that is very probably correct.
 
Chanakya said:
Here's what Carl Sagan himself says, in that article of his that you linked: "you don't outright reject the notion that there's a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you're prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you."

He further says, "the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion."

That's soft atheism, not hard atheism.
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kellyb said:
I used to find the distinction between hard and soft atheism meaningful and useful, but I haven't for quite a while now.
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I am starting to have no idea of what is soft and hard atheism. It seems to me that everybody uses the word as he likes. Sagan himself is a soft or a hard atheist depending of who is talking.

To say that soft atheism is to be open to future evidences is ridiculous. Every rational man thinks so. Only dogmatic people don’t do so. But this elemental caution is not contrary to believe that God doesn’t exist with certainty. Even that certainty doesn’t mean absolute certainty.

I think that “soft atheism” is used as synonym of an atheist that doesn’t make uncomfortable to believers. A guy who isn't aggressive, who doesn't criticize too much, who doesn't round up the other way around, who isn't indignant about anything... And above all, don't let he say that believing in God is irrational.

Conclusion: A pure evaluative word.
 
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David Mo said:
This is not what you said before.
psionl0 said:
Observable god ==> falsifiable god (assuming JayUtah is correct)
Unobservable god =/=> unfalsifiable god.
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It was intended to be short hand for
Observable god ==> falsifiable god
does not mean
Unobservable god ==> unfalsifiable god.

I apologise if my meaning was not clear.

The second statement could also be true but we would not be able to deduce that from the first statement alone.

The first statement could also be written in the "contrapositive":
Unfalsifiable god ==> Unobservable god.
It is easy to transpose those statements but it would not be logically correct.

If both statements are true then we would write
Observable god <==> Falsifiable god.
 
psionl0 said:
It was intended to be short hand for
Observable god ==> falsifiable god
does not mean
Unobservable god ==> unfalsifiable god.

I apologise if my meaning was not clear.

The second statement could also be true but we would not be able to deduce that from the first statement alone.

The first statement could also be written in the "contrapositive":
Unfalsifiable god ==> Unobservable god.
It is easy to transpose those statements but it would not be logically correct.

If both statements are true then we would write
Observable god <==> Falsifiable god.
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Thank you for the explanation.
 
psionl0 said:
It was intended to be short hand for
Observable god ==> falsifiable god
does not mean
Unobservable god ==> unfalsifiable god.

I apologise if my meaning was not clear.

The second statement could also be true but we would not be able to deduce that from the first statement alone.

The first statement could also be written in the "contrapositive":
Unfalsifiable god ==> Unobservable god.
It is easy to transpose those statements but it would not be logically correct.

If both statements are true then we would write
Observable god <==> Falsifiable god.
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Originally, Jay simply said:

The god we are talking about is claimed to cause effects in this universe and is thus falsifiable in this universe.
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Which is absolutely correct. Then you followed it up by saying:

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).
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That wasn't Jay invoking the converse. That was all 100% you. Although in this case, the two statements are independently true (unobservable god is unfalsifiable, and observable god is falsifiable.)
 
JoeMorgue said:
Either God has no effect on the universe (and he therefore doesn't exist) or we put those effects up to scientific scrutiny (which you won't/can't do because those effects don't exist because God doesn't exist.)

So basically "God exists because I get to make up how we determine how he exists because I say so."
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Your mistake: to solve a problem with the help of science is not to solve a problem only with science. Debunking miracles is half science half philosophy. Science can say: this didn't happen. Science cannot said: and this is a scientific proof that God doesn't exist.
 
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psionl0 said:
Ok then, let's say "consistently observable or detectable when a scientific test or a series of scientific tests are conducted".

Happy? Or is there a loophole that I have missed?


Repeating your earlier news flash doesn't answer the question.

(ETA it appears that somewhere along the line, you attempted a sleight of hand and replaced the word "visible" with "accessible").
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What on earth are you going on about those are your exact words! Which God has those properties?
 
David Mo said:
Your mistake: to solve a problem with the help of science is not to solve a problem only with science. Debunking miracles is half science half philosophy. Science can say: this didn't happen. Science cannot said: and this is a scientific proof that God doesn't exist.
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It can be scientific proof that the claimed, specific god does not exist.
 
psionl0 said:
OK let's go with that.

BTW "visible" was Darat's choice of word.
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What on earth are you going on about, those were your exact words, which God has those properties was my question. I pointed out that the gods of the largest religions do not have such a property. So again which gods match your words?
 
The Christian God sent his son to earth where he was born of a virgin, endowed him with the power to perform miracles and then brought him back from the dead. That all sounds pretty observable to me.
 
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