Guds existens kan inte bevisas

Lägger in ett inlägg från lite över ett år sen. Påminndes om det pga en kommentar, och jag tycker det ät läsvärt.


Min äldre son bloggar inte så ofta. Det blir några inlägg, och sen händer inget på en lång tid. Han började ju nyss igen, och jag trodde han var klar till nästa år. När jag kollade i morse fanns där ett nytt kåseri om religion. Tycker att hans skrivande är läsvärt både vad gäller skrivstil och innehåll, så jag delar med mej. Om ni inte har nåt emot all läsa lite engelska, förstås.

Well, you can’t prove there is no god…
And that’s exactly the problem. Theories should not be judged by whether or not they have been disproven. There are a plethora of theories deemed too silly to bother with disproof. This is not a sign of their value. However, if a theory is subject to constant potential disproof, and still remains, and as well, makes valuable predictions, which are later verified, that is a sign of its value.

Throughout history, ‘God’ has been ascribed a lot of predictive power. The movement of the heavenly bodies, thunder and lightning, natural disasters, etc… And most of that predictive power has slowly(and not so slowly, from the 19th century on) been subsumed into one or more simple, predictive theory. And so it becomes easy to see the pattern. One starts with a hypothesis with many extra assumptions, and instead of losing the hypothesis, one discards the ancillary assumptions, one, by one, by one, until nothing remains but The God Hypothesis, with little to no predictive power, and thus value as a theory.

People often say something like ‘well, you can’t disprove the existence of God’. And this is precisely the problem. One can go from Belief1+Jesus to Belief2+Jesus to Belief3+Jesus, because while some types of beliefs progress with evidence, deities are not among that group. Ask the typical fundamentalist what would disprove the existence of god, and my guess is there would be nothing. So of course the existence of God hasn’t been disproven, because there is very little, possibly even nothing that would disprove it.

This doesn’t just apply to theories with deities, but rather, any pseudoscientific venture. Again, I mean to impress upon you that there is no clear distinction between science and pseudoscience. But vague distinctions are distinctions nonetheless.

For example, I do not know at exactly what point I would consider somebody naked. Let us, for example, consider somebody with solely a hat on. Are they naked? Would they be arrested for indecent exposure, depending on where that hat is? On the one hand, somebody in full skiing gear is clearly not naked, and somebody fully unclothed in an open area is clearly naked. But what for somebody with one sock half on their foot? It could easily be a vague distinction. I do not know at what point in putting clothes on a person becomes clothed. But I do have clear examples of both, and thus the distinction is valid, if vague.

The same is for science and pseudoscience.

The reason gravity is a good theory, is it would be so easy to disprove. It has very specific predictions. And yet it has not been falsified. All I have to do is to document dropping one object and have it be moved towards other masses at a rate of GM1M2/(r^2). Obviously there are other factors to take into account, such as wind resistance, but if I were to drop one bowling ball under normal circumstances and instead of it dropping, it just floated in the air, science would need to either come up with a compelling explanation, or think up a new theory.

Under the ‘web of belief’ which is made up of assumptions formed around a hypothesis, you can always strip away hypotheses. However, what differentiates science from pseudoscience is the rate at which this happens. There is no cut off at which point one more ad hoc assumption makes something pseudoscientific. Some scientists held onto their theories long after they should have discarded them, and some have been right to. But with the God Hypothesis, there have been nothing but ad hoc assumptions. So, of course, if your definition of God, or the way you treat your God Hypothesis, is that it can’t be proven false, of course it shan’t. But how useful of a theory is that?

Science has built skyscrapers, sent us to the moon, given us cars and computers and refrigerator and airplanes and all sorts of advances.

Religion has given us…seven new deadly sins? Bans on stem cell research? Anti-gay propaganda? And nearly all explanatory power it once had has been stripped away and handed unceremoniously over to Science.

Science is clad in the discoveries of the past 4-5 centuries.

As for Religion? Well, the Emperor’s new clothes are looking a bit revealing…