• Question: do you have to not believe in god to be a scientist?

    Asked by ferdos10 to Keith on 23 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Keith Brain

      Keith Brain answered on 23 Jun 2010:

      You can still believe in god. You can:
      (1) believe in a God whose existence can’t be proven. This would be an act of faith.
      (2) believe in a God whose existence can be proven, but we haven’t done this yet. Some people are a little dismissive of this idea and call such a god, a “God of the gaps”
      (3) believe in a God whose existence has been proven – in which case I think that a lot of other scientist would disagree with you, but that’s OK – disagreement is very common among scientists.

      More advanced pondering (feel free to ignore):
      Is the existence of God something that can be proven by science? No, I don’t think so, because there is a very core idea in science that nothing can ever been proven – you can only ever disprove something.
      Can God’s existence be disproven?
      This concept of refutation (showing that something was wrong) was one of the key ideas of an important modern Philosopher of science called Karl Popper. He described theories as scientific ONLY if they could be disproven i.e. “fasifiable”.

      So, the hypothesis that “There is a god” is not testable, because you could use argument (1), above. So, the hypothesis “There is a god” is not a scientific hypothesis, and one that scientific methods can’t tackle.

Comments

  • Photo: lupusmortii

    lupusmortii commented on :

    God says in the bible”I will not prove I exist for proof denies faith and without faith I am nothing” but if he is nothing without faith then even if he does exist he cant have created earth as there was nothing to believe in him until humans came around and even then they believed in a multitude of gods (but believed in gods of some sort) so he probably doesn’t exist also there is the problem of all the other religions surly if any god/s exist surly they would be the ones from earlier religions after all at least they don’t go saying that they created the world then contradicting themselves later on

  • Photo: Keith

    Keith commented on :

    Interesting arguments, lupusmorlii. I’m not sure about the biblical source, but there is something very similar in Douglas Adams’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, where the Babel fish is invoked to argue:
    “”I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”

    I think that the standard biblical interpretation is that the existence of God can’t be proved … and then argues that just because you can’t prove something, that does mean that its not real. This is a valid argument – which just means that the standard Christian position isn’t, to my mind, scientific.

    There’s an interesting bit of maths here, called “Gödel’s incompleteness theorems”, which means that even in maths there are things which are true but can’t be proved (if you’ll allow a very loose interpretation). If not even the mathematicians can sort out proof, then tacklingly religion logically is really tricky.