The purpose of this blog is to formulate ideas - and as ideas can be molded and refined please feel free to comment with agreement or disagreement, as long as it is thoughtful.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Why Science Can't Disprove God

Regardless on your religious beliefs or your scientific background, the ultimate extreme question ("Does God Exist?") cannot be answered by science.

Why?
1) You can't prove the null hypothesis.  Every science experiment is set up to test, that is, disprove the null hypothesis (ie. there is no relationship) and "proof" in science is shown by finding enough of an effect through your experiment that you can establish an estimated probability that your null hypothesis is incorrect.
The more thorough and controlled the experiment, and the repeatability of the findings provides evidence that the effect under investigation is legitimate.  There is no scientific experiment that can prove that the null hypothesis is true - the best you can do is repeatedly show that you don't have enough evidence in the current testing environment to say it's not true - perhaps subtle, but a legitimate limit of science.

2) Religion is faith-based, not evidence based.  There cannot be an experimental finding that disproves God in a faith-based discipline.  It certainly may be possible to prove that some aspects of a faith-based system did not happen exactly as written, or that times/circumstances were not exactly as portrayed, but that does little, if anything, to affect the underlying belief system.  (e.g. you may cite geological evidence to dispute the timeline of literal Bible interpretations, but this does not necessarily alter the belief system - "days" can be re-interpreted to be longer intervals...).

3) There is likely no single point of conjecture that one could point to that would disprove faith.  Even at the extreme, if science could explain all aspects of existence in our universe (or even multi-verses), it still would not stop the argument that "God set it up that way".  Stephen Hawking's book "The Grand Design" postulates that M-theory comes very close to the "theory of everything" and that the presence of gravity alone can explain how the universe forms, how particles come into and out of existence etc.  However, this still can be countered with "That's how God intended it to be".


Please note, I'm not trying to be facetious - the realms of science and faith are fundamentally opposed - science doesn't rely on faith, and faith doesn't rely on science.  Any particular line in the sand drawn as "the" point between Science and Religion will likely be problematic (Richard Dawkins argues this point, as he is uncomfortable with considering Religion as being outside of science), but arguing for or against any particular "location" for this delineation doesn't fundamentally alter the fact that it is only a waypoint - not a destination - in the quest.

However there will always be the possibility (at least among faithful) that all of the universe was set in motion, exactly as uncovered by science, by an undetectable being.  Science is certainly welcome to design experiments to show that that hypothesis is either statistically unlikely, or irrelevant to the issue under investigation, but the very fabric of Science cannot disprove it.

This hypothesis is sometimes referred to dismissively as the "Flying Purple Spaghetti Monster" hypothesis, as science cannot explain <insert your favourite observable effect here> as not being caused by the Flying Purpose Spaghetti Monster.  Take away the dismissiveness, and this does show a natural and legitimate limit of science - the explanation of observed effects can change as more experiments are run and more complete understanding of issues is available (see the evolution of Newton to Einstein - a more complete understanding of the physical world altered the explanation of observations).

Explanations (theories and hypotheses) in science rely upon the ability to explain existing observations and to predict outcomes in novel experiments - the Flying Spaghetti Monster may be real, but that knowledge does not help predict what will happen in the next experiment, so as a scientific explanation it is discarded. Faith-based explanations (regardless of whether or not you think they are true, or if they are in actuality true) also fail as scientific explanations for the same reason (e.g. "God caused the chemicals to react and turn the solution blue" is fine as an explanation, but as a scientific explanation, it falls short, as it cannot explain what will happen in future circumstances when additional substances are added etc.).  Again, this is neither a failure of science, nor a failure of faith, just an illustration of the difference.

From a scientific standpoint, it would certainly be possible to prove the existence of God by setting up experiments that would provide differential results when God exists vs. when s/he doesn't.  Oddly, however, this experimental evidence may suffice for scientists, as it it based upon the scientific method, but would likely not be sufficient for the faithful.  Should any "proven" God not match the faith-based ideal, it is likely that it wouldn't be accepted, particularly if it should differ in significant and important ways from established scripture or teaching.

All in all, I don't see the clash between science and religion.  The fundamental underpinnings of faith cannot be changed by any scientific discovery or theory.

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