From: starr-daniel@yale.edu (Daniel Starr)
Newsgroups: alt.atheism,talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: Vatican Finds Galileo 'Not Guilty'
Date: 15 Nov 1992 19:42:55 -0500
Organization: Yale University Science & Engineering UNIX(tm), New Haven, CT 06520-2158
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: minerva.cis.yale.edu

Well, we have from Jim Copeland:
"I am simply waiting for evidence that science can't answer the question
of God's existence."

And from Aaron Scott:
"The assumption that God does not exist is unnecessary for science to 
function... Therefore, the demand that religious world views conform to
scientific world views is also invalid [as the other way around]."

Jumping right in here, it seems to me that:

1.  Science (as I understand the term) is dependent on systems about which
one can make testable predictions -- if not about every individual case, at
least about the average over many cases.  So I would suggest that science
can answer the question of God's existence if and only if God's existence
(or lack thereof) implies certain testable predictions. 

Now, most modern religion does _not_ explicitly make testable predictions. 
(Many atheists would suggest that this is a result of the repeated failure
of the predictions that were testable.)  For example, the God many
modern Christians (for example) believe in, about whom the 
only prediction (for affairs in this world) is that He will come again 
at some point in the indefinite future -- soon, they hope, but no 
certainties -- is not a God that science can establish or disprove.  What
on earth (excuse the pun) would you use for an experiment? 

Of course, one can argue that such a God is philosophically unlikely,
or illogical, or irrelevant, etc.; but by definitiion -- no testable
predictions based on His existence or lack thereof -- His influence falls
outside what science works with.

2.  I'm not sure what is meant by "world views conforming".  If one means
"eliminating contradictions" -- a God about whom there are no testable
predictions is equivalently a God whose doings do not affect science.

The Big Bang, and the possibility that God merely made the universe look
exactly as if a Big Bang occurred, are, scientifically, equivalent.  As
a philosophical position, I can assume that all of this is a dream.  There
is, as usual, no testable prediction to establish that what I right now
conceive of as my entire life is not merely a dream from which I will
eventually wake.

Because there is no testable prediction to distinguish "it is the way it
looks" from "I'm dreaming it's the way it looks" from "God is making it
seem as though it's the way it looks" from an infinite number of variations, 
it is not a scientific but a philosophical question which of these
to believe.  Each is internally consistent.  The solution to this class
of problems is Occam's Razor:  there are an infinite number of equivalent
possibilities, none intrinsically more probable than any other, one must
choose one, so one chooses the most efficient one -- "it is the way it
looks".  But this comes from philosophy, not from science.  It just
happens that most scientists are comfortable with Occam's Razor, whereas
many non-scientists have difficulty with this bit of metaphysics.

(Please note that one really does have to choose one, since any choice
affects one's behavior.  If it's all a dream, I can do what I want!  If
it's made by God, I ought to kiss up to Him, no?  And so forth. Since
one's every action or lack of action can have a serious effect if
there's a God (and depending on _which_ God there is), one necessarily
is acting according to some opinion on this, even though one might like
to withold judgement.) 



-- 
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|Daniel Starr                | "Wait! Wait! Maybe THIS will work!" |
|dstarr@minerva.cis.yale.edu |                                     |
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