Science affecting the decision on the existence of God?

[_barrelomonkeys]

I would have voted the same way as physics guy. Not sure and science has nothing to do with it.

[_Gorman]

Through science, as a teenager and later, I was able to realize, and come to accept, that the church leaders were simply dead wrong about things like the Flood of Noah, death existing in the world before the time of Adam and Eve. I learned that, notwithstanding a lot of resistance from a lot of the churchmembers I knew, as well as from past church leaders, evolution was in fact the real explanation for how the species developed, not special creation by God in their current form. Science thus opened my eyes to the idea of the church actually being wrong about things and not knowing what they're talking about, which eventually, many years later, lead me to accepting the possibility that the church wasn't actually true. Without the contradiction of Noah's flood, death in the world prior to the Fall, etc. I don't know that I ever would have gotten to this point.

Part of it was a blow to the credibility of the leaders. If they're wrong about these things, why should I trust that they were right about so many other things? Part of it was the slow realization and even slower acceptance, which took me years and years to reach, that these guys aren't any more "inspired" by God in the ways of truth than anyone else.

Of course, it took the realization that I could no longer negate or excuse away, that the LDS apologists were playing word games, blowing smoke, and rationalizing and excusing away problems in a most egregious way, before I finally let all of the stuff I mentioned above finally have its full reign. But without these early science-based doubts, I don't know that I would have gotten where I'm at now.

Interesting. I started on a similar path, but it diverged from yours at some point. The end result being that I acquired a large distrust in science when it discusses anything other than predictions of experiments (as some of you know, this is one of my soap boxes); therefore, for me science does not have much say in things other than warming up my frozen pizza and the like.

[_JAK]

As one or two of you have seen, I am extremely interested in the affect science has on decisions we make in a religious setting. I am merely curious as to how many would state science as a large factor in religious decisions. I am not trying to accuse or be tricky at all.

I probably define an atheist as someone who has decided to live his life as if there were no God, and a theist as someone who has decided to live their life as if there were a God.

If science has affected your religious views in a moderate or large way, and would like to list the scientific information that was integral in that decision making, that would be doubly interesting.

This is my very first poll, so if none of the categories fit very well, you can state why not, but these categories are intentionally broad.

PhysicsGuy stated:
I probably define an atheist as someone who has decided to live his life as if there were no God, and a theist as someone who has decided to live their life as if there were a God.

At least one problem in your choices is no option for agnostic. Again, as you often demonstrate, you have a false choice. That is, there are other options than the ones you offer. Moreover, there are various views among even agnostics (as well as the other catagories).

In addition, just how much difference is there between people who claim a God belief and those who don’t? Most people who go to jail/prison claim they believe in God and claim to believe they know how they should “live their life.”

Others “find God” once in jail/prison. Evidence suggests that going to jail tends to make people find God. At least that’s their claim. Paris Hilton -- the latest public example. But, she plans to party when her time in jail is up.

Most people I know who cheat on their taxes claim that they believe in God -- a singular entity (Nothing like Paul Tillich’s philosophy/theology).

Most people who have affairs or have multiple marriages (even polygamy) claim they believe in God.

I’m skeptical there is much difference between believers and non-believers in their behavior (as in “live their life as if...”).

JAK

[_JAK]

To quote the guy on Nacho Libre:

"I believe in science."

Is that an admission you are incapable of speaking for yourself? I’m skeptical that YOU “believe in science.”

Your previous posts have not demonstrated that.

JAK

[_JAK]

I would have voted the same way as physics guy. Not sure and science has nothing to do with it.

barrelomonkeys stated:
I would have voted the same way as physics guy. Not sure and science has nothing to do with it.

Really? So what, in your view of yourself, has something to do with your views? You certainly have something to do with science. You’re writing on an Internet bb.

JAK

[_barrelomonkeys]

I would have voted the same way as physics guy. Not sure and science has nothing to do with it.

barrelomonkeys stated:
I would have voted the same way as physics guy. Not sure and science has nothing to do with it.

Really? So what, in your view of yourself, has something to do with your views? You certainly have something to do with science. You’re writing on an Internet bb.

JAK

I decided God didn't exist before I understood science. I was never a Christian and was not raised to be one. Therefore I came to my conclusions as a child. Before Biology and Chemistry classes. Thanks for asking.

I later became a deist. Now I'm agnostic.

[_JAK]

barrelomonkeys stated:
I decided God didn't exist before I understood science. I was never a Christian and was not raised to be one. Therefore I came to my conclusions as a child. Before Biology and Chemistry classes. Thanks for asking.

I later became a deist. Now I'm agnostic.

Thanks for your much clearer answer. As I pointed out to PhysicsGuy, agnostic should have been an option in his poll.

You might be interested that the historical evolution of superstition/religion has been from many gods to few gods to one God to soft/hard agnostic to soft/hard atheist.

Most who are deeply embroiled in a particular religious mythology have little idea of the historical track of human religiosity.

JAK

[_truth dancer]

PhysicsGuy stated:
I probably define an atheist as someone who has decided to live his life as if there were no God, and a theist as someone who has decided to live their life as if there were a God

.


Hmmm what do you see as the difference in the way these two groups live their lives?

I'm not sure what belief in God has to do with how one lives her/his life... unless you are talking about the carrot and the stick sort of thing?

~dancer~

[_barrelomonkeys]

As one or two of you have seen, I am extremely interested in the affect science has on decisions we make in a religious setting. I am merely curious as to how many would state science as a large factor in religious decisions. I am not trying to accuse or be tricky at all.

I probably define an atheist as someone who has decided to live his life as if there were no God, and a theist as someone who has decided to live their life as if there were a God.

If science has affected your religious views in a moderate or large way, and would like to list the scientific information that was integral in that decision making, that would be doubly interesting.

This is my very first poll, so if none of the categories fit very well, you can state why not, but these categories are intentionally broad.

I have a certain set of values that I try to live my life by. These are probably held by many in the religious community. I do not necessarily believe in God. I can't discount that there is a God. I just am not certain.

I live my life to make me happy. I'm a total hedonist. It just so happens that what makes me feel good is being good to others.

[_Gazelam]

First, one basic proposition receives particular attention in all of them, the well-known second law of thermodynamics: everything runs down.1 And it is stated with strong and bemused reservations, because there is something wrong with it. Let us quote Watson, the biologist (and I understand he has a great reputation in England):

Left to itself, everything tends to become more and more disorderly, until the final and natural state of things is a completely random distribution of matter. Any kind of order is unnatural, and happens only by chance encounters These events are statistically unlikely and the further combination of molecules into anything as highly organized as a living organism is wildly improbable. Life is a rare and unreasonable thing. [He belabors the point]: Life occurs by chance, and the probability of its occurring and continuing is infinitesimal.2

There is no chance of us being here at all. Furthermore, "the cosmos itself is patternless, being a jumble of random and disordered events."3 It is not just life that is improbable, but the fabric of life itself—matter. The nuclear physicist P. T. Matthews asks,

Why is the proton stable, . . . since this is clearly crucial to the world as we know it? From the atomic point of view, the proton is one of the basic building blocks. Yet from the behavior of the other hadrons, . . . there is no obvious reason why it should not disintegrate into, say, a positive pion and neutrino, which is not forbidden by any conservation law.4

(The only two stable hadrons are the neutron [n0] and the proton [p+]. The neutron has a mean life span of 3 x 103 sec [about 50 minutes]. All other hadrons have mean life spans of from 10–8 to 10–18 seconds). Matthews goes on to explain the factors that determine the stability of the proton: "The rate of decay of any particle depends partly on the strength of the interaction and partly on the 'amount of room' it has into which it can decay."5 To describe what he means by "amount of room," Matthews draws an analogy of a room full of objects: "For every object in the room, there are, of course, vastly many more positions in which it would be considered out of place. When these possibilities for all the objects in the room are multiplied together, the number of untidy or disordered states exceeds the ordered ones by some enormous factor."6

Then he moves into the domain of the second law of thermodynamics and a mathematical description of this concept. Matthews continues, "The logarithm of the number of different states in which a system can be found is called the entropy. Thus the entropy of tidy or ordered states is very much less than that of untidy or disordered ones."7 To give us an idea about the magnitudes of the numbers we are dealing with, he presents the analogy of a deck of cards:

The rate at which numbers build up in the Second Law situation can be illustrated by considering a pack of playing cards. We can define an ordered, or tidy, state to be one in which the cards are arranged by value in successive suits. There are just twenty–four such configurations which arise from the different possible orderings of suits. This is itself a surprisingly large number, but the number of different ways the fifty-two cards can be arranged is about ten thousand million, million, million, million, million, million, million, million (1052). The chance of finding a shuffled pack in an ordered state is the ratio of these two numbers [24/1052].8

Matthews continues:

The relevance of this to our problem is that one may think of a proton at rest as a very highly ordered condition of a certain amount of energy—the rest energy of the proton—which can exist in just one state (strictly two if we allow for two possible orientations of the proton spin). If the proton can decay by any mechanism into two or more lighter particles, these serve to define an alternative condition of the system which is relatively highly disordered, since it can exist with all conceivable orientations. The number of allowed states depends on the relative momentum of the decay products much as the number of points on the circumference of a circle depends on its radius. The decay interaction is the shuffling agent . . . If it exists and operates on a time scale comparable with the age of the universe, then by relentless operation of the Second Law, essentially every proton would by now have decayed into lighter particles . . . Clearly the opposite is the case, and there must be some very exact law which is preventing this from happening.9

Had all the protons decayed, there would be no stable atoms, no elements, no compounds, no earth, no life. When the biologist said that life was wildly improbable, a rare unreasonable event, who would have guessed how improbable it really was? "A human being," writes Matthews, "is at very best, an assembly of chemicals constructed and maintained in a state of fantastically complicated organization of quite unimaginable improbability."10 So improbable that you can't even imagine it. So "wildly improbable" that even to mention it is ridiculous.11 So we have no business being here. That is not the natural order of things. In fact, he says that "the sorting process—the creation of order out of chaos—against the natural flow of physical events is something which is essential to life."12 So the physical scientists and the naturalists agree that if nature has anything to say about it, we wouldn't be here. This is the paradox of which Professor Wald of Harvard says, "The spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible . . . In this colloquial, practical sense I concede the spontaneous origin of life to be 'impossible.'"13 The chances of our being here are not even to be thought of, yet here we are.

Full Text: http://farms.BYU.edu/display.php?table=transcripts&id=58