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Permalink Reply by Jonathan Chang on July 15, 2012 at 5:01am

I'm assuming the original post meant the Christian God; so what would happen if science proves the existence of the Christian God?

People then have a choice to make: they could sell out their own moral sensibility for the chance of eternal life in heaven, or they could fight for the freedom to their way of life. It would be the same as life under any autocratic ruler. Imagine Iran: If you believe and follow the rules of the leader, you may lead a relatively privileged life. Otherwise, you might be stoned or burned.

This leads to the question: If God does exist, is God's morality objective or subjective? What makes God exempt from subjectivity?

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Permalink Reply by Idaho Spud on July 15, 2012 at 7:25am

There could be thousands of answers depending on which god we're talking about.  

If I understand correctly, the average christian god demands faith and insists on remaining hidden.  That means science could never prove his existence.  Being smarter that human scientists, he could remain hidden forever.

If he changed his mind and let science prove his existence, then he would not be god.  At least not the god that is supposed to be the same yesterday, today, and forever.

My mind is going around in circles on this subject because people's ideas of god are all over the place, contradictory, and can't be pinned-down, which is good evidence that gods are man-made ideas.

Taking the question at face-value, the god that science could prove existed would be one that did not demand faith, but one that perhaps started the big-bang and/or evolution and then took a hands-off approach, leaving us to our own devices.  That god doesn't sound as scary as the others, but who knows.  There are too many possibilities to answer the question what can we do?

As long as I'm participating in this topic, I'll just add some of my thoughts that I find interesting.  I think it highly likely that someday "gods" will reveal themselves to scientists.  They will do amazing things that will convince most people that they are gods.  But, of course, they won't be gods -- just scientists that have been around millions or billions of years longer than humans and know how to do "miraculous" things.  Because they will be scientists, I think they will be truthful and tell us they are not gods.  I'd love to see that day.  Beings that advanced may even know how to survive the expansion of the universe (the big freeze), or even how to survive the big crunch, if the expansion reverses.

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Permalink Reply by G on July 22, 2012 at 2:17am

Blah Blah Blah !

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Permalink Reply by G on July 28, 2012 at 1:22pm

What is science ?, is religion is sort a science ?.Methinks,science is just a thought which makes us straightfoward.

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Permalink Reply by James Yount on July 28, 2012 at 1:25pm

Why do you keep repeating these sentences?  The second is incoherent and the rest needs more context.

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Permalink Reply by Patrice Anodin on July 28, 2012 at 1:52pm

That is quite a weird comment. If you want a definition for science, google it, you're on the internet, you have no excuse. And no religion and science don't match; one relies on faith and the other on facts. They're irreconcilable. Are you a deist or an agnostic? Quit sitting on the fence mate, about time to make up your mind.

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Permalink Reply by G on July 29, 2012 at 2:09am

Fucking,I need peoples Revulsion,not a explanation. 

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Permalink Reply by T.A.D. Tijerina on July 29, 2012 at 4:40am

The Abrahamic theologies that I am familiar with describe god as having characteristics that are non-physical. Recent apologists elaborate on this further by borrowing scientific concepts and terms, and saying things like "only a non-physical being could create the universe out of nothing" or "god exists outside of time, outside the universe". If such things were true, and if god is non-physical how would we detect such a thing? How would you design an experiment for it? And what about the possibility of other gods? Why speak of a god in the monotheistic sense?

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Permalink Reply by archaeopteryx on July 29, 2012 at 9:38am

Actually T.A.D., the Bible's god has been portrayed in a variety of ways - in Genesis, written mostly by the Yahwist Source and the Priestly Source, the writers of the Yahwist Source saw him as an anthropomorphic being who strolled over to Abram's tent for an afternoon snack before moseying on down to destroy thousands in Sodom and Gomorrah, yet in the New Testament, Yeshua (Jesus) said, "God is a spirit." The truth is, since Man created god in His own image, as Man's sophistication evolved, so did his concept of a god.

As for testing for god, Michelangelo, as he was carving the Moses, was reputed to have said that he saw Moses in the stone, and simply chipped away everything that wasn't Moses. I suppose you could use the same razor - examine everything, and whatever cannot be rationally explained, place it in a "Possibly God" folder, but I suspect you will ultimately reach the same conclusion as Neill Degrasse Tyson, who said: "God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance, that gets smaller and smaller as time goes on."

archaeopteryx
in-His-own-image.com

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Permalink Reply by T.A.D. Tijerina on July 29, 2012 at 10:50am

13 Foundations of Jewish faith: 

http://www.mesora.org/13principles.html
http://www.ou.org/torah/rambam.htm

http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/332555/jewish/Maimoni...

G-d is an immaterial, non-corporeal being. Any description of god as having any kind of physical form or performing any physical action is to be taken as metaphor such that a believer who is a material being in the material world might better understand an immaterial being. A bit of a mind-fuck piece of rationalization, but that's Jewish theology.

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Permalink Reply by T.A.D. Tijerina on July 29, 2012 at 10:56am

And as for this: "I suppose you could use the same razor - examine everything, and whatever cannot be rationally explained, place it in a "Possibly God" folder"

My response is why? Why should anything that is unexplainable be attributed to any kind of god? If something cannot be explained at any current moment, it is simply that - a piece of missing knowledge that awaits a moment of discovery or epiphany. If a gap in knowledge is there, let it be there until it is filled.

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Permalink Reply by G on July 29, 2012 at 11:05am

Thanks for yer Revulsion 

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